by HELENE RICHARD
The US intervened on the side of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election of 1996, offering advice and influence to help him secure the finance he needed.
It is claimed that Russia now interferes in the political and social affairs of most western countries. President Emmanuel Macron believes the yellow vests movement is partly an attempt by a ‘foreign power’ to destabilise France, and everyone knows he means Russia. Russia, it is claimed, is behind the emergence of a major separatist movement in Catalonia, the UK vote to leave the EU in 2016 and Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 US presidential election. In the US, the idea that a foreign power might be trying to influence political events in this way rouses emotional reactions in the media and in government, and has led to an inquiry into the possible connections between Trump, his election campaign and Russia.
But, despite the outrage there, the US has itself not always been respectful of the sovereignty of other states. Former US State Department official Thomas Melia admits that ‘the CIA manipulated elections in 1940s Italy and 1950s Germany — and beyond electoral shenanigans, it also secretly helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s’. He adds that these things happened during the cold war, and that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian and US efforts to undermine foreign elections have not been ‘morally equivalent’: the US is pursuing ‘programmes to strengthen democratic processes in another country (without regard to specific electoral outcomes)’; Russia ‘manipulate[s] another country’s election in order to sow chaos, undermine public confidence in the political system, and diminish a country’s social stability.’ Steven Hall, former chief of Russian operations at the CIA, says comparing them ‘is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns’. The policies intended to overthrow Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro illustrate this view: the official line is that the US is promoting democracy, while Russia is supporting an illiberal dictator (see [Venezuela’s missing (…)
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