Report on *legal* ways foreign governments can directly influence US politics

This is an informative article about the grey areas in which foreign governments can legally contribute to American politicians and campaigns: Ryan Summers and Ben Freeman, How to Make American Foreign Policy Yours: The Perfectly Legal Ways Foreign Powers Subvert American Democracy TomDispatch 11/12/2019.

This is also an area in which the Citizens United Supreme Court decision has problematic results for democracy. As President Obama said after the decision was handed down, "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ... I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

Summers and Freeman also discuss how foreign government funding for think tanks and even directly to universities is used as a tool of foreign government influence.

While foreign influence in Washington has consistently made front-page headlines, it’s arguably just as pervasive at American universities. Chinese influence has, for instance, garnered considerable attention in recent years. That country’s Confucius Institutes, ostensibly language and cultural centers at American colleges paid for by the Chinese government, have been the focus of eye-opening congressional investigations on the role foreign governments can play on campus. As a Senate investigation reported in early 2019, “Confucius Institute funding comes with strings that can compromise academic freedom,” allowing the Chinese government to play censor at academic conferences on U.S. soil and even censor course materials critical of China.

Chinese influence on campus has garnered headlines, but that country is just one of more than 100 that have funneled $9-plus billion in foreign money to U.S. college campuses in the past five years, according to the Department of Education -- and China isn’t even the biggest player among them. That honor, believe it or not, goes to little (but wealthy) Qatar, which has given more than $1.3 billion to American universities since 2014, nearly three times as much as the Chinese. ...

While at least two dozen universities are severing ties with Confucius Institutes, schools have been far more reluctant to cut ties with other authoritarian governments. After the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, for example, universities and think tanks faced considerable pressure to sever ties with Saudi Arabia, but few did. Since 2014, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most prestigious universities in the country, has received the most money from the Saudis -- at least $77 million, according to Department of Education records. [my emphasis]

But it's important to recognize that "civil society" ties between different countries is an important element of international politics among allies as wellas adversaries. The Nixon Administration's improvement of diplomatic relations with the USSR and China importantly included establishment of cultural and "civil society" interactions. There's nothing inherently sinister about this. Just as there should be nothing surprising in governments attempting to use such ties to their advantage. That's why it's important to have clear laws about financial contributions and to adjust those laws regularly as various governments and private interests develop ways to legally bypass the previous rules and regulations.

And, again, Citizens United and other Supreme Court decision treating financial campaign donations as "speech" are so problematic for democratic politics.