Those
who have watched the Netflix series House of Cards may be surprised to read how close it
is sometimes to reality. Both candidates in this year’s election for president
of the United States – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have accepted
donations from Ukrainian oligarchs and Ukraine’s former president, Viktor
Yanukovych, who is in hiding in Russia. Yanukovych is wanted by Interpol and by
Ukraine for mass corporate raiding of Ukraine’s state budget and leaving the
country bankrupt, murdering EuroMaidan protestors and committing treason when
he supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The convention of the US Republican Party (GOP) last
week resembled not a centre-right political party, but one that has been
hijacked by the nationalist-populist Donald Trump, who is far from
conservative. A similar analogy would be that of Italian populist Silvio
Berlusconi becoming leader of the British Conservative Party. Both Trump and
Berlusconi are megalomaniac narcissists. The appointment of Paul Manafort as
Donald Trump’s election campaign chief added to the surrealism of Trump’s
populist takeover of the GOP. Manafort headed Ukrainian president and Party of
Region leader Yanukovych’s election team and political consultants for a decade
between 2005 and 2014. On top of that is the scandal of Russian intelligence
hacking the US Democratic National Committee and leaking emails on the day of the Democratic Party
convention that shed a bad light on the treatment of Bernie Sanders and
boosting Trump’s campaign by showing divisions in the Clinton camp.
Former President Yanukovych and the Party of Regions
had lobbied influential Republican Party policymakers and consultants in the
past. Vin Weber, who was awarded the Democracy Service Medal in recognition of
his service as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Chairman in 2001-2009
for his commitment to advancing the principles of democracy and human dignity,
is a clear example. Weber, who had been a Mitt Romney foreign-policy adviser in
the 2012 election, was a registered lobbyist for the European Centre for a
Modern Ukraine (ECFMU) funded by the Party of Regions that Yanukovych led for
most of its existence. This represented a clear contradiction: Weber, after
promoting democracy for the first decade of this century, became a lobbyist for
a government that was dismantling the democratic achievements of the Orange
Revolution.
Weber’s cynicism is not unique to the GOP. Former
Freedom House president, Adrian Karatnycky, who once told me he was a “Clinton
Democrat”, was widely believed to be a Yanukovych lobbyist, but reinvented himself as CEC’s Senior
Partner responsible for Ukraine, a company established and headed by Marek Matraszek,
a long-time Conservative.
On the Democratic Party side there are Ukrainian
skeletons in the closet as well. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk nurtured
good relations with former President Bill Clinton by providing a donation to
the Clinton Library and financially supporting the William J. Clinton
Foundation’s programme to combat HIV/AIDS. When Hillary Clinton was Secretary
of State between 2009 and 2013, the Clinton foundation
received 8.6 million US dollars
from the Pinchuk Foundation.
In addition to Weber, the ECFMU hired the Podesta
Group to lobby Yanukovych’s public image in Washington DC. Anthony (Tony)
Podesta, like Weber, is among to the top lobbyists in the US and is close to
the Democratic Party, while his brother, John Podesta, is a former chief of
staff to President Bill Clinton’s administration and an advisor to President
Barack Obama who is also Hillary Clinton’s
campaign manager.
Podesta Group staffers Tony Podesta plus Stephen
Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state,
are also US lobbyists for Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank. As reported in Observer, the Podesta Group lobbies to “lift some of the pain of sanctions placed on
Russia in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine, which has
caused real pain to the country’s hard-hit financial sector”. More importantly,
Sberbank is controlled by Russia’s Central Bank, making it “functionally an arm
of the Kremlin, although it’s ostensibly a private institution.” Sberbank is
allegedly “used to support clandestine Russian intelligence operations, while
the bank uses its offices abroad as cover for the Russian Foreign Intelligence
Service or SVR”. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has accused Sberbank of
channelling funds to separatists in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas.
Cynicism is a dominant feature of Francis Underwood,
the Democratic Party President fromHouse of Cards. This feature
extends to Manafort and other US political consultants more broadly. Similar to
Trump’s instrumental approach to the rule of law, Manafort during the entire
period of time working for Yanukovych never registered at the Department of
Justice’s FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act (https://www.fara.gov/), a requirement for US political consultants working for foreign
governments. What is more, Manafort is no stranger to highly
corrupt and authoritarian clients, including Zimbabwean and Egyptian authoritarian leaders Robert Mugabe
and Hosni Mubarak respectively, a business group tied to Ferdinand Marcos, the
dictator of the Philippines and Lynden Pindling, the former Bahamian prime
minister who was accused of ties to drug traffickers. Some reports believed
that Manafort’s long experience in
Ukraine, running four
election campaigns and coping with a popular uprising, would be invaluable to
Trump but import dirtier East European election tactics into the US.
