Though many -- particularly the "liberventionists" -- will disagree, the recent move by the Russian parliament to limit the power of foreign "NGOs" in Russia should be heralded by true libertarians in the United States and elsewhere for several reasons.
First, just economics. The major US "NGOs" are primarily funded by the US government. This is especially the case with the so-called human rights NGOs like Freedom House and even the various Open Society (sic) octopi. This is an illegal taking of the wealth of US citizens to affect political change overseas. Any libertarian or Constitutionalist or old-line conservative who doesn't object on these grounds alone is a fraud.
Second, a moral argument. It is simply immoral and dangerous for the United States, through its "GONGOs" (government organized NGOs) to embrace the same dialectic that drove the old Soviet Union to seek to remake the world in its own image.
As British writer John Laughland writes recently in the Spectator (linked above):
In short, any state which pursues a policy of national independence will soon find itself in the West’s cross-hairs. The Clintonite doctrine that there are such things as "rogue states," which has been effortlessly adopted by George W. Bush, means precisely this. There is an international and a domestic aspect to this hostility to the state: internationally, George Bush’s "forward strategy of freedom," predicated as it is on the assumption that states have a right to enjoy their national sovereignty only under certain conditions, entails support for the anti-sovereignist dictates of punitive supranational law. In internal politics, the anti-state Marxist-Hegelian doctrine of "civil society" has become a central plank of Western thinking, at least for states it wishes to control. In Eastern Europe, for instance, supposed "non-governmental organisations" are invariably presented as being more authentic and objective representatives of popular opinion than the established, public, law-based structures of the state. This applies even when the so-called NGOs are in fact front organisations funded by Western governments, as is often the case. Indeed, the mere activity of "opposition" is, by itself, often elevated to a sort of political sainthood, as if the exercise of authority and power were intrinsically sinful. In one egregious case, in Georgia, the task of counting the votes in the January 2004 presidential election was given to just such a private NGO, with the established state authorities simply sidelined.Like Marxists, indeed, and like many of his European friends, George Bush appears to believe both that freedom is an ineluctable "force of history" and also that it requires constant struggle to achieve it. He argues, like Hegel, Marx’s precursor, that humanity is one, and that a free state like the USA is not really free if other states live under tyranny. In his mind, old-fashioned American Puritan millenarianism marries easily with the missionary mentality of world revolutionists: "The survival of liberty in our land," he said in January, "increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." A true conservative, by contrast, would say that there is much evil in the outside world – and that the duty of a statesman is to hold it at bay.
The "NGO" phenomenon that swept Central Europe in the early 1990s, funded primarily by the US, was the mark by which the former communist states were measured vis-a-vis democratization. In fact, we see now (and many saw at the time) that the establishment of well-funded quasi-state organizations that answered not to the local population but to a foreign power was a tool by which elites in the West guaranteed that elites in the former communist countries (who knew well that bootlicking brought prosperity) would remain in the driver's seat and would usher in a "managed transition" not to true political and economic freedom, but to a managerial state where the strings that matter are pulled from thousands of miles away. That is the reason local economies were never allowed to develop once the state-owned monstrosities fell silent.
What does all this mean for Russia? Clearly the Russians understand the nature of the "color-coded" revolutions that the US has fomented all around them. Indeed, at a meeting this summer with the heads of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization it was made clear to me that Russia (and the other members for that matter) were extremely wary of US semi-covert moves in the region with the provocations and "people's revolutions" from Ukraine to the attempted people-power putsch in Uzbekistan.
Though this move is already being sold as "the Kremlin's latest effort to stifle civil society and democracy," the truth is in fact the opposite. There is nothing democratic or "civil" about foreign-funded political organizations maneuvering at the behest of their paymasters. It is the raw exercise of coercive power, plain and simple. For Russia to restrict these phony, totalitarian "NGOs" is actually a great sign that Russia is moving toward more freedom. It should be celebrated by all of us who care about such things.
