Yes, history tells us the CIA manipulated elections in 1940s Italy and 1950s Germany—and beyond electoral shenanigans, it also secretly helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s. And American diplomats strive mightily to cajole, persuade, and pressure foreign leaders and sometimes voters to do what seems to those diplomats like the right thing—these days in places ranging from Ukraine and Georgia to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Tunisia. Scott Shane of The New York Times recently also placed in this big basket the multifaceted campaign waged by the U.S. for the electoral ouster in 2000 of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the “Butcher of the Balkans,” along with a reported (and unsuccessful) 2009 U.S. scheme to sideline the obdurate Afghan president Hamid Karzai. I would argue that the campaign against Milosevic was justified due to the fact that he was an implacable foe of democracy in Serbia, as well as the author of several rounds of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia—and that his departure was a necessary precursor to the democracy-building that flourished in Serbia after he was voted out of office.

Still, in all of these historical cases, the U.S. was engaged in purposeful efforts to secure a very specific political outcome—the ouster or the installation of a particular leader, depending on which one was thought to be conducive to American interests and the country’s stability. But where America’s domestic and foreign critics alike commit a serious category error is in placing present-day U.S. democracy-promotion efforts in the same basket. Shane, for example, writes that “in recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been the taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills and build democratic institutions and train election monitors.”

There are two important distinctions to clarify. First, and most important, is the difference between programs to strengthen democratic processes in another country (without regard to specific electoral outcomes), versus efforts to manipulate another country’s election in order to sow chaos, undermine public confidence in the political system, and diminish a country’s social stability.

Having played several roles in the American democracy bureaucracy, in and out of government—as a diplomat and then aid official during the Obama administration, and earlier on the front lines of non-governmental organizations including NDI and Freedom House—I have seen this play out from diverse perspectives. As a U.S. official, I was called upon to engage foreign governments on their democratic deficits and to persuade them to improve, citing their own national stability, enhanced prosperity, and the ways in which it would improve our bilateral amity. As an NGO implementer, I traveled with less fanfare and mostly engaged with people outside governments, listening and assessing capabilities and opportunities, providing technical information, connecting newly experienced civic activists and politicians from recent transitions to those in the throes of change. In addition to practical advice, my colleagues and I sought to convey to those trying to improve the quality of governance and justice in their own countries that there is a global band of brothers and sisters prepared to help across borders—as part of a broader assistance effort to advance stability, economic development, and modernization.