Will kleptocracy become a unifying enemy for the West?
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IS ANTI-CORRUPTION THE NEW ANTI-COMMUNISM?
It’s been an interesting week for the international response to Belarus, with leading Western countries – the United States, the European Union, Canada and the UK – all announcing a new round of sanctions simultaneously. The action was inspired by the hijacking of a Ryanair flight flying over Belarus, and the arrest of Raman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega, as well as by the generally vile behavior of the government in Minsk.
The US Treasury Department and its partners have essentially now made any form of international economic life impossible for a whole range of Belarusian insiders, in what looks like a first example of the cooperation against human rights abusers promised at the G7. It’s easy to overlook how remarkable this kind of Western solidarity is — less than six months ago President Biden’s predecessor was picking fights with his friends for no apparent reason.
I’m beginning to wonder if an idea that’s been kicking around for a while might be thrusting itself into the center of the Atlantic Alliance: “anti-corruption is the new anti-communism”. Now, I’ll freely admit that – on the face of it – equating corruption and communism looks mad: one is a system of organized theft; the other is a utopian scheme for creating a new society. But, if you look past that, authoritarian kleptocracy could indeed become the unifying enemy that the West has lacked since the end of the Cold War (“terrorism” having proved inadequate for the task).
- “The Kremlin’s black cash is the new red menace, and it has to be looked at that way. Corruption as a tool of statecraft is something that is spreading from Moscow and is spreading as a tool of influence,” said Radio Free Europe’s Brian Whitmore in testimony to the Helsinki Commission four years ago. “Corruption is a national security issue of the highest order and needs to be treated as such.”
George W. Bush’s attempt to weld Iran, Iraq and North Korea into an “axis of evil” was risible 20 years ago, but it’s much less ridiculous to suggest that Russia and China are leading an axis of kleptocracy that threatens the basis of our democracies. In the last couple of years, the idea has spread in earnest, including in this article. If you ignore the hyperbole, it makes some important points.