The U.S. has, in many ways, led this democratic march over the offshoring cliff. With few Americans paying attention, the U.S. transformed over the past few decades into the world’s leading financial-secrecy haven, providing all of the anonymity services kleptocrats in Moscow and around the world needed to continue their transnational money-laundering operations.

States such as Delaware opened anonymous shell companies for whoever came calling, while South Dakota and others invented new financial-secrecy tools that prevented even the federal government from figuring out who’s behind trusts in those states. Along the way, American law firms—operating for decades without basic anti-money-laundering checks—joined real-estate agents, hedge-fund managers, and art-market executives in providing all the skills and loopholes necessary for oligarchs and related entities to skirt even the most basic regulations.

Why have Western governments been so slow to take action against this sort of corruption? These offshoring networks are, by design, difficult to understand and disentangle. Purposely obscured, purposely buried, their kleptocratic appeal lies in their anonymity and in their invisibility. Yet complexity alone cannot explain the persistence of these practices. For decades, Western industries have profited from the (anonymous) inflows of this oligarchic wealth. Shell-company providers in Nevada and Wyoming, real-estate agents in Malibu and Miami, white-shoe law firms in New York and private-equity managers in Connecticut, art gallerists in San Francisco, and PR spin doctors in Washington—all took a slice of the money pouring through the offshoring sieves, without any questions asked.