Читать книгу Putin on the March - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 5
ОглавлениеHow does a nation with a weak and vulnerable economy and inferior military go on an international military and intelligence winning streak the likes of which haven’t been seen in years? How does a nation with a fraction of America’s striking power exert its will in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and sow doubts about the legitimacy of American democracy—further polarizing and dividing an already-divided superpower?
How does Russia win?
–DAVID FRENCH, NATIONAL REVIEW 1
[Russian information warfare is] about destabilizing democracy and pitting us against each other to limit the influence of the United States on the world stage.
–JONATHON MORGAN, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL 2
Remember the 2012 presidential election, during which President Obama held off the challenge of the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney?
Remember the debates? There were three. In the first, Romney scored a decisive win over an off-his-game Obama. In the second, in the “town hall” format, the president rallied and had a good night. And in the third, devoted to foreign policy, the two candidates had this exchange:
OBAMA: Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaeda; you said Russia—the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years . . .
ROMNEY: Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin.3
Obama won the soundbite war, and he won the election. But five years later, it is clear that Romney’s warnings were correct and that Obama’s dismissals of Vladimir Putin’s Russia were woefully, damagingly wrong.
Moreover, something else is clear: Putin and Russia are winning at every level in which they are engaged, and there is little sign that their victories will be reversed.
What has Putin achieved since that October evening when Obama and Romney debated? Consider just the leading points: He has forcibly annexed Crimea from Ukraine, causing international condemnation for Russia but few other genuine costs; he has destabilized and weakened Ukraine, which is fighting a low-level war for its independence and survival. And in the course of moving against Kiev—in a part of the world Russia has always considered its “near abroad”—Putin made a successful bet that the Western democracies, led by the United States, would do nothing to stop him. He was correct then and he appears to be correct still.
In the charnel house that is Syria, again with the condemnations of world leaders ringing in his ears, Putin boldly intervened on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship despite the risks of a military confrontation with the United States or other Western powers. Here, too, Putin bet that the United States and its Western allies, when push came to shove, would want no part of any fighting in Syria. They would talk, and they would levy sanctions, but if he held firm and stood by his ally, he would prevail. And he has. Assad is in power to stay, and Putin has made Russia a power broker in the Middle East.
Putin’s triumph in Syria has had the residual effect of causing a refugee crisis that is flooding Europe with desperate people, most of them Muslim and more than enough of whom are prone to radicalism and terror. European capitals are roiling with political anger and divisions over how to handle the influx of people—or whether to accept them at all. The rise of nationalist, antiglobalist parties in most EU countries can in many cases be closely tied to the Syrian refugee crisis, a crisis that likely wouldn’t exist had Washington pushed back on Putin in Syria when it had the leverage to do so.
Indeed, a quailing Obama basically outsourced US Syria policy to Russia by declining to enforce his red line on chemical-weapons use; during Trump’s presidential campaign, he eagerly followed suit, seeking to enlist Putin as some kind of regional policeman, especially on ISIS, to keep us out of Syria. This refusal to act is a serious abnegation of the US leadership role in the world, suggestive of a deep isolationism born of populist disgust with elite foreign policy after Iraq.
The refugee crisis and the Western paralysis and disagreement over Syria have fostered deep divisions and instability in the Western Alliance. An EU official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, called it “Putin’s year,” and said that the Russian leader was “looking at a divided Europe”—just what he wants. The EU official was deeply concerned because the “United States for the first time is providing no counterbalance to [Putin].”4 Indeed, the election of Donald Trump has tested the stability of the alliance. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump spoke critically of NATO and other traditional Western alliances, to the dismay of many; at one point, he even suggested that the durable postwar alliance was “obsolete.”5 (More recently, he retracted that judgment.) No previous presidential candidate had ever questioned the centrality of the Western Alliance. Trump is a patriot, but his skepticism—and, in my view, his naiveté—about the vital role of the Western Alliance plays into Putin’s designs.
Under Putin, Russia forged a strong partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran, just as Tehran was finalizing its nuclear deal with the United States—a deal almost entirely on terms that will benefit the mullahs, not Washington. Along with its Syrian achievements, Russia’s new closeness with Iran makes it the new superpower of the Middle East. And just to make that point clearer, Putin has even reached out to Israel, which, after eight years of getting back-of-the-hand treatment from the Obama administration, was receptive to overtures from the Russian president.
Putin also continues to deepen his historic alliance with the People’s Republic of China. What I have called the Russia-China Axis is the fundamental anti-Western, antidemocratic, anti-American force in the world today. And we remain ill equipped to deal with it, largely because we do not seem ready even to acknowledge its existence, its active moves around the world, and the implications it presents for our foreign policy.
