Deconstructing the US Administration’s Conceptualization of Strategic Corruption

Abstract

Social identity theory is useful for analyzing the construction of Gramscian hegemony. It is comparatively weak in an authoritarian populist regime because of its reliance upon coercion. This terror is used to control the significant minority of the public that finds the regime—with its coarse romanticism, crude stereotyping, and brutality—repugnant. The so-called developed democracies are polities that display this Gramscian hegemony, i.e., the normative habitual obedience to the authorities by the overwhelming majority of the public. The Biden administration’s focus on corruption and the so-called rules-based international order had its foundation in American post-Cold War hegemony legitimation. This legitimation claim lies in the belief that American global leadership provided the political resources for freedom and prosperity against the Soviet Union. Moscow has attempted to disrupt this system. The Biden administration’s prevailing worldview portrayed these efforts as constituting the so-called strategic corruption. It aims to undermine the global public good for Moscow’s illegitimate, parochial, imperial political gain. This worldview emphasizes the necessity of the stability of its foundational institutional order under American postwar hegemony that has expanded globally. The Trump administration functionally rejects this US domestic and international legitimation claim. It focuses on populist reactionary American nationalism for control. The perception of systemic behavior, as constituting strategic corruption, is contextually dependent. Implicit in the charge of corruption is an appeal to a desired future. Corruption is a negative normative evaluation of behavior in terms of violation of a higher order goal, e.g., public goods such as national security and self-determination.