Biden administration shifting towards anti-corruption initiatives as hectoring on rights and democracy has lost resonance
https://asiatimes.com-by David Hutt
A woman holds behind her back a stack of Indonesian rupiah banknotes. Photo: Twitter
On December 9, Washington published its first-ever Strategy on Countering Corruption, a document that at first glance appears to be a mere bureaucratic repackaging of existing ideas.
“Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” US President Joe Biden wrote in a National Security Study Memorandum in June, which started the administrative review culminating in December’s report.
“But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance,” Biden added, “we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.”
For sure, little of this is revolutionary thinking. Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, says it’s hard to see how anyone could separate corruption and rights abuses.
“It’s often the same government elites and their cronies in authoritarian states who are involved in both corruption as well as human rights violations,” he said, “and that often whistleblowers and reformers are precisely those being targeted with abuses.”
However, the Strategy on Countering Corruption is implicitly attempting something else. Admitting Washington has “long recognized” countering corruption as an important foreign policy goal. It states that “a growing understanding of corruption’s strategic impact and the increasing interconnectedness of the global economy underscores the need for a new approach.”
Biden has made fighting global corruption a priority, recognizing it as a legitimate national security threat, something that experts would have rejected just a few years ago, said Charles Dunst, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
This approach appears to be catching on.
After Transparency International’s Annual Membership Meeting in November, for instance, the post-conference statement declared that because “the abuse of human rights undermines the sustainability of anti-corruption reforms, members declare that the fight against corruption is incompatible with the abuse and neglect of fundamental human rights.”
For the most part, the new US strategy is about domestic policy. Yet it expands coordination between the United States and its partner countries, which has already been stepped up since the Anti-Money Laundering Act came into effect in 2020.
That legislation allowed the US Treasury to send attachés and intelligence unit liaisons to embassies abroad to work directly with foreign governments on anti-graft investigations.
The new strategy gives US federal courts greater subpoena power over international banks, which should make it easier to investigate money laundering in the global financial system.
And it expands upon the US Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative which has been piloted since 2010. That gave the department powers to seize money, held in the US, that is proved to be “stolen” corruptly by foreign governments.
A new Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Rewards program provides financial incentives to whistleblowers who alert the Justice Department to “stolen assets” from abroad.
The Strategy on Countering Corruption “will guide the important anti-corruption engagement that the US Department of State will continue to implement globally, including in Southeast Asia,” a State Department official told Asia Times.
This includes working bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally to ensure countries are living up to their anti-corruption obligations and commitments, the State Department official said, adding that this will be built upon existing rules, such as UN Convention against Corruption and in partnership with present organizations like the APEC Anticorruption and Transparency Working Group.
The official explained that the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) is now offering “more assistance to Southeast Asian financial intelligence units, prosecutors and law enforcement to curb illicit finance and strengthen anti-money laundering regimes.”
Additionally, INL is expanding efforts to hold corrupt actors accountable through assistance to Southeast Asian anti-corruption commissions and utilizing anti-corruption sanction tools.
“The fight against corruption is an important element of protecting human rights and bolstering democracy, including in Southeast Asia,” they added.
“Defending against authoritarianism, promoting respect for human rights and addressing and fighting corruption were key tenants of the Summit for Democracy and priorities for this administration.”
However, some doubt how much this apparently new approach will actually alter US policy in Southeast Asia.
“I think there will be stepped up anti-corruption efforts regarding Myanmar, and [it will] possibly have impacts on Laos and Cambodia, but that it is unlikely to touch some aspects of the facilitation of corruption, like the private banking sector in Singapore,” said Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“There may be some efforts at getting at prominent business people in other countries besides Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, but I still think this would be limited by the US need to court Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore.”
Other analysts, however, reckon the semantic shift — of focusing on anti-corruption efforts as a way of improving democracy and human rights, and working with regional governments to fight graft — could pay dividends.
“If the Biden administration properly advertises its anti-corruption programs, national governments throughout Southeast Asia, particularly those who prefer Washington to Beijing, may be more interested in joining these activities — at least to increase their legitimacy at home,” Dunst said.
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to take human rights seriously in his foreign policy.
No doubt this was heartfelt. But it was also meant to spread some distance between himself and his rival Donald Trump, whose presidency since 2017 had seen Washington largely overlook human rights issues, preferring to focus instead on security alliances and trade imbalances.
