We exported our own corruption

[struggle4progress]

By PAUL MUSGRAVE | Special to The Washington Post
September 27, 2019 at 11:00 am

... It’s worth remembering how optimistically Americans used to see their country’s role in the world — and how they saw U.S. leadership as an inevitable force for good. In 1995, on a visit to Kiev, President Bill Clinton welcomed Ukraine to “the ranks of the world’s great democracies.” As evidence of the country’s new status, he directed its people to “the sight of your flag flying next to the American flag at the White House” when then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma had come to Washington, D.C., shortly before. The mark of a great democracy was aspiring to match the American standard ...

... In the 1990s, Clinton, Albright and a swath of American intellectuals assumed that U.S. experts would spread democratic practices around the world, thereby helping to consolidate the liberalizing wave. By the mid-2000s, though, folks like Paul Manafort — a former Republican consultant — had instead begun exporting political skill on behalf of clients like Ukrainian oligarchs ...

... Manafort, of course, later took on another client: the long-shot presidential candidate Donald Trump. In all of the hoopla about Russia’s interference in U.S. elections via social media, the fact that Trump’s campaign manager might have acted as a bagman for a Russian-backed political party in Ukraine went mostly ignored.

... Little wonder that Zelensky made sure to tell Trump that he had stayed in Trump Tower when he was last in New York City.

... the ease with which Trump winkingly suggested that he wanted assistance in digging up dirt on a rival clearly demonstrates that the president was willing to skim a little off the top. Moreover, he was willing to do so while working out a deal meant to advance two countries’ national interests. That isn’t the act of a government that stands taller and sees further. It isn’t even the action of a grim realist calculating what would put America first. It’s the modus operandi of a Mafioso ...

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/27/guest-commentary-u-s-tried-to-fix-ukraines-government-we-exported-our-corruption-instead/