A Blueprint for Using Corruption Against America’s Rivals

In 2023, inspectors opened up some of the People’s Liberation Army’s missiles and found water where the fuel should have been. Silos in western China, part of the Rocket Force meant to deter or fight the United States, had been hollowed out by graft. The scandal took down a defense minister, who vanished from public life, and opened a purge that has rolled through the Chinese military ever since.

It is also, according to a recent Hudson Institute report, a glimpse of something the West keeps misreading: the corruption inside America’s rivals is not just a moral failing. It’s a structural weakness, and one Washington could learn to exploit.

That argument comes from Nate Sibley (now working in the Trump administration at the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe) whose June 2026 paper for the conservative think tank lays out what he calls a US counter-kleptocracy strategy. The pitch is that America’s principal adversaries are all kleptocracies, and their rot could be turned against them.

Theft Is Not the Same as Rule by Thieves

Corruption, in the standard Transparency International phrasing it borrows, is abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Bribery, embezzlement, the usual catalogue. Every society has some. Kleptocracy is different. It literally means rule by thieves, and Sibley treats it as a whole system of government, where stealing isn’t a bug in the machine but the machine itself.

Access to housing, contracts, promotions, a passport, all of it flows through political loyalty rather than law. That’s the sense in which he means it, and why he insists a few million going missing from a pothole fund somewhere is not the point.

The most interesting evidence for this reframing comes not from Hudson Institute but from an academic the report lists in support. The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, in her 2020 book China’s Gilded Age, argued that China grew explosively not despite its corruption but partly because of a particular flavour of it. She called it access money: the kickbacks and hospitality that local officials traded for permits and off-the-books lending that greased the infrastructure and property boom rather than gumming up the paperwork.

Ang’s own analogy, as the report relays it, is steroids versus a healthy diet. The gains are fast, visible, and intimidating. The underlying body is distorted, and maybe eventually wrecked.

The Paradox At Work

The same corruption that entrenches these regimes at home also eats away at the instruments they need abroad. A patronage system is good at buying loyalty and very bad at building a functioning missile force, because the incentives that reward a well-connected supplier are the same that let him bill for fuel and deliver water.

The report points to Russia, where a deputy defense minister, Timur Ivanov, was arrested on bribery charges in 2024 as defense spending swelled toward roughly a third of the federal budget, and Vladimir Putin swapped out his defense minister for an economist. It points to Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez sacked something like eighteen to twenty thousand oil-company staff in 2003 and turned the state oil giant into a spoils machine, a decision that helped push nearly eight million people to flee the country by 2025. On paper these are formidable states. Under stress, the wiring shorts out.

Beyond the borders, the same logic scales up into foreign policy. The report draws on data from AidData, a research center at the College of William and Mary, which mapped 13,427 Chinese development projects worth around $843 billion across 165 countries between 2000 and 2017. Roughly a third ran into serious trouble: corruption scandals, labour violations, protests. The researchers also flagged some $385 billion in what they call hidden debt, routed through opaque structures that recipient governments don’t fully disclose. Opaque deals, tied contracting, elite-to-elite negotiation. The features that make Belt and Road attractive to a well-placed local official, Sibley argues, are the same that breed dependency and graft. Beijing’s model abroad, on this reading, mirrors its model at home.

Where the Argument Gets Shakier

The trouble is that leveraging corruption has been tried, and the report admits it mostly didn’t work. When the West froze the assets of Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, plenty of observers expected the pressure to crack Putin’s inner circle. It didn’t. The oligarchs trooped into the Kremlin to be lectured, not to plot, and Sibley concedes that targeting kleptocracy is no silver bullet against a regime driven by ideology and grievance rather than mere greed. That’s a big concession. It suggests that even where the vulnerability is real, the lever may not move much.

What survives scrutiny, though, is the core reframing. Thinking of kleptocracy as a system rather than a scandal changes what you look for. It directs attention to the rocket fuel and the procurement chains and the hidden debt, the places where stolen money degrades a rival’s actual capability, rather than to the yacht in the harbour that makes for a better photo. Whether Washington should act on that insight the way Sibley wants is a political question, and a contested one. Whether the insight is real seems harder to dispute.

A deeper question the report raises is whether corruption can even be exposed effectively any more. In an information environment thick with manipulated clips and reflexive claims of fakery, Sibley worries that regimes like Russia’s have learned to make graft feel universal and unprovable, so that cynicism itself becomes a shield. If that’s right, then the hardest part of any counter-kleptocracy strategy is not finding the rot. It’s getting anyone to believe what you find.

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