OF RELATED INTEREST THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2024 39 Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World Anne Applebaum, Doubleday, 2024, $27.00/hardcover, e-book available, 224 pages. Anne Applebaum’s 2020 bestseller, e Twilight of Democracy, analyzed the growing appeal of autocracy to Western intellectuals and politicians. In her new volume, Autocracy, Inc., she trains her lens on the dictatorships—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, among others—that are working together (and with prominent American billionaires) to enhance their power and undermine the West. General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta , hails the book as “a wakeup call … for anyone interested in preserving the democratic values and culture that have been fought for at a high price in blood and treasure for over 200 years.” After 17 years as a Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum became a sta writer at e Atlantic in 2020. She is the author of ve critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including Gulag: A History, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non ction. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis Jonathan Blitzer, Penguin Press, 2024, $32.00/hardcover, e-book available, 544 pages. Not surprisingly, the ongoing migrant crisis at America’s southern border is one of the major issues in this year’s hotly contested presidential election. As Jonathan Blitzer explains, the scale of the in ux has soared in recent years, largely because so many desperate people have been uprooted from their homes in the Northern Triangle countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here documents how decades of misguided U.S. policy and sweeping regional corruption paved the way for the crisis. But Blitzer makes the story personal, telling it both through the eyes of those who have attempted the crossing and those on the other side of the border who have either helped them along the way or tried to prevent them from crossing. Jonathan Blitzer is a sta writer at e New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. Up in Arms: How Military Assistance Stabilizes—and Destabilizes—Foreign Autocrats Adam E. Casey, Basic Books, 2024, $32.00/hardcover, e-book available, 336 pages. Debates about the utility and morality of security assistance date back to our founding, as Adam E. Casey points out in his introduction to this provocative book. e conventional wisdom is that military aid props up nondemocratic governments, but is this necessarily true? Citing case studies ranging from Paraguay and Guatemala to Libya and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), among others, Casey says it isn’t true: “Aid, arms, and advisers do not just bolster dictatorships; they also transform them. And these transformations are not always bene cial for the stability of authoritarian regimes.” A Wall Street Journal review calls Up in Arms “a methodical study that largely avoids moral posturing, especially about U.S. policies and decisions. at alone justi es taking it seriously.” Adam E. Casey is a U.S. government analyst whose writing has appeared in e Washington Post, Foreign A airs, and Foreign Policy. His research has been cited by e New York Times, e Economist, and Bloomberg, among others.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=