Human rights and democracy were already waning in places like Southeast Asia before Trump took office. Thailand’s military had their coup in 2014; Duterte began his brutal war on drugs months before the US presidential election and; the Rohingya genocide was in full swing by the time he entered office.
But conditions worsened during Trump’s years in the White House. Cambodia’s ruling party obliterated whatever limited democracy the country had in 2017. The Vietnamese Communist Party has cracked down harder than ever on dissent. Duterte’s war on drugs escalated. Indonesian President Joko Widido increasingly forgot his liberal promises.
Just before his inauguration, Biden vowed to fix the problem but he has since bungled. His Summit for Democracy in early December was criticized for not inviting key allies, such as the Philippines, and for inviting non-key allies with questionable democratic credentials, like the Democratic Republic of Congo.
His “retreat” from Afghanistan last year was seen as self-serving and inhumane, with little care shown about the rights of the Afghans left behind. Washington has been mostly absent from the ongoing Myanmar crisis, apart from the imposition of limited sanctions on the coup regime.
Biden has also struggled to shift US foreign policy away from Trump’s transactionalism. His international agenda — a “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” — smacks of a liberal repackaging of Trump’s “America First” gambit. One commentator has called it “Trumpism with a human face.”
At the same time, fewer governments than ever are content with receiving moral lectures from Washington, itself now in the global spotlight for democratic deterioration.
A Pew Research Center survey published in November revealed that only 14% of Germans, 18% of French and 11% of Singaporeans think the US is currently a good model for democracy.
Americans also appear to be losing their taste for proselytizing. According to another Pew Center survey, published last March, only 20% of American adults regard the promotion of democracy as a top foreign policy objective, putting it at the bottom of a list of twenty choices.
Biden’s own team has been more willing to admit America’s own mistakes. “Although the Biden administration champions human rights, freedom, and democracy as integral to its foreign policy, its language has cooled when speaking with Southeast Asian partners,” Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote recently.
When US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke in Singapore in July, he stated: “our democratic values aren’t always easy to reach. And the United States doesn’t always get it right.”
With US foreign policy ever-more geared to how it brings benefits to American voters, a refocus towards fighting corruption — especially given the subtle nod that it is US taxpayers’ money in the form of aid and development assistance being pocketed by foreign officials — is more appealing to US audiences.
Abroad, anti-corruption sounds less preachy. The Strategy on Countering Corruption is as much about tackling graft at home as abroad, it says.
In this way, Biden can say his policy assists other governments — and they can assist America in its own anti-corruption efforts — rather than Washington maligning their treatment of their citizens.
This framing as assistance would be much more “more palatable” to certain Southeast Asian governments than a US focus on democracy or human rights, said Dunst, the analyst.
Indeed, many of the region’s least democratic governments are themselves engaged in graft-busting, often for political rather than altruistic purposes.
For instance, Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party launched a scorched-earth anti-corruption campaign in 2016. Laos’ communist party has also vowed to root out graft, as has Malaysia’s government, which is still reeling financially from the 1MDB scandal that cost the state more than US$7 billion.
Many regional and domestic surveys find graft to be one of the main sources of public frustration, as well as finding that a large proportion of Southeast Asians think their governments are doing a bad job at tackling the problem. Only Singapore and Malaysia are ranked above average in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index.
To be sure, the Biden administration is not about to stop talking about democracy or human rights. Yet by assisting global anti-corruption efforts, Washington can hope to nudge its partners in Southeast Asia and beyond towards certain geopolitical positions.
That said, geopolitics gets short shrift in December’s Strategy on Countering Corruption report. The “Indo-Pacific” isn’t mentioned at all. China is referenced just once, but not in relation to its superpower clash with the US. However, geopolitics is implicit in the policy.
“The strategy’s 800-pound gorilla is China — not explicitly mentioned, but omnipresent,” stated a recent article on a blog post about the Strategy on Countering Corruption.
“The document’s focus on ‘strategic corruption’…clearly indicates that the US is targeting China’s coercive overseas development practices, such as those currently plaguing its Belt & Road Initiative,” it added.
Instead of lecturing Southeast Asian governments on their often poor human rights records — which is typically unwelcomed, and only pushes them closer to China and its “no strings attached” cooperation, analysts say — Washington now appears ready to make itself more humble and cooperative towards the same end goal.
Follow David Hutt on Twitter at @davidhuttjourno