Why Foreign Influence Is on the Rise Corrupt officials and ‘princelings’ grow more important in our globalized politics. By Walter Russell Mead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-foreign-influence-is-on-the-rise-11569885340
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington warned in his Farewell Address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Those words have rarely seemed more relevant than now, when both the president and the front-runner for the nomination to challenge him are embroiled in a scandal that began with attempts by Ukrainian figures to manipulate Washington politics and policy.
The Ukrainian firestorm is only the start. America and the world are changing in ways that will make the question of foreign influence in U.S. political life more fateful, and more difficult to police, than ever.
This isn’t about Facebook ads and voting machines. It is not even about more blatant forms of foreign meddling, like the alleged Russian leaks of damaging information stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Serious as these problems are, America’s greatest risk isn’t the vulnerability of its voting machines to foreign hackers or the susceptibility of party apparatchiks to phishing scams. It is the erosion of ethical standards in the American political and business establishments that most exposes the U.S. to the kind of foreign interference against which Washington warned.
This isn’t a partisan problem. Some members of the administration, including the tweeter in chief, have behaved in ways that earlier American presidents would have condemned, but they are hardly alone. The Clinton Foundation was perceived by many of its foreign donors to be a way to influence American politics during the years in which Hillary Clinton was a likely future president. And hardly anyone believes it was Hunter Biden’s experience, sagacity and business acumen that commended him as a candidate for board membership to a beleaguered Ukrainian gas company.
This isn’t only a story of moral decline, but also of how the public came to care. After the end of the Cold War, the soft corruption of the American elite didn’t seem to be a serious problem, either to elites or to the public at large. The U.S. was supreme in the world, and the principles of liberal democratic capitalism seemed to be sweeping the globe. Wall Street firms hired Chinese “princelings” in hopes of making powerful connections; American princelings were similarly targeted overseas. Consulting contracts with Russia, deep business ties with the sons and daughters of the Chinese politburo—while some saw ethical problems with some of these relationships, few saw them as national-security problems.
That changed with the return of the politics of economic envy at home and of geopolitical competition abroad. Widespread public anger with an elite perceived to be enriching itself through corrupt deals fired up both Trump and Sanders voters in 2016; those passions continue to drive much of the electorate today. The renewed geopolitical and ideological competition with China and Russia adds an explosive dimension to populist resentment. Collusion with hostile foreign powers, we begin to discover, isn’t merely corrupt. Many see such collusion as treasonous—literally—and administration critics are using the T-word to describe what in happier times would have been considered mere sleaze.
Globalization is real, and unless the U.S. is to cut all economic ties with the second-largest economy in the world, business relations with China will continue. Yet history isn’t over and the world isn’t flat; doing business in China or with China isn’t the same as doing business in Japan or the U.K. The weak rule of law in China means that American firms must often placate powerful Communist Party officials to protect their investments. At the same time, Chinese firms, whether private or state-owned, increasingly operate as political agents of Beijing. As the political relationship deteriorates, American business and American politicians (and their princelings and hangers-on) need new rules to govern their relations with adversarial powers, which are also significant economic partners.
Impeaching or not impeaching Mr. Trump won’t solve this problem. Separately from the impeachment process, Congress needs to hold wide-ranging hearings on the problem of foreign influence in American politics, document the efforts of foreign countries and economic interests to affect American behavior, and write legislation that, while protecting necessary and normal business relationships in a global economy, effectively deters both hostile foreign actors seeking to meddle illegitimately in U.S. affairs and Americans misguided enough to collaborate with them. Failing to do this won’t only leave the U.S. open to hostile foreign powers. It will leave legitimate businesses exposed to wild and demagogic charges of the most damaging kind.
Comments are closed.
