I am a citizen of India. India is constitutionally a democracy. It has a fundamental and foundational interest in supporting democracy worldwide. While suffering under colonialism, the promise offered by the dream of India’s freedom was democratic self-rule ('swaraj') and sovereignty over its own affairs.
Some potted history follows. Many episodes in India's long history show that when you invite a foreign power to help subdue your domestic rivals, you end up ultimately losing your own sovereignty to the foreign power.
The most recent examples lie in how India was colonized by the British East India Company. Beginning with a trading treaty with Emperor Jahangir in 1612, the Company, in pursuit of trade and control, ultimately took over most of India, kingdom after kingdom, bit by bit. The Company would involve itself in local conflicts of Indian kings, play them against each other through promise of trade and military alliances. It would then turn around and impose conditions, forcing former allies to become vassals or take them over completely. By the time of the most notable Indian rebellion, the mutiny in 1857, the East India Company exerted military and political control over most of India and had India's economy in a vice-like grip.
The British government took over control in 1857. The Indian independence movement ran from the mid-1880s to 1947. One of the independence movement’s underlying precepts was 'India will not attain freedom without unity'. Well, India did become free without complete unity in 1947 after the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Post-independence, post-partition, India is free, but outside interests are able to exert themselves in the region. The latest power to fish profitably in troubled India-Pakistan waters is China.
So, as an Indian, my skin crawls and hairs rise when many Americans say about Russian interference in the 2016 elections things like:
anything is better than obama and or the murdering clintons
The Trump administration and the Republican Party have obstructed almost all action to bring to light Russian interference in 2016 or to take corrective action to protect the sanctity of US elections in future.
Elected Republicans in the Senate and House, and those in the Trump administration declare themselves to be completely blase about the numerous contacts and money associations that members of the Trump campaign and some Republican entities had/continue have with Russia, Saudi Arabia and China, to name a few.
Republicans are doing their best to bury the Mueller report out of sight and loudly denounce even normal oversight by House Committees. It appears that anything goes for the cause of defeating the Democratic Party. The GOP considers its domestic rival to be an enemy having lower moral standing and less legitimacy than opportunistic foreign entities.
Now, the US and its citizens have the sovereign right to undermine their own sovereignty.
But in case anyone needs reminding, here are some civics basics about foreign interference in elections of a hypothetical state C:
1. When party A uses a foreign state F’s help to gain advantage over its domestic rivals, party B, party A undermines the political rights of its fellow citizens, of party B and of party B's supporters. Party A violates the social contract laid out in state C’s constitution.
2. Party A and their supporters lose political rights too, because in taking foreign help, they have given foreign state F leverage over themselves, and over their state C's government.
3. The state C, party A, party B and citizens of C all surrender some of their sovereignty, namely, their exclusive rights over their own affairs, to foreign state F.
4. Foreign state F gets to wield power over state C's and its citizens' affairs to further its own interests, without being accountable to state C's citizens. When people who wield power over a state C are not accountable to the citizens of C, not via elections nor via a constitution, that is defined as imperialism or colonialism. This situation is all good for foreign state F, and all bad for state C. State C gets no reverse leverage.
5. Once a foreign state F gets to interfere with state C's electoral process and party B's candidates without any push-back from state C, foreign states G, H and K feel encouraged to jump in to do so too.
6. When party B sees party A getting foreign state F’s (or G, H and K's) help to win multiple election cycles without any push-back, party B might see foreign help as the only way to defeat party A and win elections too. Politics is the art of the possible and foreign help has been made possible.
7. Once both party B and party A, and their legislators are compromised by the influence of foreign states, and the judicial and bureaucratic apparatus of state C are under thrall of political appointees, ordinary citizens will have trouble getting any legal/political/legislative processes to work to restore their sovereignty over their government and their affairs.
8. There will be no Mueller in 2020.
PS: Sovereignty:
Sovereignty is the full right and power of a governing body over itself, without any interference from outside sources or bodies.
PPS: Some things like the erosion of sovereignty are like the 9/11 attacks: we refuse to believe they can happen until they do.