The US and UK have long emboldened kleptocrats and oligarchs. Is change coming?

In just a few weeks, the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union will arrive. The date will largely slip by without any commemoration, either in Moscow, London or elsewhere. Yet one thing is clear: hopes for democratic transformations have been long decimated, buried by autocrats and dictators littering the region. From Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, from Belarus to Kazakhstan, brutal regimes continue to pillage entire populations, strangling any democratic forces they find. In Russia, a revanchist regime continues to undercut European security and threaten its democratic, Western-leaning neighbours with further rounds of invasion and bloodshed.

But one other thing, some three decades on from the Soviet collapse, is also clear. These regimes didn’t transform into rapacious, repugnant governments on their own. Rather than Western forces helping to shift these new states into democratic polities, an entire range of Western professionals and Western industries helped these illiberal, kleptocratic forces to entrench their rule and to use the West for all their laundering needs, when it comes to money and reputations alike.

Indeed, while the US and UK crowed about victory at the end of the Cold War, Washington and London have spent the decades since transforming into the world’s leading money-laundering services for the oligarchs, kleptocrats and illiberal forces who have crushed democratic reformers and gained power for themselves.

The parallel American and British playbooks over the past few decades, accelerating especially through the 1990s and 2000s, are broadly similar. Building empires of anonymous shell companies – especially in the corporate tax havens of overseas territories like the Caymans or states like Delaware – American and British figures began shilling these anonymous financial secrecy vehicles to anyone looking to hide their illicit wealth. No matter whether those assets were gained through, say, underhanded privatisation schemes, or links to organised crime, or by close relations with a local dictator.

Ultimately, the broader ethos of deregulation during the 1990s and 2000s meant the fewer questions asked about the source of wealth, the better.