Putin’s victories have provided positive propaganda for his antidemocratic, anti-Western model of governance. With China and Iran as his partners, he is exemplifying a different model than the democratic, free-market framework, which has been reeling for more than a decade from the shocks of war, financial instability, inept leadership, and economic stagnation. Putin offers antidemocrats around the world new hope that there is another way to do things. His is a bleak and depressing model—but it is gaining ground, and not just in non-Western precincts. A portion of the right wing in Western democracies finds Putin’s nationalist brio, social conservatism, and contempt for opposition appealing and even inspiring.
Finally, Putin is also having a huge impact right here at home in the United States—as everyone knows. As this manuscript goes to press, Congress and the Justice Department are still conducting investigations into the contacts between Russia and members of the Trump administration—with suggestions of potential collusion between the two during the 2016 presidential campaign. US intelligence agencies have confirmed that during the campaign, Russian hackers were responsible for the leak of thousands of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee. Russians were also identified as the source of “fake news” stories, such as the rumors about Hillary Clinton’s health. The Russian role in the election was so prominent that it has set the always-warring political parties at each other’s throats yet again, this time arguing over whether the process was legitimate or fatally compromised by the chicanery of an international foe. If it does nothing else, the Russian hacking scandal has succeeded in dramatically weakening Americans’ already-shaky faith in our political system—but the story, of course, is far from over, and it might yet result in a full-blown, Watergate-level constitutional crisis.
Many believe that the United States is undergoing a period of discord and division not seen since at least the late 1960s; others, sounding more dire warnings, believe that the country is coming apart. A primary perpetrator in both critiques is Russia and the role of Russian influence. And this represents a Putin victory, too.
“President Trump talks about winning? Right now, Putin is winning,” said former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge in March 2017. Ridge was talking about the investigations into Putin’s election meddling happening in Washington. The goal for Putin, Ridge said, is “destabilization”—and he is achieving it. “Let’s create chaos, let’s create uncertainty, let’s destabilize the political environment,” Ridge said. “[The Russians] have done a wonderful job. If that was their goal, they have done it.”6
It is indeed one of their goals, and has been for years. But it’s only one front on the battlefield on which Putin operates.
A year ago, I coauthored a book with Evan Roth Smith called Putin’s Master Plan: To Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence. We wrote it as a warning to readers and, I hoped, to our political leaders that the Russian leader had a grand vision and a determined plan to execute it. Moreover, we warned, the plan was far from some abstract design: on the contrary, it was an active, ongoing reality, with some setbacks along the way but, for the most part, hard-earned, substantial successes. And we warned that the United States simply didn’t have its eye on the ball in regard to Russia, and that, unless this changed, Putin would continue to gain.
Our warnings have been borne out. I’m hard-pressed to identify an important assertion that we got wrong. I say this not to boast but to underscore the gravity of the situation we face. The sobering truth is that Putin is meeting with sustained success in the three key areas in which he needs to prevail: foreign policy; control of Russian internal politics; and keeping the United States and our Western allies off balance, demoralized, and even destabilized.
Putin has done everything in his power to reclaim Russia’s lost command of its traditional sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and its lost glory as a superpower. Those who dismiss what he has done as unsustainable, ill-advised, or reckless seem to willfully overlook one fundamental truth: he is getting away with it, and the more he is able to get away with and the longer he can do so, the stronger he becomes—especially as the Western democracies grow more fractured, both from their own internal problems and from the lack of a consensus on how to respond to him.
It is a fact that Putin has won in Syria. The West (and the Syrian people) has lost, in no small part because the countries refused to fight. Ceasefire talks don’t even bother to include the United States or other Western powers. The game is over: Assad has prevailed because Putin was willing to put blood and treasure on the line to preserve his rule—and was willing to bet, wisely as it turns out, that the West would do nothing to stop him.
Putin, in Charles Krauthammer’s words, left the Obama administration’s presumptions in tatters. “The mantra out of this administration always was, ‘You can’t solve a civil war militarily,’” Krauthammer said. “The answer is, you can.”7 Indeed, Putin used force to achieve a clear objective: Save the Assad regime, and, as a collateral goal, discredit the West. He achieved both ends.
In December 2016, as the ceasefire was being negotiated without American participation, Moscow informed Washington that any US bombing strikes on Syrian targets without Russian approval would be met with force. The Russians put down a marker. They had a marker down from the beginning in Syria. They stand by their friends and allies. The Americans do not. Remember Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? President Obama let him be deposed—showing for all that the United States would stand by as an allied regime on which it had spent trillions twisted in the wind. Not Putin; when the chips were down and seemingly the whole world stood against Assad, and, by extension, Putin, the Russian leader did not waver. Four years later, he has won in Syria, pushed the United States out of any role in what happens next, and greatly strengthened the Russian hand. And all for an effort that wound up costing the Russians less in blood and treasure than Moscow had expected.
International observers agree that NATO stands today at its most unstable point since the alliance’s inception. This is not all Putin’s doing; Western democracies have grappled with political upheaval and institutional collapse for years. But a solid portion of it does have to do with Putin: Russian aggression has further divided Europe and undermined the stability of EU and the NATO alliance. The state of the EU today reflects in considerable degree the success that the Russian leader has had in eroding and dividing an alliance that he has always seen as a threat to Russian security and to his own neo-Soviet ambitions of renewed empire.
“The last thing Russia wants is a strong Europe,” wrote Judy Dempsey for Carnegie Europe. “A strong Europe means having a coherent and united foreign, security and defense policy.”8
Before he left office in January 2017, Bulgarian president Rosen Plevneliev warned about Putin. “The threat,” he said, “is less about Russian tanks invading Europe and more about Russian influence dividing the Continent.”9 He said that his country was under attack by Russian hacking and propaganda during a referendum and local elections. He urged Western leaders to recognize that they were in a “dangerous and unpredictable” confrontation that he called “Cold Peacetime.” He warned: “The game of Mr Putin is to make other countries dependent.”10
But it was too late. Bulgaria had already elected a pro-Putin regime.
Donald Trump may prove to be a successful president, but, so far, his impact on the Western Alliance has been a destabilizing one—in no small part because of perceptions that he is sympathetic to, or at least apathetic about, Putin’s designs. Our NATO and EU allies don’t necessarily believe that the United States is on their side. This was made dramatically clear when the EU’s “most senior Brexit negotiator,” a member of the European parliament from Belgium, launched an attack on Trump and Putin, calling them a “ring of autocrats” who want to destroy Europe.11
“Not only do they like each other, they also have one thing in common,” said Guy Verhofstadt. “Bashing and destroying our way of thinking, our values, our European liberal democracy.”12
Putin has also taken Turkey out of the Western/NATO orbit, even if Ankara technically stays a member of the treaty organization. He turned Turkey away from the United States, all the while “winning” on Syria. Before recent years, this would have been thought of as an unfathomable development, and in fact it was unfathomable even more recently when Russia and Turkey came to loggerheads in Syria. During the Syrian conflict, Turkey, allied with the United States, worked furiously for the overthrow of Assad, Putin’s client and the ally of Shiite Iran, the natural rival of and frequent meddler in Sunni Turkey. And Putin worked just as furiously to save Assad.
Russia’s success in Syria was bad enough on its own—the entire situation has been a humanitarian and political disaster—but, worse, Russia and Turkey have now found common cause. Again, a Western political-leadership vacuum was crucial in doing so. Now, Putin and Erdogan, along with the mullahs in Iran, are the power brokers in the Syrian future, having taken responsibility for the Syrian ceasefire. Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, whom President Obama called “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend” of the United States in 2012, is edging closer and closer to an alliance with Putin. Russia and Turkey have even begun joint bombing missions against ISIS.13
Further, Putin and Erdogan are restarting the Turkish Stream natural-gas pipeline, a gas route that would bypass Russia’s existing pipelines through Eastern Europe to bring Russian gas to Western markets. The idea is that Russia, if troubles with Ukraine deepen, will be able to continue its gas transactions with Western countries like Germany and Italy without worrying about supplies being disrupted through the Eastern pipelines. The new pipeline, in other words, will allow Russia to cut off gas supplies to nearby countries like Ukraine while not having to disrupt sales to countries like Italy or Austria.
Even the assassination in Ankara of Russia’s Turkish ambassador hasn’t stalled the two countries’ rapprochement. “A crime has been committed and it was without doubt a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalisation of Russo-Turkish relations and spoiling the Syrian peace process which is being actively pushed by Russia, Turkey, Iran and others,” said Putin in an address to the nation. “There can only be one response—stepping up the fight against terrorism. The bandits will feel this happening.”14
Few Western observers seem to have absorbed the magnitude of the Turkish move toward Russia. Turkey had been long regarded as NATO’s Eastern partner. If its drift toward Moscow proves enduring, it could alter the power dynamic between Western Europe and Russia for years to come—by further weakening NATO, strengthening the hand of autocrats, and lessening the influence of the West in the Muslim world.
Putin has also built a strong and stable yet misunderstood alliance with China. For years, I have warned about the impending Russia-China axis. If anything, things have only grown worse. The Russia-China reconciliation has expanded and accelerated to degrees even I would not have imagined.
“Over these last decades,” Putin said in October 2016, “we have developed quite unique relations of trust and mutual support [with China].”15 That is an understatement.
