What can democracies do about autocratic interference? Josh Rudolph on the challenges of resistance and resiliency.
After the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Soviet Union actively spread disinformation about the murder—partly because the Soviets feared they might be blamed for it, partly to exploit shock and confusion, sow discord, and undermine faith in American institutions. The central narrative they pushed may be familiar: Kennedy was killed not by Lee Harvey Oswald alone but by a right-wing conspiracy of wealthy businessmen, military leaders, and intelligence officials who opposed Kennedy’s policies on Cuba and nuclear-arms control. Back then, an operation like this was labor-intensive—the KGB planted false stories in left-wing newspapers around the world, fabricated a letter tying Oswald to the CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, and so on—but it got a lot of traction, particularly in left-leaning European media. And the narrative has circulated ever since, among conspiracy theorists and in pop culture—including as the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1991 thriller JFK.
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets conducted plenty more covert influence campaigns against the U.S. and other Western democracies. In the 1950s and ‘60s, they tried to exploit racial strife in America, even forging letters to civil-rights organizations purporting to be from the Ku Klux Klan. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, they tried to radicalize Western anti-nuclear movements through front organizations, funded research, and media manipulation. In the ‘80s, Operation Infektion promoted the false claim that HIV/AIDS was created as a biological weapon at Fort Detrick, Maryland. China had its own operations. Cuba, East Germany, and even North Korea had theirs.
In the meantime, the Soviets had become masters in the arts of strategic corruption and compromising material (kompromat). Often, they’d identify and cultivate relationships with influential Westerners who had financial troubles, proclivities for vice, or ideological sympathies the KGB could work with. They’d offer bribes, business deals, or other financial incentives through front companies and intermediaries to compromise their targets. They focused on corrupting politicians, journalists, and business leaders in positions to influence policy or public opinion. In Western Europe especially, they targeted politicians and labor leaders through both direct payments and lucrative business arrangements.
It’s still not clear how strategically effective many of these operations were. But they were often damaging, and they were ongoing.
Strategic corruption by autocracies toward democracies, in other words, isn’t new. Part of what is new is the players: When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dubai was a small city in the desert. Now, the United Arab Emirates is the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East and a key U.S. ally. Part is the context: Since the 1990s, a hyper-globalized economy has transformed and connected autocratic and democratic societies; money tied to the Chinese Communist Party, the post-Soviet Kremlin, and, increasingly, the ruling families of the Gulf states has flowed into Western capitals; and digital technologies are now driving more than 729 million real-time financial transactions a day—not to say the virtually constant consumption of media and messaging. But no small part of what’s new are the stakes: Amid all these changes, democracies’ threat interface—the set of ways attackers can interact with or exploit a system—has become more complex and rapid-changing than ever. What can democracies do?
Josh Rudolph is a senior fellow and the head of the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group at the German Marshall Fund. Rudolph says that in the developing world, the challenges of responding are relentless, both because there are so many vulnerabilities to strategic corruption and because there’s so much opportunity for corrupt actors to interfere with investigations. But developed democracies, including the most powerful in the world, face their own relentless challenges. While some have made headway through legislative initiatives and enforcement, they all struggle to close legal loopholes faster than new ones open up. And in the United States, especially, this struggle has been complicated not only by the jarring priorities of a new administration, but also by a long-term trend among American legislators —to put partisan political advantage ahead of national security …
From Altered States, a print extra from The Signal x the Human Rights Foundation.
Allison Braden: Ben Freeman and Miranda Patrucić describe some of the most powerful autocracies in the world engaging in an array of influence activities—some legal, some not.
It seems the Persian Gulf states are the big players in more developed democracies like the U.S. or the U.K.; China and Russia, in less developed democracies. Some of these operations are focused on economic ends, some on geopolitical ends, some on defending autocracy itself. What patterns stand out to you?
Josh Rudolph: What stands out to me most is that these big players aren’t just autocracies but also, like many autocracies, largely kleptocracies— as Justin Callais points out, systems whose leaders use their power to build and maintain their wealth through public resources and state assets, and then use corruption with those resources and assets to maintain and develop political power.
