Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Meddlers

First, some good news. Earlier this month, I reported on journalist Cami Dominguez’s story for KQED about photographs taken by children in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. We so often hear of the evils of social media, but then there is this — Cami’s story has some 34,200 “likes” on Instagram and 240 positive comments.

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Every couple years, reports start appearing about attempts by foreign countries to influence the outcome of our national elections. They’ve become predictable; Russia, China, Iran — those considered our main adversaries — are launching disinformation campaigns designed to boost one candidate or the other.

Less publicized are the efforts by our friends like England, France, Germany or Israel, to do the same thing.

If a full accounting of the matter were to be done, it would document the fact that virtually any country of any size around the world has a major stake in the U.S. election, and acts accordingly. And the reason is obvious: We have by far the biggest economy in the world, the most advanced technology, the greatest wealth and the most feared military.

So the consequences of even slight changes in political direction in the U.S. are felt all over the world. This has long been true — reports of foreign meddling in our elections date back to the earliest days of the republic. In 1796, for example, a French agent released private information to the public to try and sway the election in favor of Thomas Jefferson. But the difference in our time is that globalization of the world’s economy since the 1990s has kicked election meddling into hyperdrive.

Americans started feeling the effects of globalization with the emergence of trade deals like NAFTA, and the loss of manufacturing jobs to countries with cheaper labor forces.

But it was only when Covid hit that the complexity of the global supply chains became apparent, as did our vulnerability to obtaining basic goods in a crisis. These are problems, much like the pandemic itself, that cannot actually be solved locally; they require global solutions.

Politicians can argue about the costs and benefits of globalization, but they are virtually powerless to slow it down, let alone stop it. They may be able to lessen the deleterious domestic effects with tariffs, quotas, subsidies and other protectionist moves. But these come with risks of their own and often go hand-in-hand with nativist, anti-immigrant, regressive political campaigns that prove self-defeating in the long term.

And they are essentially ahistorical in nature.

So it is natural that our fierce domestic debates over policy differences would be closely monitored around the world. Other countries’ entire political economies may rise or fall depending on which direction the U.S. takes.

These fundamental matters are in the end more significant than the surface ideological concerns that seem to drive foreign interference in our election cycles. In an inter-connected world economy, everybody has a stake in the game.

And the game starts here.

(From last September.)

NOTE: Sad news this morning. Robert Redford has died. In addition to what made him famous — film — he was a force for good on the environment.

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