Trump, Vladimir Putin and Yanukovych appear similar in
many aspects such as populism, plagiarism and ties to crime. Also similarly,
less educated and marginalised voters seeking a paternalistic leader have voted
for the Party of Regions, Putin’s United Russia party in Russia and Trump in
the US primaries.
Yanukovych and Putin are clearly authoritarian, while
Trump seems to lean this way as well. As the Economist notes, they “constructed and now inhabit post-fact worlds,
in which the truth is malleable and disposable”. The wealth of Trump and
Putin “plays to a popular cynicism, even despair, regarding politicians”.
Meanwhile, both belittle their political adversaries and critical journalists
with impunity. They “incoherently occupy a broad, populist political terrain:
they offer protectionism to some low-wage workers and the promise of rising
pensions, combined with an enthusiasm for money-making” and “in their extravagant
tastelessness and shared macho posturing’s at the same time leave little
political space for their opponents.”
In addition, plagiarism was commonplace for Yanukovych
and Putin and now seems so for the Trump campaign. Raisa Bohatyriova, secretary
of the National Security and Defence Council under Yanukovych, gave a
graduation speech at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy that was lifted almost word for word from a speech by Steve Jobs to Stanford University’s
class of 2005. Putin’s PhD thesis was heavily “borrowed” from a 1978
textbook titled Strategic Planning and Public Policy by
University of Pittsburgh Professors David I. Cleland and William R. King. The
first day of the Republican convention was overshadowed by Melania Trump’s
speech which seemed to plagiarise Michelle Obama “nearly verbatim” from her
2008 speech. After making countless denials the Trump campaign admitted the
plagiarism.
In addition, allegations of ties to crime have been
made against Yanukovych, Putin and Trump. A detailed investigation
concluded: “What Trump has to
say about the reasons for his long, close and wide-ranging dealings with
organised crime figures, with the role of mobsters in cheating Trump Tower
workers [and] his dealings with Felix Sater” should be explained to US voters.
Sater was a senior Trump advisor and son of a reputed Russian mobster.
Manafort was also accused by former opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko of having
facilitated the parking of “millions of dollars in offshore real estate
investments, according to documents released as part of a federal racketeering
suit”. The documents submitted to the court “offer a glimpse of Manafort’s
financial ties to [Ukrainian gas tycoon Dmytro] Firtash who is wanted by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation over bribery allegations” and “show how
Manafort set up investment vehicles at Firtash’s behest in order to funnel his
considerable fortune into real estate ventures in the United States and
elsewhere”. Tymoshenko’s lawsuit alleged that “by inviting Firtash to utilise
the various US based companies to facilitate Firtash’s money laundering and
political corruption activities, Manafort gave Firtash the opportunity to expand
the scope of his money laundering activities into the United States.”
Another similarity includes good relations with
Russia. Here we clearly see how far Manafort has been able to move the
traditional Republican Party foreign policy approach with Trump as its
candidate. This is reinforced by an extensive analysis of ties between Trump and Russia which concluded that
if Putin could “design a candidate to undermine American interests and advance
his own, he would resemble Trump”.
Ohio Governor and Republican candidate John Kasich has
said that the Republican Party should reject all of the ideas and values that
underpin Trump’s foreign policy. Trump’s dismissal of NATO is totally at odds
with traditional Republican Party values and places him on the
isolationist-nationalist right of US politics. This year’s US elections were described by the Atlantic magazine as “Hillary Clinton running against Vladimir
Putin” while Kasich’s most vehement
attack was on Trump’s views
of Russia, Ukraine and Putin.
In the lead up to the Republican Convention, the Trump
campaign had “gutted” the Republican platform by watering down assistance to
Ukraine and removing support for sending arms to Ukraine, a move that most
Republicans had previously supported. As one of his foreign policy advisers,
Trump has hired Carter Page, “a globe-trotting American investment banker who
has built a career on deals with Russia and its state-run gas company
[Gazprom].” Page is a critic of US-led
sanctions against Russia and
a “reliable defender of Russian intentions” portraying US policymakers as
“stuck in an outdated Cold War mind-set”.
As we watch the US presidential election unfold this
year, it is striking how close to real life the Netflix portrayal of Washington
DC is in House of Cards. Putin and
Yanukovych must be toasting vodka in Moscow as Trump defied the pundits and
became the GOP’s 2016 candidate.
Taras Kuzio is a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and author of the 2015 book Ukraine. Democratization,
Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism.
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