When Dwight Eisenhower wanted toensure that Japanese voters stuck with U.S.-friendly prime minister Nobusuke Kishi in the 1958 elections over socialist and communist challengers, the clandestine machinery of the national-security state whirred into action. American spiesrecruited key officials within Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party to funnel inside information to the Central Intelligence Agency and arranged a secret meeting at a Tokyo hotel with a former prime minister to deliver campaign funds to the party — in events so deliberately obscured that historians and intelligence analysts began topiece it together only a half-century later. When Donald Trump wanted to make sure that one of Kishi’s successors kept Japan’s government in Liberal Democratic Party hands, he dispensed with the cloak and dagger. He just tweeted it out. “The Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has already proven to be a strong, powerful, and wise Leader, and one that truly loves her Country,”Trump wrote in a Truth Social post addressed directly to Japanese voters three days before they cast ballots in January. “it is my Honor to give a Complete and Total Endorsement of her, and what her highly respected Coalition is representing.” The surreptitious foreign election interference of the Cold War has given way to brazen cross-border campaigning from Washington and Moscow, nowhere more visible than in the run-up to last week’s Hungarian parliamentary vote, where both governments let at least some of their efforts to aid Prime Minister Viktor Orbán play out in the open. The White House appeared to draw from the same playbook it uses to boost down-ballot Republicans closer to home. There were supportive visits from the vice president and Cabinet officials, engineered for amplification on social-media, backing up Trump’s promise that “the full economic might of the United States” would help Hungarians if they voted the right way. Then aget-out-the-vote reminder from Trump, along with the same “complete and total endorsement” language he used for Takaichi — and indistinguishable from how he backed candidates forTexas agriculture commissioner andNassau County executive. While Russia continued to work from an older model — reportedly plotting covert social-media campaigns from its Budapest embassy and even allegedly scheming a potential botched assassination of Orbán by its intelligence services — it also played explicitly to Hungarian public opinion. In the weeks before the vote, the Kremlin promised Hungary would receivepreferential access to Russian gas supplies and released Hungarian prisoners of war. The beneficiary of those… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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