Kleptocracy, by its nature, doesn’t stop at its borders. The same actors, networks, tactics, and resources kleptocrats use to maintain power and prevent democracy and the rule of law from sprouting in their countries—kleptocrats repurpose all of it for foreign aggression.
Which is to say, a key means of foreign aggression for kleptocrats is strategic corruption. It’s a prime geopolitical weapon they use to undermine the sovereignty and efficacy of other states, not least democratic states—often secretly, though sometimes more or less out in the open, by working within target states’ laws.
You can look at the tactics supporting strategic corruption as being on a spectrum—in terms of how directly any tactic violates democratic integrity or subverts a democratic process.
"Kleptocracy doesn’t stop at its borders. The same actors, networks, tactics, and resources kleptocrats use to maintain power and prevent democracy and the rule of law from sprouting in their countries—kleptocrats repurpose all of it for foreign aggression."
The most indirect—and chronic—form of strategic corruption these days is what’s called corrosive capital. Major examples would be China’s investments in its Belt and Road Initiative or Russia’s investments across Eastern Europe, using unscrupulous patronage networks and opaque business dealings to spread their kleptocratic model of autocratic governance—as Miranda Patrucić talks about.
In the middle of the spectrum are malign-influence operations. The Gulf autocracies are very active here. So is China. These might include bribing a minister or some other politician in a target country. Or they might include threatening a public official—say, the governor of a U.S. state—with economic repercussions, perhaps the loss of jobs and business in their state unless they self-censor their political speech or help advance a foreign- policy initiative, or otherwise subordinate the legitimate interests entrusted to them by their own people in favor of the interests of a foreign power.
And then, the most direct—and acute—form of strategic corruption is financing election interference. There’s no more blatant way to undermine the sovereignty of a country than to corrupt its democratic process—typically with the proceeds of kleptocracy, often through legal loopholes and deniable, covert proxies like Russia’s oligarchs.
In all three of these forms, yes, there are both legal and illegal tactics—even in this boldest form, financing election interference. In research I’ve worked on, we found 125 cases of autocratic regimes funneling money into the political processes of Western democracies, and 83 percent of those cases exploited some loophole— whether by giving someone something valuable that could legally be considered a gift, by legally getting money to someone who can then legally make a donation, or by any number of other routes. There are so many legal ways to interfere in foreign elections, and democracies just haven’t closed most of the loopholes that enable them.
Braden: Thinking about the example of the Belt and Road Initiative: What can democracies do to counter that kind of corruption—if there’s nothing illegal about building, say, a bridge?
Rudolph: The most common method Beijing uses to entrench the political power structure around Belt and Road projects is bribery, as Miranda Patrucić says. Now, in most countries, bribery is illegal. But the challenge is with enforcement, because most countries have, frankly, a Western conception of bribery written into their laws—and to enforce it, you have to be able to identify the quid pro quo. You know, it’s all documented that this individual went to that individual, and then one of them said something like, If you use this power lever to give me that policy outcome, I will pay you this amount of money—and now I will wire-transfer you the money.
But in Belt and Road countries, that’s usually just not how it works. It’s not a Western-style, arm’s- length contract system. It’s a system structured first and foremost around long-term relationships and power systems where the quid pro quo can be informal and extend over a very long period. Maybe years go by where you have a vague sense that you owe something to someone powerful, and it’s not clear when that will have to flow—or through what channel.
The documentation standard typical in Western law is also required for the U.S. government’s Global Magnitsky Act of 2016, which allows the U.S. to sanction corrupt foreign officials. Having to identify a documented quid pro quo makes enforcement extremely tough.
"There are so many legal ways to interfere in foreign elections, and democracies just haven’t closed most of the loopholes that enable them."
