The Corruption of American Foreign Policy
By 
Even before Donald Trump assumed office in January, it was obvious that kleptocratic motives would play a role in his foreign policy. We had already seen significant corruption during Trump’s first term, including in his approach to international affairs. Trump had, after all, been impeached for his efforts to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into undermining one of Trump’s major political rivals, Joe Biden. U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East was particularly marred by self-dealing, much of which involved Trump’s son-in-law, Jacob Kushner.
What we did not know in January was either the degree that kleptocracy would define U.S. foreign policy or the full range of players involved. American foreign policy has always driven by different, sometimes competing, forces — including the electoral ambitions of political officials, the interests of specific economic sectors and even individual businesses, and the beliefs of different ideological factions.
During his first term, Trump staffed his administration with foreign-policy and national-security veterans to staff his administration. Their presence not only limited the scope of corruption, but also checked the far-right impulses of some of Trump’s core supporters. Despite the damage done by Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, to his Department, U.S. foreign relations remained anchored by an independent, professional civil and foreign service.1 Chief Justice John Roberts, along with five other hyper-partisan members of the Supreme Court, had yet to rule that the Constitution included a secret set of provisions that granted Republican presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution.
The “guardrails” are now almost entirely gone, and a miasma of corruption surrounds Trump foreign policy. In our podcast on Trump’s we-should-do-Munich-but-dumber-because-Obama-got-a-Peace-Prize-and-I-wants-one-too plan, I stressed that the whole thing was an effort by Trump’s cronies to make money. The Financial Times had already published a damning report on some of the business interests involved in Stephen Witkoff’s amateur-hour negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, over the fate of Ukraine.
(Witkoff, you may recall, was at the center of the corrupt series of bargains stuck earlier this year between the Trump administration and various autocrats in the Gulf States. As a bombshell report in the New York Times detailed, Witkoff brokered a deal in which the United States lifted export controls that had prevented G42, a technology firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, from accessing high-technology semiconductors. An investment firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon “deposit[ed] $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.”)
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an extensive account of the machinations that led to the Ukraine “plan.” Some of its reporting derived from intelligence gathered by American allies, who are unsurprisingly alarmed by how the collapse of the United States as a Constitutional Republic threatens their security.
This is really one of those reports that you need to take the time to read in full. If you don’t have a subscription of the Wall Street Journal or get it, as we do, via Apple News, then Daniel Drezner has a partial summary.2 But here’s one of the key framing passages, which definitely falls into the “exactly what we thought and yet sill horrifying” category of Trump stories.
At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”
Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.
The sordid tale, in no small measure, involves Kremlin-backed oligarchs cultivating ties with the Americans who envy them.
One sign that [Putin] may be serious [about ending the war, at least in the short-term] is that some of his most-trusted friends, sanctioned billionaires from his St. Petersburg hometown—Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady—have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals, according to people familiar with the meetings and European security officials. That includes reviving the giant Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged by Ukrainian tactical divers, and under European Union sanctions.
Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.
Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.
Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.
Dan Drezner does a great job of picking apart the shocking level of geopolitical and economic naïvety on display here by would-be American dealmakers. But here I want to emphasize his discussion of the Trump administration’s penchant for bypassing the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus. Dan writes that:
The motivation for the Russians in bypassing the U.S. national security bureaucracy is obvious. Witkoff no doubt thought he was cutting through red tape to get to a deal. The problem, as previously noted in by the hard-working staff, is that Witkoff is spectacularly out of his depth — which means that he’s ginning up ideas with little understanding of the problem that he is trying to solve.
Dan quotes the closing paragraph of the Wall Street Journal story:
Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.
He then notes that:
Witkoff is not just uninspiring to Ukrainian officials — his actions highlight why his approach will not be likely to work. Without additional consultation Witkoff’s initiatives will continue to be leaked and he will face a steady barrage of external criticism. This will sabotage whatever slim chance he has of succeeding.
A few weeks back, I had dinner with a Biden-administration official who discussed the White House’s extensive — and often successful — efforts to block Beijing from expanding China’s growing network of overseas military bases. These efforts required extensive coordination across the U.S. government, multiple consultations with American intelligence officials, and well-planned execution.
That is, precisely the opposite of how the Trump administration approaches international affairs.
Trump is overseeing the de-institutionalization of U.S. foreign policy. His motives aren’t difficult to understand. He’s corrupt, ignorant, and narcissistic. His cronies worship at the altar of money and status. They correctly view the institutions of U.S. foreign policy, and the professionals who staff them, as an obstacle. Meanwhile, fascists like Stephen Miller try to tear down state autonomy because they despise the fact that the United States is a pluralist republic and hate the rule of law. Reactionaries seize the moment to destroy “the administrative state.” The plurality of forces in the White House are aligned in their desire to subvert the public interest.3
Many of us will live with the consequences for decades. But others — including many hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Africa and Asia; small-time drug-runners and fishermen in the Pacific and the Caribbean; unvaccinated children; Americans losing their health care — will not get to live at all.
- Tillerson had terrible instincts as an administrator, but he was much better on policy issues, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. ↩︎
- I know that we all hate the WSJ‘s editorial line; the new, now-with-five-hundred-percent-more-Trump-toadying Washington Post opinion pages; and the New York Times‘ addiction to both-sides headlines. But all three outlets still provide essential coverage of U.S. and international news. We’ve kept our subscription to the Times, despite it all, and if the Washington Post ever course corrects, we’ll start paying for it as well. ↩︎
- For those of you whose minds immediately leap to Gaza, the Iraq War, Indonesia, Cambodia, East Pakistan, Vietnam, Operation Condor, and myriad other examples of death and destruction wrought by “professional” foreign-policy hands… Yes, obviously. Many of these examples, however, illustrate the consequences of policymakers discarding legal constraints, dismissing ethical concerns, or overruling the advice of professionals. At least realpolitik in the defense of the Republic takes the question of what is in the public good seriously. This administration does not. ↩︎
