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President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the April Jobs Report from the East Room of the White House in Washington, United States, May 7, 2021.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
WASHINGTON President Joe Biden is putting global anti-corruption efforts at the center of U.S. foreign policy, issuing a new directive to federal agencies to prioritize efforts to identify and fight corruption.
The instructions will take the form of a national security study memorandum released Thursday, the first of Biden’s presidency. The memo formally establishes the fight against corruption as a fundamental US national security interest.
The note is important because it publicly informs federal agencies that they need to “improve their anti-corruption game,” an administration official said, speaking to reporters on the background to the directive.
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The official said that the main parts of the directive will focus on financial crimes, including measures to modernize existing anti-corruption laws to tackle cryptocurrencies and cybercrime.
“We view crypto as a means of illicit financing,” officials said, “but these new steps are by no means limited to new technologies like crypto.”
The official also said the effort will involve updates to the bank secrecy law, currently the primary vehicle for enforcing transparency on how money flows through financial institutions.
“We will be looking for ideas on how to modernize these systems to respond to new technologies,” said the official.
The fight against corruption is part of a larger ongoing shift towards a new “foreign policy for the middle class”. The strategy, devised in part by Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, highlights how foreign and domestic policy can be brought into a new middle ground between traditional conservative and liberal approaches to world affairs.
Foreign policy for the middle class aims to ensure that globalization, trade, human rights and military might are all exploited for the benefit of American workers, not only for billionaires and multinational corporations, but also not. for abstract ideological reasons.
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