Inflating the electoral process

by Frank Gaffney
The Washington Times, April 2, 1996

Four years ago, Bill Clinton took a very dim
view of a foreign government meddling in the democratic
processes of another sovereign state. At the time, of
course, Governor/Candidate Clinton was objecting to
British Prime Minister John Major’s efforts to help his
friend, George Bush, stave off what proved to be a mortal
electoral challenge from Mr. Clinton.

That, as they say, was then. Today,
President/Candidate Clinton is actively and personally
intervening in Russia’s upcoming presidential election to
help his friend, Boris Yeltsin stave off a potentially
mortal challenge from the Communist Party’s leader,
Gennady Zyuganov. The consequences of this interference
in a foreign election are likely to prove fully as
injurious as were the British government’s efforts on
behalf of Mr. Bush.

U.S. and Russian official documents leaked,
respectively, to Bill Gertz of this newspaper and to a
Russian nationalist journal establish that President
Clinton has quite explicitly tapped U.S. taxpayer
resources — both directly and indirectly — in an effort
to ensure that President Yeltsin is re-elected this June.
The following are among the costly contributions being
made for this purpose:

At Mr. Clinton’s urging, the International Monetary
Fund has approved the second-largest loan in its history
(only the no-less-politicized Mexican bailout was
larger). This has been done even though former senior
Russian officials privately acknowledge that Moscow has
complied with virtually none of the IMF’s preconditions.
What is more, in those areas where Russia appears to have
taken steps demanded by the IMF — notably, by abandoning
a planned across-the-board 20 percent increase in tariffs
— it has failed to do so fully. In fact, as the New York
Times reported on March 26, the Kremlin has actually
increased tariffs by between 5 percent and 10 percent
“but the Monetary Fund says it does not believe that
the politically important loan should be held up because
of those increases.”

It must be asked: If such an attitude has been adopted
at the outset of the disbursement of the Russian loan — a
disbursement that is, interestingly, front-loaded so as
to put $1 billion in Mr. Yeltsin’s hands before the June
election — why should Moscow give greater weight to
assertions that the Fund will be more resistant to
political imperatives in deciding the fate of future
progress payments?

The Clinton administration continues to insist that
hundreds of millions of tax dollars flow to Russia
through the so-called Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR)
program, known universally as Nunn-Lugar funding after
its congressional sponsors — Sens. Sam Nunn and Sen.
Richard Lugar. On March 18, the CATO Institute published
a damning indictment of this $1 billion-plus program in a
study titled The Nunn-Lugar Act: A Wasteful and Dangerous
Illusion. Author Rich Kelley defines the problem this
way: “The evidence suggests that CTR may in the long
run threaten, rather than enhance, American security. CTR
funds have eased the Russian military’s budgetary woes,
freeing resources for such initiatives as the war in
Chechnya and defense modernization. Any claim that CTR
has encouraged good behavior in the former Soviet Union
is an overstatement, if not an irony. In fact, the
program has created a series of perverse incentives that
may have hindered, rather than advanced, the
stabilization of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet
Union.”

The Clinton administration has found the U.S.
Export-Import Bank to be yet another vehicle for sluicing
what amount to campaign contributions into Boris
Yeltsin’s war chest at American taxpayer’s expense. On
March 21, David Kramer of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and Heidi Kroll, a Moscow-based
economist employed by Harvard University, published a
chilling article in the Wall Street Journal titled,
“The Ex-Im Bank’s Russian Disaster.” This
article describes two recent initiatives undertaken by
Vice President Al Gore that will involve lending well
more than $1 billion in taxpayer-underwritten resources
even though their net effect is likely to be the
undermining of privatization and the discouraging of
productive foreign investment in Russia.

As it happens, some experts — notably, a
distinguished British scholar, Dr. Mark Almond —
anticipate that, despite his poor showing in the polls at
the moment, President Yeltsin will be re-elected. In
remarks last week to a Heritage Foundation gathering, Dr.
Almond suggested that if so, it would not be because of
U.S. help, however. Nor would it be due to the popular
appeal a Yeltsin candidacy. Rather, it would be because
President Yeltsin would use the powers of his office —
not least the KGB’s responsibility for the security of
elections, and the loyalty of Yeltsin-appointed mayors
and governors — to steal the election.

Should that occur, it is likely that President
Clinton’s acknowledged and free-spending intervention on
behalf of the victor will be seized upon by the defeated
communists and other xenophobes to drive Mr. Yeltsin to
take ever-more-draconian steps to demonstrate his
independence from, if not outright defiance of, the West.
As a result, even if widespread vote fraud (which those
like Jimmy Carter will nonetheless indubitably call
“substantially free and fair elections”) does
not produce grave domestic instability in Russia, it will
almost certainly accelerate the Kremlin’s reversion to
malevolent type internationally.

President Clinton professes to be a champion of
campaign finance reform. He could do worse than by
halting his administration’s wanton misuse of tax dollars
blatantly to interfere in Russia’s nascent democratic
process. Even if such behavior were not improper and
counterproductive, it would still be opprobrious since —
as Mr. Gertz has established — Mr. Clinton is motivated
in no small measure by the belief a Yeltsin victory will
help his own re-election bid. If President Clinton will
not refrain from such self-dealing at taxpayer expense,
Congress should sharply restrict his ability to do so.