# Authoritarian International The **Authoritarian International** is [[Josh Marshall]]'s name for a transnational coalition of authoritarian governments, Gulf dynasties and private wealth that, in his account, has become a self-conscious group with [[Donald Trump]] as its "avatar" — and that will outlive Trump personally and electorally. Marshall laid it out on the [[Talking Points Memo]] Editors' Blog on **February 11–12, 2026**, noting the convenient acronym ("AI"). He says he had discussed the concept before; those earlier posts have not been traced here. The frame matters for this vault because it moves the subject from **ideology to class and capital**. Where [[International Far-Right Networks]] tracks parties, movements and the Kremlin's cultivation of them, Marshall's coalition is held together by money, deals and mutual leverage — and it puts American billionaires and Gulf sovereign wealth *inside* the movement rather than beside it. ## The map: Marshall's roster Marshall names seven components, then the figure who unifies them. The components and their order are his; the vault pages in the right column are where each one already lives in the KB. | # | Component (Marshall) | Where it lives in the vault | |---|---|---| | 1 | Authoritarian governments around the world | [[Autocracy]] · [[Autocracy Inc]] · [[Kleptocracy]] | | 2 | The princelings of the Gulf monarchies | [[Mohammed bin Salman]] · [[Saudi Arabia]] · [[Qatar]] · [[United Arab Emirates]] · [[Saudi Influence]] · [[Qatari Influence]] | | 3 | A sprinkling of European right-revanchist governments | [[Viktor Orbán]] · [[Hungarian Influence]] · [[International Far-Right Networks]] | | 4 | The rightward portion of Silicon Valley | [[Tech Right]] · [[Tech Oligarchy]] · [[Elon Musk]] | | 5 | The Israeli private intelligence sector | [[Commercial Spyware]] · [[Israeli Influence]] | | 6 | Various post-Soviet oligarchs | [[Russian Oligarchy]] · [[Mafia State]] · [[Vladimir Putin]] | | 7 | Increasingly, the world's billionaire class | [[Plutocracy]] · [[Oligarchy]] | | — | Avatar | [[Donald Trump]] | Marshall names only Trump, Musk, [[Mohammed bin Salman]] and [[Jared Kushner]] as individuals. He names no Israeli firms and no specific post-Soviet oligarchs; the vault anchors above are category pages, not his attributions. The tree below is the vault's rendering of the roster. The STATE / PRIVATE split and the "operating system" branch are our grouping of his text, not a graphic Marshall published. ``` THE AUTHORITARIAN INTERNATIONAL (Josh Marshall, TPM, Feb 11-12, 2026) │ ├── AVATAR │ └── Donald Trump ......... "includes and is even perhaps led by" him; │ solidified the group, will not end it │ ├── STATE POWER │ ├── Authoritarian governments ...... where "the government never changes" │ ├── Gulf monarchies ................ Mohammed bin Salman's billionaire confabs; │ │ Jared Kushner in the seat of honor │ └── European right-revanchist govts a "sprinkling" │ ├── PRIVATE POWER │ ├── Silicon Valley's right wing .... Musk running foreign policy from │ │ Twitter and SpaceX; pro-Russian on Ukraine │ ├── Israeli private intel sector │ ├── Post-Soviet oligarchs │ └── Global billionaire class ....... "increasingly" │ └── OPERATING SYSTEM (anti-civic, not merely anti-democratic) ├── private, one-off deals ├── mutual pledges of secrecy ├── soft, mutual extortion ......... see Feb 12 follow-up: kompromat └── rejection of democratic accountability ``` ## The thesis: an anti-civic world Marshall's central distinction is that this is less an anti-democratic world than an **anti-civic** one. Its working parts are private one-off deals, mutual pledges of secrecy often enforced by soft mutual extortion, and above all a rejection of democratic accountability. Elections are a secondary target; the primary one is the idea that public power answers to a public. He offers three pieces of evidence: - **The MBS dinners.** Early in the Biden administration, a U.S. hedge-fund manager who attends the gatherings [[Mohammed bin Salman]] hosts for the world's billionaires told Marshall that at the most recent one, [[Jared Kushner]] had the seat of honor at nearly every dinner — at a moment when Trump was at his political low point. Marshall's takeaway: the Kushner–MBS and Trump–MBS relationships were not transactional but durable, "in and out of office." The vault's financial record of that relationship is on the MBS and Kushner pages ([[Affinity Partners]]' $2 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign fund). - **Musk's foreign policy.** In the late Biden years, [[Elon Musk]] made increasingly brazen efforts to run U.S. foreign policy from Twitter and [[SpaceX]], most visibly a pro-Russian line on Ukraine that undercut U.S. policy. - **Saudi oil pricing.