The New Manchurian Candidates
Openness to outsiders is a liberal democracy’s greatest strength, but it can also prove a curse. Hostile autocratic powers such as China and Qatar have realised that throwing dollars around Washington, Ottawa, London, Sydney or Brussels can get results. How else do you get a proposed US-sponsored Qatari airbase in Idaho, and even a US commitment to defend the terrorist-sponsoring kingdom? China, for its part, often backs Democratic candidates like New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, who received $65,000 from a businessman with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This may not be the programmed treachery portrayed in the 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, but foreign interests have gained growing influence across the West. At the same time, much of the far left lives off donations from CCP-allied Shanghai-based billionaire Neville Roy Singham. In 2028 we might see Gavin Newsom – California’s China-friendly governor – as a wannabe satrap at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Most foreign influence-peddlers are not partisans, but opportunists. China, often tied to the left, was recently found using an agent to penetrate Germany’s hard-right AfD. Authoritarian states see weakness in Western societies – particularly among an increasingly out-of-touch political class – as an opening to accentuate divisions within polarised publics. Influence-peddlers butter their bread on both sides, not minding that their fingers might get greasy.
There are, of course, differences in the nature of foreign political donations. Some target the grifters of Trump world. Some ally with the green left. Others seek to leverage ethnic ties with migrant communities.
In his classic transactional manner, Trump’s family members and associates are getting rich off deals with Middle Eastern monarchs. Top administration officials like Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and FBI head Kash Patel have strong connections with Doha. Trump, no stranger to impropriety, has even accepted a gift of a jumbo jet from Qatar, which is to be refitted for use as Air Force One.
At the same time, many prominent GOP figures – including former House speaker John Boehner – have signed up to a lobby firm that pushes for China’s interests. Trump allies on Wall Street also lobby on behalf of China, cashing in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity – even amid the Trumpian trade wars that are supposed to rein China in.
Over the past decade, much of the largesse from abroad has gone to universities – bulwarks of ‘progressive’ politics. Qatar alone accounts for more than a third of all foreign donations to US universities. This is the same nation, lest we forget, that funds Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump with Amir of Qatar Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani, via Flickr in Public Domain. Credit: Daniel Torok/White House.
