Global Challenges Now - September 2025
Presentation to The McLean Foreign Policy Group
Washington DC September 10, 2025.
Frank Vogl
Corruption is a word that is being used with mounting frequency in public discourse about the Trump Administration. In Sunday’s New York Times, for example, columnist Ezra Klein wrote: “I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power.”
Today, I want to talk today about corruption, here and across the world. I will focus on three topics: corruption in politics, corruption and conflict, and corruption and human rights.
Rarely, if ever before, has corruption had a greater malign influence on the modern world. It permeates domestic government and politics here in the United States, and in scores of countries across the globe. It plays central, terrible roles, in adding to international insecurity. And, in part because of the policies of the current Administration the situation at home and abroad is getting much worse.
Corruption is not a victimless crime. Vast numbers of people across the globe are living in poverty, facing constant extortion from the police and low-level public officials, while basic social services are inadequately provided because public sector budgets are robbed by those in power. Corruption is not gender neutral - in many countries the impact of corruption on women is especially severe,
It is difficult to measure the costs of corruption, but one indicator is data on illicit flows of cash. When politicians, servants, organized crime syndicates, steal funds, so they strive to place their dirty cash in safe havens where the money can be invested secretly and profitably. Data from the Nasdaq Verafin 2024 Global Financial Crime Report, recently stated: “In 2023, an estimated $3.1 trillion in illicit funds flowed through the global financial system. Money laundering accounted for trillions of dollars funding a range of destructive crimes, including an estimated $346.7 billion in human trafficking and $782.9 billion in drug trafficking activity, as well as $11.5 billion in terrorist financing.”
Corruption and Politics
What is at stake in a world of rising corruption is our freedom. Fundamental to democracy is the securing of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and freedom to protest peacefully.
When Paul Revere in 1770 used the “Boston Massacre” in his publicity poster to mobilize revolutionary support he was in the forefront of what would become a long, and important American conviction that tyranny must be opposed at all times and in all places. At its core, the many citizens in many nations who today are campaigning against corruption are committed to the idea that every person not only must have the right, but also the opportunity to live in dignity.
This conclusion is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It is not receiving the attention it vitally deserves. For there are trends across the globe today that are shrinking freedoms and robbing vast numbers of people of their hope and their dignity.
The number of full democracies in the world today is declining, as authoritarianism rises. There is not an authoritarian government that is not corrupt. Kleptocracies abound.
I suspect that too many people in too many countries just do not know why democracy is so important. Towards the end of World War Two, on December 8, 1944, Sir Winston Churchill told the British House of Commons:
“How is that word “democracy” to be interpreted? My idea of it is that the plain, humble, common man, just the ordinary man who keeps a wife and family, who goes off to fight for his country when it is in trouble, goes to the poll at the appropriate time, and puts his cross on the ballot paper showing the candidate he wishes to be elected to Parliament—that he is the foundation of democracy. And it is also essential to this foundation that this man or woman should do this without fear, and without any form of intimidation or victimization. He marks his ballot paper in strict secrecy, and then elected representatives together decide what government, or even in times of stress, what form of government they wish to have in their country. If that is democracy, I salute it. I espouse it. I would work for it.”
Corruption can be defined as the “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and we mostly view it as actions that are illegal. Such as stealing public funds and public officials taking bribes on government contracts.
In their new 2024 book, Corruption In America, authors Professor Michael Johnson and Professor Oguzhan Johnston, write the following: “Many kinds of activities that are not clearly illegal, may be fully legal, or may even enjoy legal and constitutional protection (consider political campaign contributions, or lobbying), that still may strike many citizens and observers as corrupt or corrupting. Such activities may not fall under precise academic definitions of corruption yet still raise serious concerns regarding accountability, political and social trust, the sources and uses of power, inequality, and relationships between power and wealth.”
We have seen what can only be called alarming actions by our government that are eroding public trust in government and worsening government corruption, both in perception and in fact.
The increasing wealth gap in this country forces tens of millions of Americans to question why they have been left behind, why they are struggling so hard to make ends meet, to pay for their healthcare and for their children’s education.
The polls suggest that most Americans see legal corruption everywhere. For example, approximately $16 billion was spent in last November’s U.S. elections, with about one-quarter coming from large donors, who seek privileged access and influence to political power if their candidates win. Can you really blame skeptical voters when they saw a super PAC called Fairshake and two related organizations spend about $135 million in the election, financed by donations from two major crypto companies, Coinbase and Ripple, and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed more than 100 crypto startups. The firms and individuals that financed those donations have made enormous profits since President Trump has been elected, embraced crypto-currencies, promoted the crypto industry, hired top people in the business, reduced SEC regulation and curbed crypto fraud investigations.
As former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer once noted, “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.”
Our democracy is all the more threatened by fake news. Voters confront a rising tide of fake news, enhanced by artificial intelligence, that makes it increasingly difficult for the public to believe what politicians say and what the media reports. As the Brennan Center for Justice has noted: “Election deniers are working to undermine confidence in our elections and suppress turnout, particularly among voters of color and other historically marginalized communities. The misinformation they propagate — including lies about the voting process and election workers — can have significant consequences for people’s ability to vote and trust in our elections.”
Corruption and Conflict
We are living in a dangerous world, where the moral force of democracy, that embraces personal freedom and human rights, and free exchanges of ideas across national borders confronts an increasingly brutal authoritarian force. I fear Trump is on the wrong side. As
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in June: “Putin and the (Iranian) ayatollahs want the exact same kind of world. That is a world safe for autocracy, safe for theocracy, safe for their corruption; a world free from the winds of personal freedoms, the rule of law, a free press; and a world safe for both Russian and Iranian imperialism against independent-minded neighbors.”
When autocrats stride the globe, seeking profit at every turn, then armed conflicts are inevitable. At the strategic level, risks are rising due to the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, the rapid development of new technological weaponry, and the increasing sophistication of terrorist groups, often supported by authoritarian regimes.
The threats are unmistakable when we see the extravagant military parade in China as the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea embrace. Meanwhile, consider the counter symbolism of President Trump declaring that the Department of Defense is now the Department of War, and the message that might is right, as he orders a naval destroyer off the coast of Venezuela to murder unarmed people in a small boat.
Both Russia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, are supporting the conflict in Sudan, providing arms in exchange for gold. The corruption fueled by outside interests is directly producing the worst humanitarian nightmare of our times. This is a genocide. It is largely being ignored in the global media and by world leaders. The humanitarian crisis alone has been made much worse by the ending of U.S. aid. Matters are all the more grave because the leadership of the United Nations seems largely missing.
I encourage you to read the remarkable reporting in The Atlantic by Anne Applebaum who wrote: “Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.”
Anne Applebaum, who visited Sudan twice to research her compelling magazine cover story, noted:
“Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic. But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness.”
Corruption abounds in every conflict. Prime Minister Netanyahu prolongs the war in Gaza in part to remain in office and so delay the outcome of his trial for corruption. In Afghanistan, where the U.S. military was embroiled in the war for 21 years, the U.S. provided over $145 billion in reconstruction economic and military aid. The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan argued that the vast American aid increased, not reduced, corruption in this country.[1]
Corruption and the Humanitarian Crisis
And the conflicts from the Middle East to the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar and more, add to the humanitarian crises that we overlook at our peril. We dare not turn away or ignore how corruption is a contributing cause.
According to UNDP, in 2022 the number of forcibly displaced people in the world reached 108 million, the highest level since World War II and more than two and a half times the level in 2010. The year 2022 saw the highest number of battle-related deaths in generations. It registered the highest number of state-based armed conflicts since World War II and a growing share of one-sided conflicts where unarmed civil populations were being attacked. War fatalities are growing at an alarming rate, including those borne by civilians. Armed conflicts are pushing millions of people into forced displacement. Over the past decade the number of countries involved in conflicts outside their own borders has been rising, demonstrating how geopolitical interdependence plays out.”
Before going further, let me note that if global humanitarian conditions have deteriorated this year, then Donald Trump is not without blame. I cannot get out of my head a comment that Bill Gates made in a Financial Times interview: “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
Gates was calling out Tesla’s Elon Musk, who, acting as President Trump’s “efficiency” czar, had bulldozed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). One of the results, according to Charles Kenney at the Center for Global Development, is that proposed U.S. budget cuts for humanitarian assistance from $8.8 billion to $2.5 billion, “could lead to 675,000 additional deaths from HIV, and a combined 285,000 deaths from malaria and tuberculosis.”
Further aid cuts have been seen recently by the Trump Administration. At the same time, President Trump has been pressing West European governments to sharply increase their defense spending if they wished the U.S. to remain an active NATO member, so European have been cutting development assistance to finance more defense outlays. In July 2025, the OECD projected: “A 9–17% drop in net official development assistance (ODA) in 2025, following a 9% decline in 2024. The projected decline is driven by announced cuts from major providers, and it would hit the poorest countries hardest: bilateral ODA to least developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa may fall by 13-25% and 16-28% respectively, and health funding could drop by up to 60% from its 2022 peak. Coordinated, transparent action is urgently needed to mitigate the consequences of cuts in ODA for the poorest and most vulnerable populations.”
