When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August 2017, it triggered one of the most destructive natural disasters in American history. The storm stalled over Houston for several days, dumping an unprecedented amount of rain, more than a meter in some areas, leading to catastrophic flooding that put about a third of the city underwater. More than 100 people died. Around 30,000 were displaced from their homes. Some had to be rescued by boats and helicopters. Many needed temporary shelter. The storm overwhelmed local infrastructure and emergency-response systems, destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of homes, and ended up causing about $125 billion in damage.
One of the swiftest and most extensive humanitarian-relief efforts came from the United Arab Emirates. Coordinating through their embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the Emirates Red Crescent, the U.A.E. donated $10 million to Houston and surrounding areas, working with local organizations like the Greater Houston Community Foundation to help rebuild homes, schools, and community centers, and helping restore damaged medical facilities. “As Houston builds forward from the hurricane,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said, “we cherish our helpful partners such as the U.A.E.” Some communities in and around Houston are still dealing with the impact of the hurricane; many of them still remember the vital support.
Earlier the same year, three U.S. intelligence agencies—the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency—released a declassified report detailing a coordinated Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. It included hacking into Democratic Party email systems and releasing stolen information through WikiLeaks, using social-media platforms to spread disinformation and divisive content, and targeting election systems in multiple states.
The Russian Internet Research Agency created fake social-media accounts and paid for political advertisements to spread propaganda and inflammatory content. An investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI, led to multiple indictments of Russian intelligence officers, along with the former head of Donald Trump’s campaign, and detailed how Russian military intelligence carried out cyber operations targeting election infrastructure and political organizations.
While the scale and sophistication of this campaign were remarkable, its impact on the election outcome was never definitively measured, if that were even possible. Meanwhile, a number of prominent allegations about Russian interference in 2016 didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The most notable was the “Steele dossier,” a collection of reports by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, published by BuzzFeed News, that included salacious claims about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. Many key elements of the dossier remain unverified, and some have been proven false. McClatchy and other news organizations debunked the allegation that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague. The Mueller investigation, the FBI, and the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General all investigated claims about ongoing communications between Trump Organization servers and Russia’s Alfa Bank, and found them to lack merit. Initial media reports suggesting Russian agents hacked into Vermont’s power grid turned out to be wrong. The story that the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russia—which media coverage often referred to as “collusion”— was never substantiated, including by Mueller, whose team found insufficient evidence to establish any criminal conspiracy at all between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
It’s not always clear where foreign influence ends and interference begins—or even where benign foreign activity ends and influence begins: Houston may be a crucial energy-industry hub, important to the U.A.E.’s oil and gas interests; and the city’s aerospace industry, centered around NASA’s Johnson Space Center, may be increasingly important to the U.A.E.’s ambitions with its space programs; but neither makes the millions it put into disaster relief in Houston malign.
It’s also not always clear where the appearance of foreign interference is a specter—or even whether the reality of foreign interference has mattered much at all: Russia may have targeted U.S. elections in 2016 and 2020, as it would seem to have targeted Romanian, Moldovan, and Georgian elections in 2024; but it can be hard to say how far some of these disruption operations have gone or how much they’ve actually affected democratic outcomes. It can even be hard to distinguish dispassionate assessments of evidence of electoral interference from vexed narratives fueled by partisan grievances. Still, as Ben Freeman and Miranda Patrucić illustrate, any line of autocratic influence is a potential form of interference—and any form of autocratic interference is a potential vector of corruption. So what’s corruption here and what’s not?
Justin Callais is the editor at large for The Signal and the chief economist at the Archbridge Institute. While in some cases, the question is a matter of factual uncertainty, Callais says that in all cases, it’s a matter of interpretive ambiguity: When we understand something as corrupt, we don’t understand it simply as the violation of an enforceable rule; we understand it fundamentally as the degradation of a common good—and common goods can be debatable; they can be elusive; they can compete with one another; they can even change over time. Still, we can’t understand democratic life without understanding the common goods it’s grounded in—and, Callais says, we can’t understand autocratic systems without understanding how they depend essentially on degrading those common goods ...
From Altered States, a print extra created in partnership between The Signal x the Human Rights Foundation.