Across fledgling democracies that are part of Belt and Road, like Pakistan or Sri Lanka, there are people who try to do good enforcement work, who try to conduct investigations or prosecute and get the case to a judge—an honest one—and see it all through. But at every stage in that accountability process of investigation and enforcement, there are also elements who are bought and paid for by corrupt actors, who are interfering, who are applying pressure, and so on—either directly or behind the scenes.
Braden: When it comes to more blatant cases of malign influence on the spectrum of tactics for strategic corruption, where corrupt actors might openly buy off a public official, what do you see democratic countries doing to counter this sort of thing?
Rudolph: Of the three types of strategic corruption, this is the one where—in the United States, at any rate—we’ve seen the enforcement apparatus really doing its work and being effective at it. In 2017, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation created the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the FBI director at the time, Christopher Wray, made a point of warning in particular about China’s use of bribery, blackmail, and covert deals, either to entice or to bully U.S. officials.
Some of the cases he publicized involved governors, state senators, members of Congress, and so on, but others involved corporate leaders, celebrities, and sports and media organizations— which helped make the pattern of malign-influence operations behind them more visible publicly.
There are still a lot of policy gaps in the U.S., though, as Ben Freeman says. We truly are the mecca of dirty money. But enforcement on criminal cases—that’s the one thing I can we’ve been better at than most other countries in the world, including most other Western democracies.
Now, unfortunately, the new U.S. administration has taken a hatchet to that capability—from halting the enforcement of the U.S. law prohibiting the bribery of foreign officials to disbanding Task Force KleptoCapture, which targeted Russian oligarchs. The Justice Department’s decision to drop corruption-related charges against New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams makes no sense, apart from there having been some sort of quid pro quo. So it bears watching to see whether this characteristically strong American capability will endure—or is in the process of being warped into a tool for advancing corruption at home and abroad.
Braden: How about financing election interference and strategic corruption at that end of the spectrum? It seems there’s a combination of legal and illegal tactics there, too. In most democracies, it’s straightforwardly illegal to buy votes—or for foreign entities to donate to political parties. But there are other avenues.
Rudolph: Yes, and here, I’m afraid, I’m less optimistic. In the United States, we’ve been making some efforts. We were one of the last major democratic powers to establish a registry for beneficial ownership—a database that helps regulators and financial institutions and law enforcement detect, prevent, and fight financial crimes.
"Enforcement on criminal cases—that’s the one thing I can say we’ve been better at than most other countries in the world, including most other Western democracies. Now the new U.S. administration has taken a hatchet to that capability."
But we’ve done it. So it’s now harder in the U.S. to hide money in shell companies—but then, there are trusts and all these other structures people can exploit. The former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellin promoted this registry as a vital tool that would eliminate key vulnerabilities in the American financial system and allow the U.S. to tackle the scourge of illicit finance enabled by obscure corporate structures. Still, there are so many other ways in.
In 2019, there was a significant attempt in the U.S. Congress to enact a set of crucial measures—in the For the People Act, a bill that rolled together a number of previously proposed laws that hadn’t passed: the Honest Ads Act, which imposed transparency on online political ads; the SHIELD Act, which made political campaigns report to law enforcement offers of foreign-election assistance; the DISCLOSE Act, which made nonprofits that advocate for a candidate publicly disclose their donors; and similar legislation against foreign- election interference.
For the People would have closed the majority of the loopholes that enable financing election interference. But the bill never passed, because instead of respecting it as a critical national- security safeguard, one party treated it as a political project of the other, designed to draw attention to their misbehavior. Two years later, a lot of the same provisions from For the People were rolled in turn into the Freedom to Vote Act, which didn’t pass, either.
In other developed democracies, it’s just as bad. If we look at the United Kingdom, three of the top donors to the Conservative Party are Alexander Temerko, Lubov Chernukhin, and Viktor Fedotov— all elite Russian expats who accumulated their wealth through kleptocracy, by exploiting ties with Russian security agencies, striking corrupt deals for properties in Moscow, and siphoning funds from Russian state pipelines.
