The View from the Wrong Side

For this administration, weak democracies are an opportunity to be exploited, rather than a problem to be solved.

A headline from a recent Devex piece angered me: How the US government let support for democracy unravel. It represents a fundamental misreading of what has happened since January and obscures the strategic reasons why. The Trump administration mindfully demolished democracy support programs funded by USAID and NED, in collaboration with some of those organizations’ congressional supporters. For this administration, weak democracies are an opportunity to advance MAGA ideology and/or the Trump family’s financial interests, rather than a problem to be solved using US soft power to the benefit of US security.

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” President George W. Bush, 2005 inaugural address

Whether this administration’s attitude toward liberal democracy and its institutions will be guided by ideology, transactionalism or, more likely, both, it’s time for democracy and governance practitioners to confront a disorienting truth: the US is going to be taking the wrong side, particularly in Eastern Europe. I had a brief view of what this might look like while on an election observation mission in Albania some weeks ago.

Let’s imagine the simplest scenario in which the US might take the wrong side in a European country: Ukraine.

The president blames Ukraine for starting the war. He has made it clear, multiple times in a variety of terms, that he favors the aggressor. His “peace proposals” echo the Russian positions. To suggest otherwise is so willfully obfuscating that it requires ignoring the actual words that come out of his mouth.

Openly taking Russia’s side is a 180 degree reversal in US policy, which for 34 years has been to support Ukraine’s independence and democratic development, mostly without reservation. Other people have theories why this might be.

A stable, democratic Ukraine is in US interests. Ukraine’s democracy, while highly valued by Ukrainians, is weak. It struggles with corruption, a legacy of its Soviet history and post-Soviet interference by Russia. Accordingly, it has been one of the largest recipients of US democracy support. That support has touched nearly every public institution, from the Verkhovna Rada, to the anti-corruption bureau NABU, to the justice system, to the Central Election Commission (CEC), to independent media, to international and domestic election monitoring. All of it sends an important signal that the US supports liberal democracy in space contested — politically and militarily — by an expansionist Russia.

That is what being on the right side looks like. But it is all gone now. Every USAID dollar has vaporized. Nature abhors a vacuum. What’s going to fill it? I have some ideas.

Putin says the path to peace includes preventing the election of a pro-Western government in Ukraine. Putting aside the twin absurdities of a Russian president issuing the demand, and Ukrainians actually accepting it, the proposal has not received the pushback that any other administration would have provided. Instead, in February, Trump insisted that Ukraine needs to hold elections.

Only one stakeholder really wants Zelensky replaced and he’s not Ukrainian. Putin still thinks highly of his ability to influence Ukrainian elections, despite evidence that he’s not very good at it. Sure, fifteen years ago, by relying on help from MAGA-associated Americans (see: Albania’s election this May), he enjoyed some success. But Ukraine isn’t the same country it was in 2010.

Trump’s campaign “chair," Paul Manafort, who has a long relationship with Putin-aligned oligarchs, helped get Russia-backed thug Viktor Yanukovich elected president in 2010. Having fled under pressure from furious Ukrainians during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, he now lives in Russia. Ukraine charged Putin’s Ukrainian political string puller, oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, with treason in 2021 and shut down his propagandistic Russian television stations. He’s back in Russia, too. The band is back together.

Here’s a thought experiment for how this might go down: non-transparent MAGA-aligned interests, having read the political tea leaves and/or identified lucrative “economic incentives,” step into the vacuum left by USAID. Instead of supporting democratic institutions, they covertly or overtly implement the MAGA/Russia agenda in Ukraine. A good example of this is supporting the elections that Russia wants but Ukrainians do not. What would this look like in practice?

• Russian-backed political forces in Ukraine, whose natural ceiling in Ukrainian public opinion is currently the high single digits, start getting millions of non-transparent dollars for campaign activities. It could also include support from pricey operatives like Paul Manafort who know how to turn unpopular pro-Russian thugs into presentable candidates;

• Pressure to re-launch Russia-aligned media, shut down by Zelenksy because it pumped Russian influence operations into Ukrainian living rooms, under the MAGA policy of “protecting free speech.” Because of cuts to USAID-funded civil society groups that wrote the book on how to identify and expose Russian disinformation, it goes unchallenged. Those groups might come under attack, as groups in the US who study disinformation have.

• Election monitoring by fake Russian-sympathetic NGOs whose objective is to confirm, challenge, or muddy the waters around the results, as needed;

• Pressure on the CEC and courts to falsify results or not challenge violations (though I don’t see how even Russia can falsify enough votes to overcome a 80/20 disadvantage. Both Putin and Trump remain obstinately ignorant of Ukrainian public opinion).

Undermining Ukraine could also become official US policy. The reorganized State Department, an executive agency that has absorbed the quasi-independent USAID, starts offering fat contracts to starving implementers to carry out the joint MAGA/Russian agenda of undermining Ukrainian democracy. Do they do it? Of course they do, using carefully vetted subs and contractors¹. They still have leases on fancy DC offices. People need paychecks. They will sell out, very cheaply.

Democracy and governance work is different from USAID’s humanitarian work, which is generally non-controversial. Unlike humanitarians, democrats have to choose sides. USAID and NED’s democracy support programs, as practiced since the 1980s, have pissed off plenty of authoritarians, some of whom, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia and, of course, Vladimir Putin, are now MAGA-aligned. Shutting down USAID/NED makes it easier for them to implement tools like Foreign Agent Laws, as one example, to throttle civil society and independent media that challenge them.

Democracy support programming as practiced by the US for 40 years is gone. It’s not coming back. To me, its replacement looks utterly repellent. I’ve been on The Wrong Side more than once. I know the contours and have felt the texture of the thin curtain that separates the two. It’s easier to sleep on one side more than the other.

Christine Quirk is a France-based opinion research consultant who has been working in the democracy and governance space, particularly in eastern Europe and Eurasia, for more than 20 years. More information about her clients and work can be found at www.quirkglobalstrategies.com

1. This would be very bad news for the writer of this newsletter, if she wasn't about to age out of contention and had any fucks left to give