Hypocrisy on Election Interference

In his press conference last month, President Barack Obama sternly voiced concern about “potential foreign influence in our election process.”


The goal may be a valid one, but it cloaks hypocrisy of staggering proportions. The United States has been assiduously intervening in foreign elections for decades—perhaps even for centuries.


The central issue in the 2016 election was with some hacked emails, published by Wikileaks, indicating that some top members of the Democratic National Committee were rooting for Hillary Clinton to win their party’s nomination for president. This seems to have been the extent of the “interference,” and there has been a concerted effort to suggest that Russian hackers were the source of the information, a contention Wikileaks has strongly and repeatedly denied.


The revelations can scarcely have come as much of a surprise to anybody following the campaign, and it seems highly unlikely that they swung many votes—my guess, erring on the high side, would be perhaps six or seven.


The American record in election interference (always, of course, with the best of intentions) is much more extensive. 


Exhibit number one is surely the Italian election of 1948 in which the CIA furnished a million dollars to congenial parties and may have published forged letters designed to discredit leaders of the Communist Party. Meanwhile, there was a concerted effort to get Italian‐​Americans to write home urging relatives and friends to vote the right way.


In more recent times, I remember talking with a member of the political opposition in Serbia in 2001 who expressed his appreciation for funds that had been supplied the year before by agencies of the U.S. government—“we never would have been able to launch such an extensive campaign without it.”


As a public service, Michael Brenner of the University of Pittsburgh, has, with a little help from his friends, provided a list of countries where the United States has intervened in elections (he points out that the U.S. has also participated in a number of coups, but these are not included).


Going back a few decades, his list includes Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, and Portugal. More recently there have been Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia (especially Yeltsin’s 1995–96 campaign), Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Congo and several other countries in Africa, and, in Latin America, every country multiple times including within the last fifteen years Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Columbia, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.


Brenner’s list is an ongoing project. It does not include Canada, and just possibly there are some Canadians who might find that omission to be unjustified.