After that speech, I faced a brief but distinct frostiness from the presidential palace. But my case ended differently. I never doubted the support of my own government for what I had said, and for being a champion of Mexicans who had an anticorruption agenda.

In the Ukraine case, by contrast, Ambassador Yovanovitch not only lost her post, she endured a smear campaign by the executive branch of her own government at the highest possible level. What we are learning every day about Ukraine — on a par with what we hear President Trump say on the White House lawn about China policy — is a radical break from bipartisan support for how we deal with other nations. Alongside presidential abuses of power, we are witnessing the quiet death of a policy against corruption and for rule of law that for nearly three decades was among America’s most important objectives abroad.

For those of us who have spent our careers in the Americas, the priority we give the administration of justice (or rule of law, or anticorruption efforts — whatever it is called at the moment) has been an article of faith since the 1990s. As Latin American countries changed from authoritarian and military rule to democracy, their new leaders and our government understood that creating fair, transparent judicial systems would be essential for sustaining true democracy. State Department and USAID officers who began their careers in Latin America would serve later in Eastern Europe or the Middle East because they had created some of the best practices in supporting democratic change. Sometimes the programs worked, sometimes they didn’t. What didn’t waver was American support for the elements of good governance.

Right up until 2017, when the Obama administration ended, our government’s support for the rule of law and against corruption was a bipartisan goal. Indeed, when the George W. Bush administration created the Millennium Challenge Corporation in 2004 to engage in a new kind of foreign assistance, the first six of 17 listed criteria were: civil liberties; political rights; voice and accountability; government effectiveness; rule of law; and control of corruption. In that and other United States benefit programs then, officials in the executive and legislative branches believed that some success in reducing corruption in a country was required to justify sending it funds collected from American taxpayers.

But the policy went beyond logical fiduciary obligations. The United States, under Republican and Democratic administrations, stood for fairness, rule of law, and a level playing field around the world. To be sure, we didn’t always succeed. But the point we were making was that we were always striving to meet high standards. And even when we failed, the examples of officials going to jail reminded us of our obligations to our national ideal.