** Marshall asserts that the Saudis tried to ease Biden out of office by manipulating oil prices. He gives no sourcing for that claim in the public text; the vault records it as his assertion, not an established fact. ## Why it outlives Trump Marshall's argument for durability is structural: - There used to be far fewer U.S. billionaires, and while their economics aimed to protect their wealth, they were not clearly on the right. As the scale of their fortunes and their identity *as a class* exploded, they moved in an increasingly anti-civic direction. - They became increasingly allied with what he calls the "primitive economy petro-states" of the Gulf. - They command vast economic resources, run the governments in many countries outright, and have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system — many of the key players are American. Trump did not exactly create the movement, Marshall writes, but a decade of his role in global politics congealed it into a self-conscious group. His conclusion is a planning problem: any revival of civic democracy in the U.S. will be menaced by the coalition's continued existence, so the time to work out how to fight it is now — not after Trump. ## The kompromat sub-thread (Feb 12) The next day's post, "More Thoughts on the Authoritarian International," takes up what Marshall calls a subset of the same phenomenon: the Putin-era system of influence and disruption operations abroad and the use of [[Kompromat]] to keep Russian oligarchs and key foreign figures — allies and enemies alike — in line. His observation is that the system is not really extortion: because everyone has something on everyone else, it can be oddly stabilizing. He returns to the first-term question of what Putin had on Trump. Everything past the first two paragraphs is member-only; the vault records only the public portion. See also [[Active Measures]] and [[Russian Influence]]. ## How it differs from neighboring frames | Frame | Who is in it | What binds it | Where the center is | |---|---|---|---| | [[International Far-Right Networks]] | Parties, movements, churches, Russian services | A shared enemy (Western liberalism) and "traditional values" | Moscow as figurehead | | [[Autocracy Inc]] ([[Anne Applebaum]], 2024) | Regimes: Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others | Kleptocratic finance and a shared interest in impunity | No center; a syndicate of states, with Western banks, lawyers and lobbyists as enablers | | Authoritarian International (Marshall, 2026) | States, Gulf dynasties, and private capital: tech, private intelligence, oligarchs, billionaires | Private deals, secrecy and mutual leverage | Trump as avatar; Gulf and Silicon Valley money as the engine | **The vault's reading:** Applebaum treats Western financial and professional elites as *enablers* of foreign autocracy. Marshall's move is to promote them to *members*. In his frame, the American billionaire class is not servicing the network from outside; it is one of the network's founding blocs, and the U.S. is a participant rather than the target. ## Brad DeLong's gloss Berkeley economist Brad DeLong crossposted the full February 11 post on his *Grasping Reality* Substack on February 12, 2026, pulling it out from behind TPM's paywall while urging readers to subscribe. He summarized the coalition as Trump, Musk, MBS, the petro-states and a "right-curious" billionaire class, and argued that its natural habitat is the parasocial, rage-bait internet — a tool it hopes to use against democracy itself. ## Source note Both TPM posts are member-only past their opening paragraphs. The roster, the anti-civic passage, the MBS anecdote and the durability argument come from DeLong's crosspost of the complete February 11 text. Only the first two paragraphs of the February 12 post are public. No graphic map by Marshall was found; the tree above is the vault's own rendering. ## See Also - [[Josh Marshall]] — originator of the frame - [[Talking Points Memo]] — where it was published - [[International Far-Right Networks]] — the party-and-movement layer of the same landscape - [[Autocracy Inc]] — Applebaum's state-network frame - [[Kompromat]] — the mutual-leverage mechanism Marshall's follow-up examines - [[Tech Right]] · [[Tech Oligarchy]] — the Silicon Valley bloc - [[Mohammed bin Salman]] · [[Jared Kushner]] · [[Affinity Partners]] — the Gulf pipeline - [[Russian Oligarchy]] · [[Mafia State]] — the post-Soviet bloc - [[Commercial Spyware]] — the private-intelligence bloc - [[Plutocracy]] · [[Oligarchy]] — the structural category