President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken agree. “Corruption saps economic growth, hinders development, destabilizes governments, undermines democracy, and foments global instability,” their press release announcing the U.S. strategy on countering corruption says. Alas, like so much touched by bureaucracy, the best-intentioned plans end up doing the opposite.

Here, the problem is both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the culture of U.S. embassies. USAID Administrator Samantha Power is adept with press releases and self-promotion but less so with basic management. She retains metrics that gauge USAID programs by money spent rather than goals achieved.

Too many U.S. ambassadors and country teams, meanwhile, prioritize smooth working relations with the presidents and prime ministers in the countries where they are stationed rather than risk local opprobrium over criticism.

Here, the case of Albania is instructive. According to David Wisner, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, the United States has invested over $27.5 million in law enforcement and justice reform programs in Albania. Anti-corruption programs alone represent millions of dollars, yet Albania grows increasingly corrupt as Prime Minister Edi Rama seeks to tilt Albania away from the European club of democracy back into Turkey-style autocracy.

Indeed, Freedom House now ranks Albania as less free than Turkey-occupied northern Cyprus. While wishful thinking sometimes leads Freedom House to delay downgrading countries — here, the organization’s long refusal to appreciate Turkey’s turn fully is a case in point — Albania’s turn away from democracy is now undeniable.

Consider the case of former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj, a University of Kentucky-educated democracy activist who steadily rose through the Albanian political ranks as voters embraced his pro-Western orientation, technocratic merit, and general competence.

In July 2023, as Ahmetaj’s rise and popularity began to threaten the Albanian premier, Rama-appointed prosecutors ordered the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime to strip Ahmetaj of his parliamentary immunity and arrest him. Ahmetaj was on holiday abroad and, fearing for his life and family, simply did not return. While the Albanian Constitution prohibits arbitrary detention, 52% of Albania’s prison population under Rama consists of those under pretrial detention.

Former U.S. prosecutors who inspected the charges concluded they were a farce, unsupported by any evidence. Rama accused Ahmetaj of corruption in a tender for a waste incinerator in 2015, but Ahmetaj had no role in that file — Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj, a Rama loyalist, reportedly owns the incinerator. Accusations that Ahmetaj accepted foreign trips fell apart when the deputy prime minister was able to produce receipts and bank statements proving he had paid at the time.  

Nor was Ahmetaj the only victim of false corruption charges. Rama imprisoned Fredi Beleri, an ethnic Greek Albanian, to sideline his campaign to become the mayor of Himara, a town on the Albanian Riviera. The charge? Buying four votes. Rama’s real motivation appears to have been to knock out any politician who stood in the way of his own plans for multibillion-dollar real estate development.

Alas, with both Ahmetaj and Beleri, the U.S. has inadvertently assisted Rama’s corruption and ambition. The U.S. has invested millions of dollars into the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime. While the court started as a legitimate tool to prosecute corruption, U.S. funding continued even as Rama corrupted and weaponized it.

Just as a series of U.S. ambassadors had with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan beginning in mid-2005, Yuri Kim, then-ambassador to Albania, rubber-stamped Rama’s positions and pooh-poohed concerns in order to ensure smooth relations. The Turkey parallel continues as Erdogan used supposedly independent bodies to levy multibillion-dollar penalties against or seize property from opposition figures and those who donated to their campaigns.

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Nor is Albania alone. As U.S. ambassadors and USAID look the other way and China renders assistance, would-be dictators have hijacked U.S.-funded counter-corruption programs in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Solomon Islands, and Peru.

It may be too late for some countries — but not for Albania. Albanians deserve democracy, not dictatorship. If Biden is serious about countering corruption, Rama should be on the docket, not his democratic opponents.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.