Mathias Döpfner is the chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, owner of the US media brands Politico, Insider, and Morning Brew, and the largest digital publisher in Europe. He joined the company in 1998 as editor in chief of the German daily Welt and became CEO in 2002. Ever since, he has pushed the digital transformation to defend independent quality journalism. He is a member of the board of directors of Netflix and Warner Music Group, serves on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Meeting, and holds an honorary office on the American Jewish Committee. He studied musicology, German literature, and theatrical arts in Boston and Frankfurt, where he also completed his PhD.

"The prolonged attempt to spread democracy through economic globalization has ended in abject failure. Far from becoming more democratic, China and Russia have doubled down on their different brands of dictatorship, while the populist backlash against free trade threatens the stability of the Western democracies themselves. The only solution, Mathias Döpfner argues in this remarkable and original polemic, is radical decoupling—replacing the World Trade Organization with a new world order of free trade between the democracies, raising even further the barriers to trade with regimes that don’t uphold the rule of law, human rights, and clean energy. Enlivened by the author’s own first-hand encounters with authoritarian regimes, this book is guaranteed to incense those who still hope to salvage what is left of the old Washington consensus."—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

Mathias Döpfner is the chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, owner of the US media brands Politico, Insider, and Morning Brew, and the largest digital publisher in Europe. He joined the company in 1998 as editor in chief of the German daily Welt and became CEO in 2002. Ever since, he has pushed the digital transformation to defend independent quality journalism. He is a member of the board of directors of Netflix and Warner Music Group, serves on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Meeting, and holds an honorary office on the American Jewish Committee. He studied musicology, German literature, and theatrical arts in Boston and Frankfurt, where he also completed his PhD.

"The prolonged attempt to spread democracy through economic globalization has ended in abject failure. Far from becoming more democratic, China and Russia have doubled down on their different brands of dictatorship, while the populist backlash against free trade threatens the stability of the Western democracies themselves. The only solution, Mathias Döpfner argues in this remarkable and original polemic, is radical decoupling—replacing the World Trade Organization with a new world order of free trade between the democracies, raising even further the barriers to trade with regimes that don’t uphold the rule of law, human rights, and clean energy. Enlivened by the author’s own first-hand encounters with authoritarian regimes, this book is guaranteed to incense those who still hope to salvage what is left of the old Washington consensus."—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

Mathias Döpfner is the chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, owner of the US media brands Politico, Insider, and Morning Brew, and the largest digital publisher in Europe. He joined the company in 1998 as editor in chief of the German daily Welt and became CEO in 2002. Ever since, he has pushed the digital transformation to defend independent quality journalism. He is a member of the board of directors of Netflix and Warner Music Group, serves on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Meeting, and holds an honorary office on the American Jewish Committee. He studied musicology, German literature, and theatrical arts in Boston and Frankfurt, where he also completed his PhD.

"The prolonged attempt to spread democracy through economic globalization has ended in abject failure. Far from becoming more democratic, China and Russia have doubled down on their different brands of dictatorship, while the populist backlash against free trade threatens the stability of the Western democracies themselves. The only solution, Mathias Döpfner argues in this remarkable and original polemic, is radical decoupling—replacing the World Trade Organization with a new world order of free trade between the democracies, raising even further the barriers to trade with regimes that don’t uphold the rule of law, human rights, and clean energy. Enlivened by the author’s own first-hand encounters with authoritarian regimes, this book is guaranteed to incense those who still hope to salvage what is left of the old Washington consensus."—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution