The Republican-trained Democrats dominated the 1996 elections, knocking the Communist holdovers out of power for the first time in nearly a century. Elbegdorj, who was thirty-five, was reelected to parliament and named prime minister. Within two years he blundered politically by trying to sell a state-owned bank to a large private bank owned by Democrats. “The merger, illegal and corrupt, made several Democrats and their friends extremely rich,” wrote Michael Kohn, an American who edited a state newspaper, the Mongol Messenger. After the MPRP staged a walkout of parliament in protest, Elbegdorj was forced to resign. He later said, “Okay, the bank merger was a bad idea.”
Two years after that, as Mongolia flailed economically, a particularly devastating dzud killed 2 million livestock over the winter, and another 300,000 animals died weekly during the spring, exhausted from fighting starvation and the catastrophic cold. Depressed herders were committing suicide. Elbegdorj soon decamped to the United States. He stopped first at the University of Colorado’s Economic Institute, in Boulder, for English-language immersion, then attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, in 2002, as an Edward S. Mason Fellow, a mid-career program for leaders of developing nations and transitional democracies. He enrolled in courses with star professors like the leadership guru Ronald Heifetz and Jeffrey Sachs, whom the New York Times called “probably the most important economist in the world.” Sachs had spent time in Russia a decade earlier during the breakup of the Soviet Union, where everything was a “mess of every kind.” There he had encountered what others were experiencing across the border in Mongolia: “One could go for literally miles… with utterly one hundred percent empty shops. And if you wanted something you had to go to a black market. You had to make secret deals.”
If the West wanted to groom someone for the Mongolian presidency, Elbegdorj was an ideal candidate. National security experts observed that he expressed positive views of the United States; he favored English to replace Russian as the primary foreign language in public schools; the traits that he revered in Genghis Khan he praised about America, such as a society built upon rule of law. In the States, he tended a growing network of American contacts, including Heritage Foundation leaders, Senator Bob Dole, and the Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, who argued that nations and individuals survive only via free markets. Friedman’s critics argued that the economist and his powerful followers had perfected the strategy of “waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the ‘reforms’ permanent,” Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Friedmanesque policies were ideological smokescreens for multinational corporations to acquire wealth, she wrote; what inevitably emerged was a “powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians—with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.” Some of the fiercest fans of Friedman’s policies were the “Communists turned capitalists” in China and the Soviet Union, whose collapse left nothing standing in the way. Klein had published her book as a challenge to the idea that “unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy.” Elbegdorj admired Friedman’s doctrine so much that his NGO, the Liberty Institute, translated his work into Mongolian.
In the spring of 2003, toward the end of his time in the United States, Elbegdorj attended a leadership conference at Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, once described as a “conservative think tank school.” Then he traveled to New Orleans for a Heritage Foundation conference, where he met a young lawyer named Robert Painter.
Painter had lived in Texas for years, but he came from Beckley, West Virginia, from a family with a political pedigree but little involvement in current politics. As a young boy in a state more blue than red at the time, Robert somehow became such a fan of Ronald Reagan that he taped the news coverage of Reagan’s assassination attempt. At West Virginia University, he became active in College Republicans. He volunteered for the Bush-Quayle campaign and wrote a manual on how to politically organize teenage Republicans. When the handbook went national, he and his cohort became known to high-profile conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who was busy “sweeping college campuses around America.”
Painter, who was six foot three, had the resonant voice of a radio announcer, the gregariousness of a networker, and the neatly combed hair of a church deacon. At first he planned to become a doctor, but in the late 1990s, he enrolled at Baylor Law. Baylor, a private university founded in the mid-1800s, was the world’s largest Baptist campus. The Princeton Review had named it a “Best Western College” and, recently, the most bigoted school in America. Boosters bristled at the characterization, though the Baylor Lariat, the student newspaper, agreed with the assessment, writing in an editorial, “There is seemingly a good number of Baylor students who just aren’t willing to accept those whose beliefs or skin color are different from their own.”
Serving on Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, Painter had made a lot of contacts, developing unlikely acquaintanceships with both former president Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom. While in law school he started a nonprofit called Liberty Forum, backed by a Virginia-based conservative youth group called the Leadership Institute, an organization that had helped him and a friend found a conservative newspaper at Marshall University, where Painter had briefly attended medical school and his friend had hosted a Rush Limbaugh fan club in the cafeteria. Painter named the Texas publication Libertas. Once a month, he and his friends distributed the tabloid on campus. Articles referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as a “Communist-sympathizer and plagiarist” and called out faculty who supported liberal political candidates. Headlines included “AIDS Quilt: is it laced with more than just compassion?” wherein the author characterized the disease as the “medically documented consequences to sinful behavior.” Baylor’s student newspaper wasted no time responding to the publication’s arrival: “Libertas looks like a newspaper and reads like a newspaper, but that doesn’t make it a newspaper,” read one Lariat editorial. A Baylor senior, Alyson Ward, published an unequivocal column on Libertas’s abuse of journalistic standards, acknowledging that there was “something admirable about being controversial and hard-hitting” but noting that Libertas had utterly failed in that regard by publishing rumors and name-calling to a degree “reminiscent of McCarthyism.” She wrote, “It’s not that they’re veering too far to the right but that they’re moving in some unclear direction under the guidance of people with suspicious motives and methods.”
