Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge.

And today we're listening in on my conversation at the recent Trace Forum with the U.S. Helsinki Commission's Paul Massaro.

Paul is the senior advisor for counter corruption and sanctions at the commission.

He provides an animated overview of current policy initiatives, U.S. support for Ukraine,

and what's next in the fight against global kleptocracy.

We have seen a lot of anti-corruption activity in D.C. lately talk us through it.

I think we're in a completely different paradigm when it comes to anti-corruption than we've been in for a really long time.

Sometimes I like to look at it like, you know, all this stuff kind of got its start in fighting money laundering related to drug trafficking back in the 80s and late 70s.

There was another massive burst of activity in the early 2000s,

mid-2000s around terrorism. And right now we're seeing what I like to think of as the sort of

third wave of this when we're thinking about fighting kleptocracy, authoritarian dictatorship,

really thinking about, I mean, not limited to, but really thinking about

Russia and China, which I think we're kind of reentering this phase of great power politics,

great power thinking, great power adversaries, great power strategic competition.

So this wasn't the case when I got started in government

10 years ago. When I got started in government, we were still, I think, really in kind of the

end of history liberal paradigm. We want to get as much as we can to economic integration and

kind of all we're seeing in the form of like, you know, the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, or if you go even further back, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, well, this was just stuff on the sidelines.

We're better off ignoring this.

We don't want to sort of lose this incredible global market, I suppose, we've built.

But I think that age has really decisively come to an end.

I think that there's a new,

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