US President Joe Biden recently issued a memorandum stating that the fight against corruption is a core national security interest of the United States. This raises new issues for the global community, namely how a number of countries – particularly China and Russia - are gradually turning corruption into a strategic weapon on the global stage.
The creation of such chaos in international relations, which is inevitably accompanied by strategic corruption, will lead to an increasingly possible revision of the world order in favour of Russia and China.
Thus, the EU countries and Brussels agree to compromise with Russia and are logically prevented from exporting the idea of “democratization”, which members of Russia’s ruling elite consider a serious threat.
For Russia, continentalism means, above all, the propensity to form alliances with continental Europe as opposed to Atlanticism, which is embodied by the United States and Great Britain.
Thus, Russia’s policy of strategic corruption uses subversive and disinformation activities, which remain invisible to the naked eye, to further its political and economic objectives in Ukraine.
What Europe can learn from Ukraine’s gas woes with RussiaGranting preferences and privileges to this company led to its interdependence with Russia’s economic and political interests, which finally resulted in the election of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Next, Serhiy Lyovochkin, head of the Opposition Bloc and member of the RosUkrEnergo clan, was appointed Head of Yanukovych’s Administration.
Thus, it is obvious that in Ukraine Moscow’s strategic corruption policy has always focused on the achievement of political rather than economic goals.
Excerpt from The Rise of Strategic Corruption
Graft is nothing new; it may be the second-oldest profession. Powerful people and those with access to them have always used kickbacks, pay-to-play schemes, and other corrupt practices to feather their nests and gain unfair advantages. And such corruption has always posed a threat to the rule of law and stood in the way of protecting basic civil and economic rights.
What is new, however, is the transformation of corruption into an instrument of national strategy. In recent years, a number of countries—China and Russia, in particular—have found ways to take the kind of corruption that was previously a mere feature of their own political systems and transform it into a weapon on the global stage. Countries have done this before, but never on the scale seen today.
The result has been a subtle but significant shift in international politics. Rivalries between states have generally been fought over ideologies, spheres of influence, and national interests; side payments of one kind or another were just one tactic among many. Those side payments, however, have become core instruments of national strategy, leveraged to gain specific policy outcomes and to condition the wider political environment in targeted countries. This weaponized corruption relies on a specific form of asymmetry. Although any government can hire covert agents or bribe officials elsewhere, the relative openness and freedom of democratic countries make them particularly vulnerable to this kind of malign influence—and their nondemocratic enemies have figured out how to exploit that weakness.
