Books, China, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Standing up to the tyrants in the East

THERE isn’t a more rigorous and engaging analyst of the crimes of the erstwhile Soviet dictatorship than Anne Applebaum, the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag, and also of Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

For her gifts, the historian is also rooted in the present, as a fearsomely active journalist, and the writer’s latest work is an up-to-the moment examination of how modern-day autocracies, not just that of Russia’s President Putin, but also including China, North Korea, and Iran, act as a kind of informal bloc to challenge what they see as the West’s “hegemony”.

It’s unfortunate that the phrase “axis of evil” has already been taken, since that would be a befitting description. Alas, it was inappropriately used by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – which actually had no military or financial links at all.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, do, however, connect in this way, accelerated by Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

The only minor criticism of Applebaum’s formidable book is that it never mentions the Iraq War of 2003–2011 or the later Western intervention in Libya. For these were the developments which not only gave fuel to the anti-Western agenda, but also convinced many – including in the West itself – that we had little moral authority to criticise the military escapades launched by the Kremlin.

Applebaum is especially adept, however, in setting out the remarkable success of modern Russian propaganda – beyond the scope that Stalin could ever have dreamed of – using the worldwide web, and of China’s ability both to control its own people through technology and to censor what was thought to be unstoppable.

At the dawn of the millennium the ever-optimistic U.S. President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the internet would liberalise China, by exposing its people to all the possibilities and opportunities the free world had to offer.

When arguing, on similar grounds, for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation, he gave an address in which he ridiculed the idea that Beijing could keep a lid on things.

“Now, there’s no question that China’s been trying to crack down on the internet,” he declared. At that point, as Applebaum records, Clinton gave a wry smile, adding: “Good luck!” – and his audience joined in the laughter.

They are not laughing now. The Great Firewall of China, and even more sophisticated tools than that, have allowed Beijing to succeed, keeping billions of its citizens in a form of intellectual slavery.

In a similar vein, the German political establishment had long believed in the doctrine known as Wandel durch Handel – “change through trade” – the idea that making nice with Moscow in terms of market access would inevitably lead to political and cultural liberalisation. This was most notable with pipelines taking Russian gas to Europe. That dream, or self-interest, in terms of the aspirations of German business, has also been shattered. The kleptocracy just got richer and far  more ruthless. 

As the deputy mayor of St Petersburg in 1992, and in his first public role, the former KGB officer Putin argued that “the entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole”. That was music to the ears of Western investors, but Putin was then, already, creaming off vast sums for himself and his associates, via his control of local export licences for raw material.

As Applebaum notes, under Putin’s perpetually renewed presidency this ultimately developed into “a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a Mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership”. It was for his leading role in exposing this that Alexei Navalny paid with his life.

Despite his apparent personal austerity and regular crackdowns on colossal financial corruption within the Chinese Communist Party – the inescapable consequence of permanent one-party rule – Xi Jinping is only too happy to make common cause with the multibillionaire plutocrat Putin.

Central, this is because they share a primordial terror of a popular uprising against their regimes: in this context, it was striking how in 2022 Xi suddenly abandoned his hitherto iron-cast Covid lockdown measures after a public revolt threatened to spread to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.

And the “no limits” friendship which Xi entered into with Putin on February 4, 2022, was specifically designed to demonstrate a kind of solidarity among autocracies, against what they both constantly refer to as the West’s “attempts at hegemony”.

Their joint communiqué denounced “the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states”. Weeks later, Putin sent his tanks towards Kyiv.

There was a tantalising glimpse of a possible fracture in the relationship at that moment: it seems likley that Xi was not given a warning by Putin of what was about to happen and, some months later, Beijing made public its grave concern about the Kremlin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, as Anne Applebaum concludes, the challenge to “Autocracy, Inc” must come from within the West itself.

And, yet, if the forecasts are right, the American people seem likely to elect to the White House (again) their own version of Autocracy Inc: Donald J. Trump.

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Britain, Government, NATO, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Give President Zelensky what he needs to defeat Putin

UKRAINE WAR

EUROPEAN leaders gathered at Blenheim Palace recently in a symposium that was a conduit for European solidarity. They surrounded Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in an image of steadfast support.

For Zelensky, he must be wondering how stalwart those allies really are. Two and a half years into Putin’s bloody and violent war, it must increasingly seem to Zelensky that NATO is offering just enough to keep Ukraine limping on – but not enough, anywhere near enough, in smashing Russian forces completely. What else could explain the West’s ambiguity and indecisiveness over the use of long-range weapons to attack targets inside Russia?

