For many Americans, foreign influence-peddling seems like a modern threat. But foreign regimes have attempted to target and sway American policymakers for centuries , going all the way back to the earliest days of the American republic.
It was in the middle of the 19th century that the U.S. saw its first big foreign lobbying scandal — and arguably its most impactful one before 2016. That was when czarist Russia, hoping to unload the giant frozen expanse of Alaska, hatched a scheme to manipulate Washington into buying a territory nobody really wanted. It worked. Not only that, it set a playbook that other dictatorships, including future governments in the Kremlin, would be eager to follow.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, U.S. officials were looking for opportunities to patch the country together. One salve for the nation’s divisions was territorial expansion. As some American officials saw it, if the U.S. could conquer or seize new lands, perhaps it could ignore its domestic disputes, at least for a bit.