Americans can spot election meddling because they’ve been doing it for years - Owen Jones
President-elect Donald
Trump – soon to become the most powerful individual on Earth – is having a
tantrum on his
Twitter feed. Losing the popular vote can have devastating consequences for
a bigoted plutocrat’s ego, and accusations
that Vladimir Putin’s regime intervened to his advantage are getting
him down. “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was
delayed until Friday,” he
claims (falsely, apparently), “perhaps more time needed to build a
case. Very
strange!”
Did Putin intervene in
the US election? It is entirely plausible, although evidence from the CIA (with its dubious
record) and the FBI needs to be carefully scrutinised, whatever our feelings on
Trump. And if the Democratic establishment pin the supposedly unthinkable
calamity of Trump’s triumph on a foreign power, they will fail to learn the
real lessons behind their defeat.
That doesn’t mean
alleged interference by the Russian regime shouldn’t be taken seriously. Putin
heads a hard-right, kleptocratic, authoritarian government that persecutes LGBT
people, waged a murderous war in Chechnya, and has committed terrible crimes in
Syria in alliance with Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. It is a pin-up for
populist rightwingers across the west, from Trump to Ukip, from France’s Front
National to Austria’s Freedom party. Its undemocratic manoeuvres should be
scrutinised and condemned.
But while Americans
feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process,
they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them. For the US is a world
leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries.
The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails
belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by
political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together
intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000,
or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.
Indeed, one cannot
understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in
the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohen puts it,
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was
nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist
Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.
As soon as Bill
Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a
policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for
President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually
called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes
Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former
national security adviser, talked of Russia
“increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”.
The results were, to put it
mildly, disastrous. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men
and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge
in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”.
While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged;
prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by
deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.
To the horror of the
west, Yeltsin’s popularity nosedived to the point where a communist triumph in
the 1996 presidential elections could not be ruled out. Yeltsin turned to the
oligarchs, using their vast resources to run an unscrupulous campaign. As
Leonid Bershidsky puts it, it was “a momentous event that undermined a
fragile democracy and led to the emergence of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial
regime”. It is even alleged that, in 2011, Putin’s key ally – then-president
Dmitry Medvedev – privately suggested
the election was rigged. In the run-up to the election, Russia was
granted a huge US-backed IMF loan that – as the
New York Times noted at the time – was “expected to be helpful to
President Boris N Yeltsin in the presidential election”.
Yeltsin relied
on US political strategists – including a former aide to Bill Clinton
– who had a direct line back to the White House. When Yeltsin eventually won, the cover
of Time magazine was “Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how
American advisers helped Yeltsin win”. Without the chaos and
deprivations of the US-backed Yeltsin era, Putinism would surely not have
established itself. But it’s not just Russia by any means,
for the record of US intervention in the internal affairs of foreign
democracies is extensive.
Take Italy in 1948: as
the cold war unfolded, the US feared that a socialist-communist coalition would
triumph in Italian elections. It barred Italians who “did not believe in the
ideology of the United States” from even entering the country; funded opposing
parties via the CIA; orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign, including
millions of letters from Americans of Italian origin; and made it quite clear,
via the
State Department, that there was “no further question of assistance
from the United States” if the wrong people won. Its efforts were a success.
This was the first of many Italian elections featuring US interference.
Take the CIA’s
self-professed involvement in the military coup that overthrew democratically
elected secular Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953: it was “carried
out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved
at the highest levels of government”, as
the agency later confessed. The nature of the
1979 Iranian revolution cannot be understood without it. Or what of
CIA backing for Augusto Pinochet’s murderous overthrow of Salvador Allende in
Chile in 1973?
There are more recent
examples too. Take the military overthrow of Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya in 2009.
The then secretary of state – a certain Hillary Clinton – refused
to describe the toppling of Zelaya as a “military coup”, which would have
required the suspension of US aid, including to the armed forces. Rather than
call for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Clinton called for new elections. US
assistance – including military aid – continued as dissidents were treated brutally;
as death squads re-emerged; as violence against LGBT people surged; and as
widely boycotted unfair elections took place.
Allegations of Russian
interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double
standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when
the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal
affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen
for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a
great day indeed.
