Both the US and Russia Interfere In Foreign Elections
Russia Is Not Alone In Foreign Electoral Interference
Most Americans today seem completely unaware that both the US and Soviet/Russian governments since World War II have routinely interfered in foreign elections. Far from being an electoral anomaly, Russian interference in the 2016 US elections was another manifestation of this larger overall trend. Research in 2016 by Dov H. Levin of the University of Hong Kong studied 938 elections and found that between 1946 and 2000, the Soviet Union/Russia intervened in 36 foreign elections and the US intervened in 81 foreign elections, including some Russian elections. For example, in 1996 Russian President Boris Yeltsin was polling at six percent in Russian electoral polls before support from political strategists of then-US president Bill Clinton played a major role in securing his re-election.
And it’s supremely ironic that the US Central Intelligence Agency, which helped to overthrow governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973), among many other nations, and which has interfered in numerous foreign elections since its creation in 1947, was one of the agencies tasked by the Barack Obama administration with investigating whether and to what extent Russia interfered in the 2016 US election.
After the Helsinki Summit with the US and Russia in July, 2018, many US foreign policy interventionists called Trump a traitor for believing Vladimir Putin’s denial of Russian electoral interference in 2016 over the US intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia interfered. Perhaps these interventionists have forgotten about the Church Committee Report, which found in 1976 that the CIA had surreptitiously intercepted all private telegraphic data entering and exiting the US since August, 1945. A US government agency’s widespread spying on all Americans for 30 years betrays the US Constitution far more than any statement by a US president.
More recently, the US government intervened in the Serbian election in 2000, the Georgian election in 2003, the Ukrainian election in 2004, and the Russian election in 2012.
In the process of interfering in the 2016 US elections, Russia spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, created 470 Facebook pages, 2700 Facebook accounts and 80,000 Facebook posts which reached 126 million Americans. Russia also created some fake Twitter and Instagram accounts. Note that $100,000 is less than one-hundredth of one percent of the $2.4 billion spent on the 2016 US presidential campaign.
Because the Russian aim was to create political division in the US, some of the Russian Facebook pages were designed to appeal to conservative audiences, other pages to liberal audiences. Also note that none of the Russian online posts specifically advocated voting for Trump nor was any Russian money given directly to the Trump campaign.
Because US foreign policy is the most interventionist in the world, the US president can be considered the world’s president. It may not matter much to US citizens who the leader of Russia or China is. But it matters considerably more to the denizens of Russia and China and the rest of the world who occupies the White House. The US president can almost unilaterally start trade wars, impose sanctions, and prop up or help depose foreign governments through World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans and more direct US foreign aid. And because Congress and the US courts today usually defer to the executive branch in the area of foreign policy, the US president can almost single-handedly start pre-emptive wars and initiate regime change in any corner of the world.
In short, the US’ colossally interventionist foreign policy, implemented almost exclusively by the US executive branch, provides some justification for why foreign governments would want to interfere in US elections. Some nations’ political and economic future is heavily dependent on who wins the US presidency. Consequently, foreign electoral interference should be viewed as potential blowback to a nation acting as the world’s policeman.