Genghis Khan and the U.S. Deep State

Should USAID subsidize America's ally, extremely unwoke Mongolia?

Genghis Khan statue, Mongolia

At the height of the Cold War, around 1950, the U.S. government gave a sizable amount of foreign aid:

But U.S. voters tend to be citizenists, even though they’ve never heard of the term, so Elon Musk’s DOGE has gotten off to a strong start by attacking USAID, which gives foreign aid to foreign countries, even though foreign aid has been pretty insignificant for the last half century

After all, foreign countries, like Canada, are wussies.

On the other hand, there’s the least wussy country of all: Mongolia, which is extraordinarily proud of its home-grown genocidal maniac, Genghis Khan:

The U.S. didn’t have diplomatic relations with Mongolia until 1987, for complicated and boring Chiang Kai-shek related reasons (Mongolia declared its independence from China in 1911 but our pals the Taiwanese Nationalists didn’t recognize this, so yada yada). But eventually the Reagan Administration finally established ambassadorial ties with Mongolia.

Since then, I’m happy to say (Mongolia being pretty awesome in an empty sort of way), Mongolia and the U.S. have been pals for reasons of the Great Game against Mongolia’s neighbors, China and Russia.

Donald Trump feels that out-competing China is a high American priority, so being friends with Mongolia is winning. Don’t you want to win?

Paywall coming up:

What are you, a loser?

Mongolia is perhaps the least woke state in the world: it’s extremely proud of Genghis Khan, whose lineage did so much damage to China and Russia. Not surprisingly, it prefers to align with distant USA rather than it’s massive neighbors.

Most of Mongolia’s early ties to the US were facilitated through Republican politicos, to the distress of the left. Here's a leftist critique in Jacobin of how the GOP-side of the Deep State used USAID and National Endowment for Democracy taxpayer dollars to woo Mongolia, perilously sited between China and Russia, into becoming a US ally.

How Washington Hacked Mongolia’s Democracy

By Branko Marcetic

When the US intervened in Mongolia's elections, they did a lot more than leak emails.

11.29.2017

For the past year, the media has been obsessed with the prospect that Russia might have meddled in the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump. From the tone of the discussion, you’d think Russia sent a squad of operatives to provide training, strategy consulting, and campaign advice to a political opposition over a period of years.

No one has alleged Russia actually did that. But it is something the US government did in the 1990s.

Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections.

The 1996 Mongolian election is a case study in the normalization of US election meddling, a successful, American-led campaign to put a free market coalition in power in a foreign country in the post-Cold War world. The effort was considered so unremarkable that it was carried out entirely overtly, and even publicized by those involved at the time. And while the electoral victory was short lived, the Republican strategists who made it happen claimed an arguably bigger prize: the opening of Mongolia and its natural resources to foreign investment.

OK, was that good or bad for America?

Here’s a USAID grant to the Democratic-affiliated establishmentarian Aspen Institute:

Mongolia is a US ally in the Great Game vs. China and Russia. To the extent that the US government wants Mongolia's friendship, it makes sense to spend money on making important Mongolians feel friendly toward America.

Why do it through the expensive Aspen Institute, however?

Well, first, because it would be crass, even if more effective, just to hand cash to Mongolian leaders.

Second, I suspect that the wiser Mongolian statesmen actually want American insiders of both parties to have a stake in the American relationship with Mongolia. If Mongolia is going to peeve its giant neighbors, China and Russia, by aligning with the USA, it wants reassurance that this is a long-term relationship and the USA isn't going to cut Mongolia adrift the next time there's a shift of party in the White House.

Most of Mongolia's early diplomacy with American were with Republicans, but I'm sure the Mongolians don't mind also having Democratic insiders like the Aspen Institute having a stake in maintaining good relationships with Mongolia.

The Aspen Institute was founded in 1949 by a German-American gentile businessman, Walter Paepcke, the CEO of the Container Corporation of America, who put on a lavish tribute to Goethe in Aspen, with the amazing doctor, musician, scholar, and philanthropist Albert Schweitzer making his only trip ever to America. Presumably, this was intended to get defeated Germans more well-disposed toward the US during the Cold War by making a big to-do in America over Good Germans like Goethe and Schweitzer.

The Aspen Institute’s tribute to Goethe was a big success, so the Aspen Institute has been, not unreasonably, a center for Democratic-affiliated establishmentarians ever since, especially at wooing elite foreigners.

Tom Wolfe explained Paepcke’s influence in The Painted Word:

By the mid-1930s, Modern Art was already so chic that corporations held it aloft like a flag to show that they were both up-to-date and enlightened, a force in Culture as well as commerce. … the Container Corporation of America was commissioning abstract work by Fernand Léger, Henry Moore, and others. This led to the Container Corporation’s long-running advertising campaign, the Great Ideas of Western Man series, in which it would run a Great Idea by a noted savant at the top of the page, one of them being “‘Hitch your wagon to a star’—Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Underneath would be a picture of a Cubist horse strangling on a banana.

For example, the Aspen Institute’s leader until fairly recently was bestselling author Walter Isaacson, whom Elon Musk personally chose to be his official biographer. I’ve read a half-dozen books by Isaacson. He’s a great guy.

So, Mongolia gets the reassurance that a prestigious cog of the Democratic Party, the Aspen Institute, is making money off America being friends with Mongolia, so Mongolia will have some Democratic friends who have friends in Washington.

That’s kind of how the world works, isn’t it?