In late January 1999, Painter and a handful of friends headed to Washington, DC, for the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the world’s largest annual gathering of conservatives. The Leadership Institute paid their way. The students planned to meet with Republican figures like Dan Quayle and Oliver North. Taunya McLarty, a friend of Painter’s who worked for Senator John Ashcroft, arranged for the group to observe a day of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Less than two weeks after the Washington trip, Libertas announced plans to broaden its distribution base to include “conservative donors across the nation.” Twenty-five thousand copies of the latest issue were mailed to “high-dollar conservatives.” Painter told the school newspaper, “Many of the conservative donors are very interested in what’s going on at college campuses.”
Liberty Forum dissolved later that year, after Painter graduated from law school. He joined Fulbright & Jaworski, a pedigreed megafirm in Houston, working in the area of medical malpractice. A few years later he married McLarty, a fellow lawyer who had joined the legal staff at Walmart. Around 2005, as the Painters started having children, they opened their own practice, Painter Law Firm, in a two-story brick office building near their upscale Houston neighborhood, Champion Forest.
By that point Painter had founded a nonprofit called Bellwether Forum, for young professionals who wanted to learn about government and
politics. Directors, members, and advisers included or would include senators and judges; an appointee in George W. Bush’s executive office for Homeland Security; and Jay Weimer, who would become an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Texas. Painter planned a speaker series echoing a similar project he’d started while at Baylor, whose guests had included the Watergate burglar Bernard Barker. Bellwether acknowledged the challenge of “selling politics to the average person,” but noted that people “secretly yearn to be in the inner-circle of influence in government.” Members attended events with titles like Cocktail Party Capitalist and You Can Change Your Local Government; they could join the “The Washington Experience,” a DC field trip to CPAC, where they might meet privately with insiders like Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and Texas congressman Tom DeLay.
In April 2003, Bellwether members traveled to New Orleans for Heritage Foundation Resource Bank, an annual gathering of conservatives who wanted “to share the lessons they’ve learned in the battles for freedom.” John Ashcroft, by now the U.S. attorney general, was keynoting, and the Painters wanted to say hi. As Robert waited to speak to Elaine Chao, then the labor secretary, he noticed an Asian man wearing a name tag that read “Former PM, Mongolia.” Intrigued, Painter approached him and said, “What’s your story?” Instantly, he and Elbegdorj—“E. B.”—were friends. Two months later, the former prime minister addressed Bellwether members in Houston and spoke at a continuing education event for attorneys, telling his audience of two hundred, “You know, even though Mongolia is seven thousand miles away from here, my country is becoming much closer to this part of the world than ever.”
Whenever anyone asked Elbegdorj about Mongolia, he explained his homeland in three parts. One, Mongolia was a great empire in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Two, Mongolia was the second country in the world, after Russia, to become Communist, a system that he believed created criminals by prohibiting free enterprise and private ownership of property and businesses. Third, Mongolia was in transition as the only Asian country pursuing economic and political freedoms and reforms. People assumed that such reforms “could not be achieved in Asia,” Elbegdorj told his audience. “Mongolia actually broke that stereotype, showing that if these reforms and freedom could be introduced in Mongolia, they could work anywhere in the world.” He added, “Making this kind of transition, considering Mongolia’s location between Russia and China, is a huge and challenging task.”
By autumn, the former prime minister was home in Ulaanbaatar, sporting a seat on Bellwether Forum’s advisory board and a Harvard class ring, which his wife let him wear on his wedding finger.
Elbegdorj became prime minister again in June 2004, this time in a power-sharing agreement with former president Nambaryn Enkhbayar, a member of the MPRP, or the old Communist Party. Right away Elbegdorj reached out to the United States, announcing his new position in a letter to Senate majority whip Mitch McConnell, and saying the peaceful transition represented “Mongolians’ continuing commitment to democracy and human rights.” When Eagle TV, the station he had reportedly helped found, returned to the air on October 22, 2005, after a hiatus, the network spent the first day, all day, on live coverage of the inaugural visit to Mongolia by a U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
Soon, George W. Bush became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country that was being called a “poster child for democracy in Eurasia” and a “desirable security interest.” In Far Eastern Economic Review, John Tkacik, a retired foreign service officer, wrote that “the American stake in Mongolia is not insignificant,” noting, “Although rarely recognized, Mongolia is of critical geopolitical importance….Its 1.5 million square kilometers of real estate is a stabilizing element in Eurasia that keeps border frictions between its two giant neighbors, Russia and China, from reaching a critical mass of conflict.” While Mongolians had “never dared think of themselves as anything but real estate over which Russians and Chinese had fought for centuries” they were now “very self-conscious about their importance in the global scheme of things,” and it thrilled some to see a U.S. defense secretary and a president visit back to back. “Americans and Mongolians have much in common,” Bush told an audience of eight hundred on November 21, 2005. “Both our nations were settled by pioneers on horseback who tamed the rugged plains. Both our nations shook the yoke of colonial rule and built successful free societies. And both our nations know that our responsibilities in freedom’s cause do not end at our borders and that survival of liberty in our own lands increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” Thanking his host country for backing the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bush pledged $11 million to help improve Mongolia’s military.
