https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...
One point the NYT briefly tries to make — which is all I'm addressing in the rest of this comment — is that the U.S. in (very) recent years has mainly interfered to support more democratic candidates, and oppose more authoritarian candidates. And Russia, NYT claims, interferes to support totalitarian candidates and sow chaos. Implying subtly that Trump couldn't possibly be anything other than a strong-man or chaos candidate. That there couldn't possibly be any legitimate democracy-respecting reasons to support him over Hillary (campaign donor influence apparently is perfectly democratic, when it's your candidate receiving the donations aka bribes). Trump may be many things: A nationalist, a pathological liar, in need of a fitness regime and a better diet, and a not very nice person (by most accounts)... but I have not seen any attempt by him to subvert democracy or separation of powers. I have not seen him act particularly chaotically, either. (Weren't Democrats afraid he would start a nuclear war the second he got the nuclear football?) To the extent he's a horrible president, that's the fault of the 2-party system and his catastrophically awful opposing candidate.
So, The NYT basically says, yeah, the U.S. interfered in a lot of elections, but recently we've been doing it for the good of democracy. Russia, meanwhile, interferes to the detriment of democracy.
First, that doesn't change the fact that it's intervention, and intervention itself is anti-democratic. If another country wants to democratically elect a strong man, that's not so good, but do other democratic countries have a right to interfere? Maybe the populations of those countries understand something intuitively about their politics that we don't, and the candidate that looks more authoritarian is really the better of two evils?
Second, when we have interfered — in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria — and it turns out that the "democratic" "freedom fighter" opponents of the existing strong-man leader are terrorists or aligned with terrorists, or the country simply devolves into chaos and faction warfare in the absence of that more totalitarian leader, what then? Is interference justified to support a more freedom-loving candidate when we have no idea (or we know perfectly well, but don't care) that the country is not currently viable as a more open democracy, and needs either a totalitarian ruler or to go through the cleansing fire of a long civil war to cement the concept and importance of democracy in the people's minds?