Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at
the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown
University, and author of the forthcoming book “The True Flag: Theodore
Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”
Outrage is shaking Washington as members
of Congress compete to demonize Russia for its alleged interference in
America’s recent presidential election. “Any foreign intervention in our elections is entirely unacceptable,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has asserted. Russian actions, according to other legislators, are “attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy” that “should alarm every American” because they “cut to the heart of our free society.”
This burst of righteous indignation would be easier to swallow if the
United States had not itself made a chronic habit of interfering in
foreign elections.
Over a period of more than a century,
American leaders have used a variety of tools to influence voters in
other countries. We have chosen candidates, advised them, financed their
parties, designed their campaigns, bribed media outlets to support
them, and intimidated or smeared their rivals.
One of our first operations to shape
the outcome of a foreign election came in Cuba. After the United States
helped Cuban rebels overthrow Spanish rule in 1898, we organized a
presidential election, recruited a pro-American candidate, and forbade
others to run against him. Two years later, after the United States
annexed Hawaii, we established an electoral system that denied suffrage
to most native Hawaiians, assuring that only pro-American candidates
would be elected to public office.
During the Cold War, influencing foreign
elections was a top priority for the CIA. One of its first major
operations was aimed at assuring that a party we favored won the 1948
election in Italy. This was a multipronged effort that included projects
like encouraging Italian-Americans to write letters to their relatives
warning that American aid to Italy would end if the wrong party won.
Encouraged by its success in Italy, the CIA quickly moved to other
countries.
In 1953, the United States found a
former Vietnamese official who had lived at Catholic seminaries in the
United States, and maneuvered him into the presidency of newly formed
South Vietnam. He was supposed to stay on the job for two years until
national elections could be held, but when it became clear that he would
lose, he canceled the election. “I think we should support him on
this,” the US secretary of state said. The CIA then stage-managed a
plebiscite on our man’s rule. Campaigning against him was forbidden. A
reported 98.2 percent of voters endorsed his rule. The American
ambassador called this plebiscite a “resounding success.”
In 1955 the CIA gave $1 million to a
pro-American party in Indonesia. Two years later the United States
maneuvered a friendly politician into the presidency of Lebanon by
financing his supporters’ campaigns for Parliament. “Throughout the
elections, I traveled regularly to the presidential palace with a
briefcase full of Lebanese pounds,” a CIA officer later wrote. “The
president insisted that he handle each transaction by himself.”
Our intervention in Lebanon’s election
provoked protests by those who believed that Lebanese voters alone
should shape their country’s future. The United States sent troops to
Lebanon to suppress that outburst of nationalism. Much the same happened
in the Dominican Republic, which we invaded in 1965 after voters chose a
president we deemed unacceptable. Our intervention in Chile’s 1964
election was more discreet, carried out by covertly financing favored
candidates and paying newspapers and radio stations to skew reporting in
ways that would favor them.
The next Chilean election, in 1970, drew
the United States into one of its furthest-reaching interventions. The
CIA and other government agencies used a variety of pressures to prevent
the Chilean Congress from confirming the victory of a Socialist
presidential candidate. This operation included shipping weapons to
conspirators who, several hours after receiving them, assassinated the
commander of the Chilean military, who had refused to lead a revolt
against democracy. His murder did not prevent the accession of the
candidate we detested, but the United States relentlessly punished Chile
for the next three years until the military staged a coup and ended
democratic rule. An American official asserted that intervention in
Chile was made necessary by “the stupidity of its own people,” which
they expressed by voting for a candidate we opposed.
Among many CIA operations to influence
elections in the Middle East, one in 1975 helped elect a prime minister
of Israel whose policies the United States favored. In Central America,
intervening in elections is an even older habit. The CIA recruited a
pro-American economist to run for president of Nicaragua in 1984, and
when it became clear that he would lose, pulled him out of the race amid
laments about the lack of electoral freedom in Nicaragua. In 2009, the
United States encouraged a military coup in which the elected president
of Honduras was deposed, and then endorsed a new election in which he
was not allowed to run.
Perhaps the most recent US intervention
in foreign politics came in Ukraine. In 2014, as protesters gathered
there in an effort to overthrow their elected government, a senior State
Department official appeared in the crowd to encourage their revolt.
She was caught telling an aide which Ukrainian politician was “the guy”
Americans had chosen to be Ukraine’s next leader, and asserting that the
United States would “midwife this thing.” A few weeks later our “guy”
became prime minister — setting off a crisis that ended with Russian
military intervention.
Condemning interference in foreign
elections is eminently reasonable. The disingenuous howls of
anti-Russian rage now echoing through Washington, however, ignore much
history.
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