In the past, when I heard money laundering, I’d think of organized criminals taking elicit money and finding ways to secure it and make it usable. But money laundering on the international level, involving authoritarian regimes, and the oligarchs and organized criminals within those regimes finding people in liberal democratic countries to help them launder their money has a national security component as well–at least if my understanding is accurate. The people in Western countries helping these people are doing something wrong, if not illegal. This can be used as leverage against them to not only continue the money laundering, but maybe do other things to help the authoritarian regimes. This is obvious if the people assisting with money laundering have political positions, but if they have any position of influence in the society–e.g., legal, media, academic, business, technology, etc.–bad actors can use the leverage with these people to harm national security and national interests. At least that’s what it seems like to me. Anyway, I started to this thread because I couldn’t find the other threads or posts that discussed this, and I wanted to post an article on this topic. The article is from Just Security and it’s called, Global Kleptocracy as an American Problem