RUTHFULLY YOURS

Malaysians go to the polls on Wednesday, and in a normal democracy the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Najib Razak would lose in a rout amid scandals and widespread defections. But the latest polling suggests the opposition in this important Southeast Asian nation will again win the popular vote but fall short of a parliamentary majority.

This would be a repeat of the 2013 election, after which Mr. Najib carried on as Prime Minister and the leader of the ruling United Malays National Organization, or UMNO. The result would show how much Mr. Najib and his party have corrupted Malaysia’s democracy with gerrymandered districts, control of the media, and race-based demagoguery.

In 2015 this newspaper broke the news that nearly $700 million from the state-owned investment fund 1MDB transited through Mr. Najib’s personal bank accounts. He said the money was a legal political donation from a Saudi royal and that most of it was returned. Malaysia’s Attorney General cleared him of wrongdoing, and no charges have been brought in Malaysia.

That didn’t stop six nations from investigating the laundering of $4.5 billion allegedly embezzled from 1MDB. The U.S. Department of Justice filed civil lawsuits to freeze more than $1.6 billion of assets, much of which was held by the friends and family of “Malaysian Official No. 1.” U.S. officials have told the Journal that Official No. 1 refers to Mr. Najib.

President Trump has made containing Iran’s regional ambitions a cornerstone of his foreign policy, and by that measure Sunday’s election in Lebanon is a setback. Not that anyone in Washington seems to have noticed.

Preliminary results indicate that Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and its allies won more than half the seats in Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament, consolidating the Shiite militia’s political grip on the country. Thanks to Lebanon’s sectarian political system, Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Sunni, will likely keep his job, but his clout will be considerably weakened given the clobbering his Future Movement took at the polls.

Voter turnout fell five percentage points from the 2009 election, mostly because Lebanese citizens didn’t have much of a choice between Hezbollah and Hezbollah-lite. Mr. Hariri threw his lot in with the terror group when he accepted a power-sharing arrangement in 2016 with former general Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah ally, to break a political stalemate. The country is overwhelmed with Syrian refugees and its economy is stagnating.

The Trump Administration seems to have adopted a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach regarding Hezbollah’s influence on Mr. Hariri and his government. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited the country in February and tried to distinguish between Hezbollah, the terrorist organization, and Hezbollah, the political party. They share the same principles. Mr. Trump compounded the confusion in April by commending “the government of Lebanon’s progress” in passing a budget, deploying Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) on the Syrian border and fighting Islamic State. The LAF is outmanned and outgunned by Hezbollah.