A corollary to this harm is that an American politician who benefits from foreign interference may shape policy toward the foreign country in question out of gratitude for the help or as an implied quid pro quo. Trump’s still partially opaque relationship with Putin and Russia ought to be a source of worry in this regard.

A foreign country meddling in U.S. politics is a single-issue form of influence. The meddler cares only about his own country’s objectives and not about any collateral damage to U.S. interests. When the core of the Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), abandoned its pretense of not taking sides in U.S. partisan politics and formed its own political action committee, its initial list of endorsees in 2022 included dozens of election deniers—Republican members of the House of Representatives who had voted against certifying results of the 2020 presidential election. The collateral damage was a direct blow to U.S. democracy.

Intelligence agencies and the media can do only so much to uncover harmful foreign interference in U.S. elections. Mitigation of the problem requires adherence by politicians to a code of conduct, according to which acceptance of such foreign help is simply wrong. Such an ethos existed during the Federalist Era, despite breaches of the code, and was part of how the nation was eventually able to overcome both the foreign meddling and the intense partisanship of the time.

Some political leaders of both parties have exhibited such an ethos closer to our own time. In 1992, a group of Republican Congressmen urged President George H.W. Bush to try to salvage his faltering re-election campaign against Bill Clinton by asking the Russians or the British for information about Clinton’s protests against the Vietnam War as a young man while in London and Moscow. Bush and his senior aide, James Baker, immediately rejected the idea as improper. In 2000, when information surfaced that Al Gore’s presidential campaign and the Democrats possibly received Chinese financial contributions, Clinton and Gore made clear that U.S. elections must be free from any foreign interference and cooperated with the subsequent investigation.

Contrast that with the approach of Trump, who, according to Robert Mueller’s report, repeatedly impeded the investigation of the Russian interference in the 2016 election. It is only when such a destructive approach to the subject is eradicated that the harms from foreign interference in America’s elections will be overcome.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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