U.S. officials have a long history of portraying Washington’s allies and clients as democratic, even when their behavior is blatantly authoritarian. Such cynical hypocrisy was at its zenith during the Cold War, but it is surging again. A similar trend is evident with respect to U.S. interference in the internal political affairs of other countries through such mechanisms as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Such agencies fund regimes and political movements that are deemed obedient to Washington’s wishes and supportive of U.S. foreign policy objectives. Conversely, U.S. administrations actively undermine governments or movements that they consider hostile or even just insufficiently cooperative. The actual nature of U.S. clients often is a far cry from the carefully crafted democratic image of them that Washington circulates.
A recent example of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of another democratic country appears to have taken place in the Republic of Georgia. According to Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili, USAID spent $41.7 million to support its preferred candidates in the country’s recent parliamentary elections. Adjusted for the size of Georgia’s population, such an expenditure in the United States would amount to $3.78 billion.
The U.S. track record in Georgia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union lends credibility to the Speaker’s accusation that Washington is meddling in his country’s internal political affairs. President George W. Bush fawned with praise for Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of Georgia’s “rose revolution” in 2003. Under Saakashvili, Georgia had become a “beacon of liberty,” Bush crowed. Generous flows of aid from Washington ensued. However, massive corruption soon characterized Saakashvili’s rule, as did his growing repression of political opponents. Ultimately, Saakashvili’s adversaries ousted Washington’s beloved “democratic” client from power.
The contrast between the laudatory U.S. portrayal of Saakashvili as a paragon of democratic reform and the reality of his conduct was stark. However, Washington’s role in Ukraine over the years has been even more pervasive and dishonest. Although Ukraine’s president, Victor Yanukovych, came to office in 2010 elections that even a team of European Union (EU) observers conceded was reasonably free and fair, officials in Barack Obama’s administration, especially Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, worked to undermine his presidency. Yanukovych’s preference for closer economic ties with Russia instead of the EU and the United States apparently was intolerable to Western policymakers.
In 2014, the United States and key NATO partners helped Ukrainian demonstrators (primarily in Kyiv’s Maidan Square) force Yanukovych to flee. An intercepted telephone call between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine confirmed the massive extent of Washington’s interference in Ukraine’s affairs. Nuland herself later admitted that the United States had poured more than $5 billion to Ukrainian groups in the years before the Maidan uprising. Supposedly, the purpose was to “promote democracy,” but as usual, the funds went almost entirely to groups Washington considered supportive of U.S. policies. It would be hard to identify a more flagrant case of outside interference in the affairs of another country.
Even if U.S. leaders sincerely intended their largesse to bring a stronger, healthier democracy to Ukraine – which is extremely doubtful – Washington did not achieve that goal. Corruption and blatant repression have become increasingly bad under the post-Maidan governments. Even though U.S. leaders invariably portray Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a democratic champion, his record proves the opposite. Under his rule, Ukraine has outlawed opposition parties, muzzled the press, harassed uncooperative churches, and amassed a record of arbitrary imprisonment and torture. Much of that abuse was evident before the outbreak of war between Ukraine and Russia. Confirming that any attempt to portray Zelensky’s rule as democratic is a hypocritical farce, Ukraine has now postponed elections indefinitely.
The rot of hypocrisy and covert authoritarianism has infected even governments in NATO and the EU. A grotesque example occurred earlier this month in Romania when an election commission dominated by the two governing parties, the Social Democratic Party (PSD and the National Liberal Party (PNL), annulled the first round of the presidential election held on November 24. Instead of the candidates of those two parties advancing to the second round runoff as expected, neither one did so. Instead, Caliin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party led the field. Elena Lasconi, a reformer representing another “minor” party took the other runoff spot.
That outcome apparently was intolerable to Romania’s political establishment and its supporters in the EU and the United States. They viewed Georgescu as especially unacceptable, since he openly criticized NATO and opposed continuing to aid Ukraine. The country’s election commission nullified the voting results and rescheduled the first round balloting for May 4, 2025. Commissioners charged that, wait for it… Russia had illegally tampered with the election. Moscow’s horrid offense was its alleged support of a TikTok campaign that seemed to benefit Georgescu. Tangible evidence regarding Russian involvement was noticeably absent. Despite the lack of evidence, U.S. and EU officials denounced Russia and praised the Romanian government for trashing the election.
Eugene Doyle, a reporter for New Zealand’s Solidarity.com, noted the menacing significance of this episode. “To save democracy, the US and the European elites appear to have found it necessary to destroy democracy. For the first time ever an election was overturned in an EU/NATO country. Ever.” Doyle also cites evidence that Russia was not even the likely culprit. The TikTok effort apparently originated with a botched PNL scheme to siphon off votes to Georgescu from other mainstream competitors.
Moreover, as Doyle points out, “Even if the Russians did it, in what crazy world would you wipe an election for a TikTok campaign, particularly one that was at best a few hundred thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising/messaging/ chatting – in contrast to the millions of dollars the U.S. State Department and various branches of the U.S. government spent on the same campaign?
The answer is that it would happen in a world where political elites in the United States and its principal allies have never really been committed to democracy. Not as a domestic governing principle and definitely not as a foreign policy objective. Instead, the alleged commitment is a propaganda tool that is discarded whenever it becomes inconvenient. We live in such a world, and have done so for many years.
Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.
