During December’s Summit for Democracy, President Biden touted his administration’s fight against transnational corruption as key to meeting the “sustained and alarming challenges to democracy” worldwide. Prior to the summit, the U.S. government released a new strategy document on countering corruption.
There is growing consensus among policymakers worldwide that corruption is detrimental to the rule of law and good governance — and thus to democracy itself. Advocating for the rule of law has been an integral part of U.S. international democracy promotion efforts for decades. However, many of these programs, run by USAID and the Department of Justice, focus on working-level technical assistance and legal training to help combat corruption.
With Biden now treating corruption as a high-level foreign policy issue, will the administration harness its existing authority to target corrupt senior officials — in the regimes of friends as well as foes? Our research suggests that a narrow framing of U.S. interests has lowered the nation’s propensity to vigorously target high-level corruption among allies.
How does the U.S. rein in corruption?
The U.S. government has many tools to call out and pursue targeted sanctions against corrupt foreign officials — along with those accused of human rights abuses, as corruption and violations of individual rights often go hand in hand. These measures include the Global Magnitsky Act, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) and a series of executive orders that expand on such legislation.
What is the Global Magnitsky Act, and why are U.S. senators invoking this on Saudi Arabia?
U.S. government agencies announced a number of new targeted sanctions in connection to the democracy summit. But a close look at the current list of individuals and entities targeted for Magnitsky sanctions reveals that it includes few from countries the United States counts as partners.
The U.S. tends to avoid confronting allies
A Freedom House report published in February details how a number of authoritarian governments use assassination and intimidation to silence opponents far from their borders. This practice made front-page headlines when the United States imposed additional sanctions on Russia after the poisoning of opposition politician Alexei Navalny last year.
But when Rwanda, a U.S. ally and the recipient of billions of dollars in Western aid, engaged in similar behavior — including allegations of assassinations of dissidents abroad — the United States didn’t apply sanctions. In cases that receive extraordinary media attention — like the October 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul — Washington belatedly imposed sanctions against particular individuals. Even then, implicated leaders like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have been shielded from punishment.
Our research for a book project suggests that where the United States has intervened militarily and then spearheaded nation-building, Washington is often reluctant to confront high-level corruption. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, Washington helped install governments implicated in human rights abuses and high levels of graft. In both countries, U.S. partners pilfered billions in government funds, depositing them in countries like the U.K. or the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. government did little to stop the illicit transfers.
Corruption works against U.S. interests in two detrimental ways — eroding trust in electoral democracy while undermining stability in these countries. Analysts have linked government corruption in Iraq to the rise of the Islamic State, for instance. And the rapid Taliban victory in Afghanistan this past summer illustrates how weak, corrupt and illegitimate the U.S.-backed government had become.
Our research looks closely at the case of Kosovo, where the United States has had unparalleled influence over the past two decades, without having to fight an insurgency. By focusing on short-term priorities like stability, we argue, U.S. policymakers cultivated close ties with politicians implicated in corruption as well as wartime and post-war human rights abuses. Meanwhile, Kosovo’s standing in the annual Transparency International corruption perceptions index has declined in recent years. U.S. policy notwithstanding, Kosovo’s compromised “old guard” political class was replaced this year by Prime Minister Albin Kurti, a reformist who ran on an anti-corruption platform.
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Can the U.S. reduce its reliance on corrupt partners?
More broadly, these dynamics are characteristic of diplomacy itself, which relies on local partners to achieve foreign policy objectives. During the Cold War, the United States cultivated a number of authoritarian allies with anticommunist credentials, often without regard to their record of repression and corruption.
A number of examples — in U.S.-backed regimes in Indonesia, Chile and El Salvador, for instance — highlighted U.S. silence and, at times, complicity in atrocities. The end of the Cold War didn’t change this dynamic, given the diplomatic logic of looking the other way as U.S. allies engaged in corruption and other malign activities.
The post-9/11 “global war on terror” further increased Washington’s tendency to lean on problematic local partners. Over the past two decades, the United States forged alliances with a variety of undemocratic and corrupt leaders, hoping to obtain critical intelligence and operational cooperation on counterterrorism while demonstrating “progress” to audiences at home.
Closer to home, where stemming illegal migration is a concern, the United States has an inconsistent record on confronting governments implicated in organized crime and drug trafficking. One example is the Trump administration’s strong U.S. diplomatic and economic backing for the outgoing president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been accused of corruption and having ties to drug traffickers.
Honduras voted for change. Can Xiomara Castro, the president-elect, deliver?
How to make Biden’s anti-corruption agenda credible
Of course, the U.S. government doesn’t have unlimited capacity to combat transnational corruption. But the nation has potential leverage that it’s often unwilling to use, especially when it comes to U.S. allies.
Targeted sanctions are just one of the many tools to combat corruption and protect human rights. The Biden administration outlined several measures in its anti-corruption strategy document, including efforts to cut off illicit financial flows.
The track record of U.S. sanctions highlights an enduring truth about the conduct of international affairs — it’s far easier to castigate adversaries than allies. For Biden’s democracy agenda to gain credibility — and not be dismissed as merely an instrument to weaken geo-political adversaries like China and Russia — it may take sustained U.S. action to hold problematic allies to account.
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Mieczysław P. Boduszyński is an associate professor of politics and international relations at Pomona College, a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute. Follow him on Twitter at @MietekB.
Victor Peskin is an associate professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center.