Corruption impacts every aspect of human security: people die as fake pharmaceuticals and pesticides are purchased by criminal government ministers; people are killed as humans are trafficked; indigenous people are uprooted from their traditional homes as criminal enterprises conspire with corrupt public officials to destroy rain forests from Borneo to the Amazon; and building developers bribe inspectors so that major construction projects evade building to code – leading in 2022, for example, to thousands of deaths as a result of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
Hundreds of millions of people are the victims of petty and grand corruption. For the most part the corruption traps vast populations in poverty, or in living conditions far below what they could and should be if extortion and vast theft of public finances was absent. At times corruption kills, as underscored in, for example, atrocities in South Sudan, Yemen, and acute humanitarian challenges in, for example, parts of Nigeria and Ethiopia. As the FEWS Network points out, conflict is the leading cause of acute food insecurity. Ongoing violence displaces millions, disrupts agricultural systems and obstructs humanitarian assistance delivery. Climate change is adding to the peril so many people now confront in fragile countries. One result is a mounting flood of refugees, striving to enter Europe and unleashing political clashes in once stable Western democracies.
Let me highlight just one of the many humanitarian disasters that we need to confront today: the impact of corruption on the rights of women is too widely ignored. Sexual corruption is widespread - it involves extortion for sexual favors. It is part of the larger issue of violence against women that is so hard to confront in a world where men rule, where in many cultures the women are too scared to complain, and where laws, if they exist at all, are too rarely enforced.
A 2024 International Labor Organization report, Profits and Poverty: The economics of forced labour, stated that forced labor in the private global economy generates $236 billion in illegal profits per year. The current estimate of illegal profits is based on a total of 23.7 million people in forced labor in the private economy – a rise of 27 per cent over the last 10 years.
Digging deeper into the data we find that forced commercial sexual exploitation accounts for more than two-thirds (73 per cent) of the total illegal profits, despite accounting for only 27 per cent of the total number of victims in privately imposed labor. These numbers are explained by the huge difference in per victim profits between forced commercial sexual exploitation and other forms of human slavery – $27,252 profits per victim for the former against $3,687 profits per victim for the latter. An estimated 6.3 million people were in situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day in 2021.
Every act of human trafficking, like every act of wildlife theft, involves bribery. Public officials are bribed by organized crime to permit vile acts against humanity. In a world of rising authoritarianism, the scale of these acts will rise, the volume of conflict will increase – we all have a crucial interest in turning the tide.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when power can reside in the hands of the citizens and public officials do indeed serve the public interest, then the prospects for human and strategic security are vastly improved. This is a crucial goal in striving to understand the forces of corruption, the need to curb corruption, and the central importance of fighting for democracy.
That fight is never easy. Many of those who have so openly and bravely challenged authoritarian regimes in the name of transparency, anti-corruption and democracy have been murdered. Remember Boris Nemtsov who was killed in front of the Kremlin; remember Alexei Navalny who was murdered in a Russian prison; remember journalists Daphne Caruana, who was blown up in her car in Malta, and Jamal Khashoggi, who was hacked to death by Saudi Arabian government officials.
Across the world there are thousands of independent journalists and civil society activists who are risking their lives and their freedom to counter the forces of authoritarianism and corruption. They deserve support.
Civil society organizations and a free press, supported by academic freedom and the rule of law, are the counterweights to those like President Trump who embraces Putin, takes family investments from the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, castigates judges, sends thugs wearing masks into our streets to arrest and deport decent people, and, to quote a most recent social media post by him: “Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Recently, I went to Atlanta, visiting the home of Martin Luther King, important historic sites of the civil rights movement and the cemetery where many of King’s top activists are buried, including John Lewis. I visited on a day that by coincidence saw vast anti-Trump protests across the United States, including in Atlanta.
The late John Lewis, wrote the following in his memoir – Across That Bridge – A Vision for Change and the future of America:
“Some people have told me that I am a rare bird in the blue sky of dreamers. I believed innocently and profoundly as a child that the world could be a better place…I have survived the worst aggression, all the attacks mounted against dreamers to stamp out the light that they see. I have been rejected, hated, oppressed, beaten, jailed and I have almost died only to live another day. I have witnessed betrayal, corruption, bombing, lunacy, conspiracy, and even assassination – and I have still kept marching on.”
We must march on, so that the generations that come after us can benefit from all the best things that our advanced civilization can offer in security, and with integrity.
[1] “Corruption In Conflict - Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” from the Office of the Special U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan, September 2016. Prime conclusions included: “1. Corruption undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fueling grievances against the Afghan government and channeling material support to the insurgency. 2. The United States contributed to the growth of corruption by injecting tens of billions of dollars into the Afghan economy, using awed oversight and contracting practices, and partnering with malign powerbrokers.”