The next several years were tumultuous. Elbegdorj was in and out of power as the young democracy came to life, stumbled, and then rose again. When he and MPRP leaders accused each other of malfeasance, well-crafted press releases and news items went out, calling the old Communists “the godfathers of corruption” and Elbegdorj “Mongolia’s Thomas Jefferson.” (Elbegdorj’s speechwriters included Bellwether Forum board member and public relations executive Robert Bauer, who also wrote speeches for George W. Bush and Afghanistan’s former president, Hamid Karzai.) At one point, Elbegdorj warned that the disintegrating government “immediately created a dangerous situation in our country.” In a phone interview with the Harvard Crimson, he said, “It’s kind of a coup d’état.”
To regroup, in May 2007, Elbegdorj invited Painter and a Bellwether team to Mongolia to train the Democratic Party in American-style politics. Instructors included a National Rifle Association executive and a fund-raiser for the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a lesser-known organization of right-wing activists that a New York Times editorial once described as a generator of “voter ID laws that marginalize minorities and the elderly, anti-union bills that hurt the middle class, and the dismantling of protective environmental regulations.” ALEC had been instrumental in the passage of the “Stand Your Ground” laws that gave armed civilians more legal leeway to shoot to kill. Its major funders included foundations with ties to Koch Industries’ Charles and David Koch, brothers who contributed heavily to conservative and libertarian think tanks, campaigns, and causes. While Mongolia’s opposition was called the Democratic Party, by U.S. standards its politics were decidedly right-wing.
By the time Elbegdorj ran for president in May 2009, he had dropped visa requirements for American tourists and pushed to abolish the death penalty. He had announced plans to create a tourism ministry and privatized the nation’s yaks. He had removed the Soviet-era mausoleums from Sukhbaatar Square and brought a massive bronze of Genghis Khan to the front steps of Government House. He had been the target of a suspected assassination attempt and accused of inciting deadly riots after the parliamentary elections of 2008 by questioning the validity of the vote.
Mongolia faced an ever-widening wealth gap, the privatization of the past two decades having laid a foundation for a “system whereby a small elite controls disproportionate resources and a large population of poor are without basic services,” as one Asia analyst put it in a report for the Brookings Institution. President Enkhbayar signed for a whopping $285 million in relief from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which President George W. Bush created to “reinvent” foreign aid, but the aid package didn’t help him hold on to the presidency. When Elbegdorj defeated Enkhbayar by 41,770 votes in 2009, everyone worried that the close count would trigger more violence. But nothing much happened. To everyone’s surprise, Enkhbayar conceded. On May 24, 2009, Elbegdorj became the first Mongolian president educated in the West, and the first never to have been a member of the Communist Party. In his presidential suite, he hung a picture of Margaret Thatcher and one of Ronald Reagan.
To those invested in seeing democracy develop a stronger foothold in East Asia, it was essential that Elbegdorj stay in power for two terms—eight
years—and that the Democratic Party take control of parliament in the 2012 election. The MPRP had been in charge for much of the past six decades, and the next four-year parliament would, among other things, establish mining policies and decide how to distribute the “tens of billions” of dollars expected to “flood” the country in a bid for natural resources. If Mongolia behaved fairly and transparently, it could parlay its staggering mineral wealth into “a stable, middle-class society like Qatar,” analysts were saying, while continued corruption would trigger something similar to Nigeria, “where an oil boom in the 1970s led to environmental degradation and conflict, the country’s wealth frittered away by corrupt officials, its average citizens mired in poverty,” the Guardian reported.
The government had finally worked out a deal to develop Oyu Tolgoi, an enormous copper and gold mine in the southern Gobi with an estimated life span of over a hundred years. A Canadian company, Ivanhoe Mines, had landed a $6 billion deal to develop the project with its parent, the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, after much negotiation with the Mongolians. The ultimate agreement called for Ivanhoe to receive 66 percent of Oyu Tolgoi and Mongolia 34 percent, but some parliament members had decided the ratio was unfair and that Mongolians deserved better. The mining companies, which had already invested over $2 billion, expected the government to honor the contract, and Mongolia’s sudden reneging made international investors nervous.
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