The British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has rebuffed Zelensky’s plea that he ditch the UK’s veto on Storm Shadow “bunker-buster” weapons, which have a range of up to 190 miles, easily capable of striking targets in Russia.

As it currently stands, the UK and other allies allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles defensively at targets on Russian soil near the border, but not offensively or deep into Russian territory.

Such a position is, of course, calculated to avoid provoking Putin into wider retaliation. At the heart of that fear is the ultimate and terrifying prospect that the dictator might reach for the nuclear button, but even less apocalyptic concerns help to dictate policy.

Success in armed conflict can only be achieved if all the elements of the battlefield are dominated. In the traditional doctrine of NATO, this means winning “deep, close, and rear” battles – that is long-range strikes and raids on infrastructure (deep), front-line combat (close), and the essential support mechanisms such as logistics and headquarters (rear).

Just as Russia is hitting Ukrainian cities, factories, and infrastructure, any military general knows it is perfectly reasonable for Ukraine to do the same in order to degrade its enemy’s military capability. But with the current restrictions on missile use in place, Ukraine’s fighting forces can’t execute the “deep” battle. Zelensky is being forced to fight with one arm tied behind his back.

That’s why many are now pressing decision-makers in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris to authorise the use of long-range weapons, such as the UK’s Storm Shadow, to strike targets inside Russia.

That would likely lead to some escalation. But as in the Cold War, many strategists are confident this war, at least, won’t go nuclear, despite the warnings of those concerned about the UK’s deepening involvement in the conflict.

For one thing, Russian tactics would probably use a tactical nuclear weapon only to stop an enemy breakthrough in Ukraine. Such a breakthrough could only occur in one of the four eastern provinces that Putin has decreed to be forever Russian. Where is the logic in irradiating many square miles of your own soil?

Then there is the relationship between China and Russia to consider. President Xi has so far offered only mild support to Putin and is unquestionably the dominant partner in the relationship. China has consistently opposed the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Of course, matters could seriously escalate long before it reached nuclear proportions.

A cyber attack on the scale of the IT outage chaos caused by CrowdStrike is well within Russia’s capability, as is severing underwater communications or energy pipelines in the North Sea. And if the Houthi rebels in Yemen were capable of striking Tel Aviv, we cannot rule out a long-range conventional missile strike on a target in Western Europe, even potentially one on the UK.

Nevertheless, military strategists and theoreticians often refer to the concept of “limited war” – that is, restricted in its aims and its geography. The war in Ukraine does indeed have limits, but history has demonstrated that Putin’s ambition is not restrained in the same way.

Before Ukraine there was Chechnya and Georgia. Why, after Ukraine, should we not think there might be Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, or even all three? Why not Poland? Anxiety levels are already high in the Baltic States, and one has to wonder why at this moment in their history, both Sweden and Finland recently chose to join NATO. The fear of Russian expansion is tangible on Russia’s borders – no wonder the Poles are spending more than 4 per cent of GDP on defence and building the largest army in Europe.

Any discussion of Ukraine’s prospect of achieving military success must also confront the issue of Donald Trump returning to the White House in November. He has made the claim that he could settle the war in a day with one telephone call. If that’s the case, Ukraine must be given every chance to achieve a position of advantage on the battlefield before that call is made.

If this war is to have a successfully negotiated end, Ukraine must be in the strongest possible position at the start of any talks. The reality is that Putin must be stopped, and Ukraine is the place to stop him. The best means of doing so is by giving Kyiv what it needs to finish the job.

The price of stopping Putin now is far better than paying the price of a wider devastating war – as the history of the last century shows.

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Cyber security, Economic, Government, Internet, Society, Technology

CrowdStrike: The risk is ours

INTERNET SECURITY

THE bleak lesson from the devastating global computer breakdown on Friday 19 July – which grounded flights, crashed payment systems, crippled NHS surgeries and hospitals, disconnected phone lines, and knocked media outlets off air – could have been even worse. With no end in sight, this malfunctioning has been dubbed the “digital pandemic” and has already incurred colossal costs in time and money.

To those unversed in the intricacies of computer technology, the speed and extent of the disaster are almost incomprehensible. Surely, many will say, computer systems should be designed to avoid crashes on this scale at all costs. We would not accept planes, trains, or automobiles that dysfunction so badly.

But the truth is when it comes to computers, we accept inherent levels of risk that would be utterly intolerable elsewhere. The technology companies’ profits soar and, when things go wrong, we – the digital serfs of this brave new world – must humbly accept the cost and inconvenience that our masters inflict on us.

To appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem, consider this thought experiment.

Imagine if we allowed almost every traffic light in the world to be made by the same manufacturer. Worse, imagine that all of them were made with a remote-controlled switch that turned them to red. And – catastrophically – that a simple error at the manufacturer or one of its suppliers could trigger this switch all over the world.

Traffic would be instantly gridlocked on every continent. To repair these traffic lights, technicians would in many cases have to dismantle them and fiddle around in the works.

That, in crude terms, is the story of CrowdStrike in this computer breakdown and collapse. Most computers in the world use Microsoft – which makes the ubiquitous Windows operating platform, as well as Word, Excel, and the Teams video-calling system. Many Microsoft customers also rely on other software – in this case the Falcon Sensor program provided by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Security software protects computers from attack, typically by screening incoming data to ensure that it does not include “malware” – malevolent programs that steal data, freeze computers, or scramble their contents.

To work properly, these programs must operate unhindered on our computers, phones, and tablets. And to protect against new threats, they must update regularly – and automatically. In this current incident, one of the automatic software updates from CrowdStrike contained a simple, devastating error. Automatically installing on computers that run Windows, it crashed affected devices, triggering a page containing Windows’s error message – the so-called “blue screen of death”.

The result: the world suddenly had to switch to cash payments and handwritten boarding passes, while shops were forced to shut, medical appointments cancelled, and aircraft at airports grounded.

It is little comfort that George Kurtz, the co-founder and chief executive of CrowdStrike, says he is “deeply sorry”. Fixing the problem will not just take hours, but days or even weeks. At best, computers will need to be switched on and off again, allowing a new update to install. At worst, affected machines will need hours of specialist attention.

Nor will it be any comfort to furious customers around the world that CrowdStrike’s share price has crashed, knocking £10billion off its £65billion capitalised market value.

It could have been far worse.

This does not appear to have been a cyber-attack by a foreign power. Microsoft systems in countries all over the world, including Russia and China, were affected.

Nor was it the work of cyber-criminals. The faulty update did not scramble our databases, leaving us open to ransom demands from crime gangs in return for a key to recover our information.

Nor – unlike many recent cyber-attacks – did it whisk our most precious private information away to the Chinese Communist Party’s spy services in Beijing.

A far worse – and narrowly avoided – cyber-attack earlier this year could have given our enemies the master key to hundreds of millions of computers around the world, enabling them to wreak deadly havoc. Known in tech circles as the “xy” attack, it involved a little-known but ubiquitous program that compresses data to improve efficiency.

This attack, probably the work of Russian spies, was uncovered and stopped by chance at the last minute. And because in the end the damage was minimal, it attracted almost no public attention.

That was a near-miss. Far worse was the SolarWinds attack, exposed in 2021. Hackers – almost certainly Russian – bugged an update issued by Microsoft for a widely used program. The targets were Western (chiefly American) defence and other government networks. The cyber raid also exposed data from the U.S. Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, and thousands of Wall Street’s top companies.

The internet has become the central nervous system of our civilisation. Yet it was never designed or intended for this. It was built to promote academic cooperation and technological innovation, not global security. It is wide open to abuse by pranksters, fraudsters, and rogue states.

A handful of operating systems and software that updates remotely and automatically create a sitting target.

We would hardly accept such a concentration of risk in other walks of life, especially if we had no control over the decision-makers in such systems, and almost no redress if they made mistakes. With most other products and services, you can sue the provider if there’s a malfunction – and gain additional compensation for any damage caused. Not computers.

Unlike other parts of our technological universe, computers, phones, and software are not sold with proper guarantees. The manufacturers can shrug at their products’ shortcomings.

Buried in the terms and conditions are clauses that exempt the manufacturer from almost all liabilities.

One might well ask how on earth we got to such a parlous state of affairs.

One reason is greed: tech giants like their profits. They lobby hard for their privileged status, just as they do for the right to sell our attention to online advertisers – and to resist demands for proper age verification on social media platforms like TikTok.

But a deeper reason is that we have been naïve and complacent in our headlong embrace of new but untrusted technology. We have prized innovation and convenience ahead of security.

These risks, we were told, were the price of admission to the brave new world of computer wizardry. Maybe. But we are paying heavily for it.

In the case of this cyber meltdown, the culprit was carelessness. But suppose the perpetrator had been some rogue regime, perhaps distracting us at a moment of geopolitical tension?

Imagine that this outage had stopped the trains running, frozen all cash machines and, for that matter, turned all our traffic lights to red – or worse, green.

We would have nobody to blame but ourselves.

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