Of course, it’s not illegal in the U.K. to show up and become a citizen, even if you became rich in Russia in the ways Temerko, Chernukhin, and Fedotov did. Neither is it illegal then to donate massively to the Tories. It’s not even illegal, after you’ve done all that, to rekindle your ties with Putin cronies and have who-knows-what kinds of conversations about your political activity. There are whole chains of influence there that British law has nothing to say about.
Some countries have gotten more aggressive in establishing frameworks to make it illegal to maintain these chains of influence through financial relationships or personal contacts. Australia is one. They faced this issue fairly directly with China—particularly in several cases where senators were receiving money from Beijing while taking its side over Australia’s on, for example, South China Sea disputes.
As such, this was malign-influence operation. But after it happened, the Australian government worked in committee for more than a year to develop a legal framework that covers both malign influence generally and election interference specifically—with very steep, 10- to 15-year prison sentences associated with them.
There’s been legislation in other democracies, meanwhile, including the United States, to require political campaigns to report any contacts they have with foreign powers. There’ve been efforts in the U.S. specifically to strengthen the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people and organizations representing foreign interests to make public disclosures, in ways that also close loopholes that have enabled them secretly to buy the loyalty of political operatives—but you know, every time they close one loophole, you learn about two more. It’s a hydra.
"Since before the new administration’s rollbacks on anti-corruption enforcement, it’s been very, very difficult in today’s Washington to sustain any broad political support for countering strategic corruption from autocracies and closing the loopholes that enable it."
Braden: This seems daunting.
Rudolph: It is. It’s daunting. But as much as it’s inherently daunting—because it’s inherently difficult to keep up with autocracies’ shifting tactical repertoires for strategic corruption—one of the biggest challenges doesn’t really have to do with them; it has to do with us.
Since before the new administration’s rollbacks on anti-corruption enforcement, it’s been very, very difficult in today’s Washington—as in other democratic capitals—to sustain any broad political support for countering strategic corruption from autocracies and closing the legal loopholes that enable it. When your country is chronically targeted for strategic corruption, the issues it raises are entirely and deeply bipartisan. Still, they always end up politicized.
Over and over, U.S. politicians use matters of foreign interference to score points in domestic competition rather than to legislate policy resilience. Over and over, particularly during Donald Trump’s first term, too many Democrats would focus on the Russia threat with a disproportionate, almost exclusive intensity— because they saw Trump as being vulnerable in relation to this threat. Which then created a dynamic where it’s very difficult to imagine Trump being able to think about the Russia threat—which is real—without focusing on what it meant for his political opponents’ position. And over and over, Republicans would say No, come on, the threat is China—and they’re helping Biden. Which, I’ll add, wasn’t true.
Over and over, when it would come time to close a loophole, lawmakers from both parties would grandstand about how a domestic political opponent on the other side of the aisle exploited this loophole and should be ashamed; the opponent would push back on those terms; and in the end, no policymaking would come of it.
Occasionally, there are instances of bipartisan collaboration, usually after a really brazen case of autocratic interference. In Australia, there was a broad political agreement to counter Chinese operations. But in the United States, we’ve had similarly brazen cases of interference, going back to 2016, and it’s continued in every election cycle since—especially, though not exclusively, from Russia.
Yet we’ve completely failed to focus on it as a bipartisan issue, not only for American national security but for the fundamental integrity of American democracy. There are politicians in this country who care about the issue and do their best—Democrats and Republicans. I don’t want to say there aren’t. We see their efforts here and there. And there were certainly good investigations into Russian operations, particularly in the Senate. But in the U.S. political system as a whole, there’s no consensus.
In moments like Pearl Harbor in 1941 or September 11 in 2001—then, everyone could see these attacks were happening. There may have been debate over what to do about them. But there was no meaningful division across ideological or political lines on the question of whether they were happening and needed a response.
You could say the difference between then and now is that these attacks today aren’t as obvious. But the reality is, they’re readily obvious to American legislators. And American legislators keep feeling incentivized to do nothing about them, other than to politicize them, while the threats of strategic corruption from autocracies keep growing and evolving.
