Soviet Union and Russia According to
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin's regime." In 2000, Applebaum described the links between the then-new president of Russia,
Vladimir Putin; the former Soviet leader
Yuri Andropov; and the former
KGB agency. In 2008, she began speaking about
Putinism as an anti-democratic ideology. However, most people at the time still considered Putin a pro-Western pragmatist. Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct toward the
Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in
The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", writing that Putin's actions had violated "a series of international treaties". On March 7 in another article, in
The Daily Telegraph, discussing an
information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies". At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them. Critics of Applebaum's, including journalist
Glenn Greenwald, have called her a "warmonger" and a "
neocon". In 2014, she wrote a review of
Karen Dawisha's book ''
Putin's Kleptocracy for The New York Review of Books; in it, she asked whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism". She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia; she wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic'', "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."
Press freedom Applebaum's article in
The Washington Post on October 14, 2018, "This Is Why So Many Journalists Are At Risk Today" highlighted attacks on press freedom by "authoritarian and autocratic regimes". In "Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war", Applebaum justified the bombing of the official Palestinian media and said that it was "a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war". But in a 2024 interview, she denied that "radio stations or television stations are actually legitimate military targets".
Central Europe Applebaum has written about the history of central and eastern Europe, Poland in particular. In the conclusion to her book
Iron Curtain, she argues that the reconstruction of civil society was the most important and most difficult challenge for the
post-communist states of central Europe; in another essay, she argued that the modern authoritarian obsession with civil society repression dates to
Vladimir Lenin. She has written essays on the Polish filmmaker
Andrzej Wajda; the dual Nazi–Soviet occupation of central Europe; and why it is inaccurate to define
Eastern Europe as a single entity.
Disinformation, propaganda, and fake news Applebaum wrote about a 2014 Russian smear campaign against her while she was writing heavily about the
Russian annexation of Crimea. She said that dubious online material was eventually recycled by semi-respectable American pro-Russia websites. Applebaum argued in 2015 that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading false stories and help "undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world". Applebaum has been a member of the advisory panel for the organization
Global Disinformation Index.
Nationalism In March 2016, during the
2016 US election campaign, Applebaum wrote a column for
The Washington Post asking, "Is this the end of the West as we know it?"; the column argued that "we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order". Applebaum endorsed
Hillary Clinton for president in July 2016, because Trump is "a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power". Applebaum wrote a
Washington Post column in March 2016 that led the Swiss newspaper
Tages-Anzeiger and the German magazine
Der Spiegel to interview her. These articles appeared in December 2016 and January 2017. She wrote that the international populist movement frequently called "far right" or "
alt-right" is not
conservative as this term has traditionally been defined. She wrote that populist groups in Europe share "ideas and ideology, friends and founders"; unlike
Burkean conservatives, they seek to "overthrow the institutions of the present to bring back things that existed in the past—or that they believe existed in the past—by force." Applebaum has underlined the danger of a new "Nationalist
International", a union of xenophobic, nationalist parties such as
Law and Justice in Poland, the
Northern League in Italy, and the
Freedom Party in Austria. In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the
US House of Representatives; the committee hearing was entitled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism". ==Personal life==