The two nations, once sworn enemies, have much in common—the common denominator is the desire to check and contain American power. Their trade interests, especially in energy, have both deepened in recent years, and they have each posed a distinct variation of an anti-Western, antidemocratic alternative model of power—models that, as the West flounders, gain ground internationally and even win hearts in democratic countries. Their militaries, once facing off across heavily fortified borders, have been increasing joint exercises, especially in 2015 when they put together huge naval exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean. And both are neck deep in rogue-state support and patronage, from the Middle East to the Far East to South America.
In late July 2017, North Korea test fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that experts concluded could have the range to hit Alaska, if not major US cities (yet). The missile test prompted a new round of high-tension rhetoric between Pyongyang and Washington, with President Trump warning Kim Jong-un that the North faced “fire and fury” if it continued to make threats.16 Even more disturbingly, the tests seemed to represent a quantum leap forward for North Korea’s missile-development efforts; most previous tests, while concerning, were usually marked by failure, sometimes abject failure, suggesting that the North was a long way from missile viability. But with this one, Pyongyang had attained a serious missile capability apparently overnight. How?
In early August 2017, an answer emerged, in the opening paragraph of a bombshell New York Times report: “North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines probably from a Ukrainian factory with historical ties to Russia’s missile program, according to an expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.” The report went on to detail how US analysts had studied photos of Kim inspecting the new missiles’ rocket motors and concluded that they derived from old Soviet designs. The motors are thought to be powerful enough that “a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.” The focal point of the activity is thought to be a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, which in Cold War days made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal.17
The North Korea/Russia/Ukraine missile story has been the strongest sign yet of a phenomenon that remains largely unknown to the general public: the tightening embrace between Russia and North Korea. Putin first visited North Korea in 2000; his ties with Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, were fairly strong, but most observers continue to associate the Hermit Kingdom with its traditional benefactor, China. Putin’s Russia, however, is moving closer and closer to a newly meaningful alliance with Pyongyang. Multiple reports in April 2017 indicated that Russia was massing its troops along its border with the Hermit Kingdom in the aftermath of a tense stare-down between the United States, Pyongyang, and Beijing over one of North Korea’s recent missile tests. Putin took no action against Kim when North Korea fired a ballistic missile in February 2017. He has even defended the North Korean nuclear program as one of self-defense. And now, with the Ukraine story, we have more insight into why he would take such a position. (A few weeks after the Times report on the Ukrainian factory ran, Russia flew nuclear bombers over the Korean Peninsula, flexing its muscles on the same day that the United States and South Korea were conducting military exercises.)
Russia has become North Korea’s leading fuel supplier. Moscow and Pyongyang are finalizing a labor-and-immigration agreement. And North Korea’s state-controlled news agency lists Russia as a top ally of the DPRK. (Putin even congratulated North Korea by sending “a friendly greeting to your country and your people on the occasion of the 71st anniversary of Korean liberation.”18)
Then, on September 3, 2017, North Korea detonated a powerful device underground that it claimed was a hydrogen bomb—and it further claimed that the bomb could be put on an ICBM that could reach the United States. The blast equaled the magnitude of a 6.3 earthquake. A few weeks later, the UN passed the harshest sanctions against Pyongyang yet—but those sanctions weren’t nearly as strong as Washington wanted, because Russia, in tandem with China, had watered them down. Washington had previously sought a total ban on oil shipments to the North, but Russia and China killed that provision and forced the United States to settle for mere limits on the country’s oil imports. Instead of a halt on all oil flowing into North Korea, the imports were capped at their current levels. Only after weakening the sanctions did Russia and China agree to vote for them. The United States was effectively blocked from taking stronger action. Teaming up at the UN is just one element of the deepening Russia-China partnership. Recent months have also seen greater security cooperation between the two countries. As they continue to find common ground against the United States, the two countries held their first joint naval drill in the South China Sea and both have condemned US plans to deploy a missile shield in South Korea. A Russian general said that their military was working with China to counter an expansion of US missile defenses.
Putin’s support of Iran, meanwhile, shows no sign of lessening. Moscow continues to be a vital supplier of nuclear equipment and other weapons to Tehran. The Persian Gulf superpower continues to play a central role in Putin’s global vision of controlling energy supplies, checking American influence, and building out Russia’s regional and global reach. Putin has met with enormous success on all these goals in recent years, but has done so especially in his desire to become a Middle East power broker. The Syrian War has been one piece of the strategy; the Russia-Iran alliance has been another. A bloody and destabilized Middle East filled with ISIS-destroyed failed states and hemmed in by Russia and Iran to the north and east suits him fine. It leaves him in a similar position to that which Stalin found himself in at the end of World War II: as the grand military power bestriding a swath of “blood lands” (as a contemporary historian has described them). The Moscow-Tehran partnership has the added benefit of diminishing the influence and example of Sunni supremacists such as ISIS in the countries and regions of Russia’s near east—for example, Chechnya.
Putin has also pushed back on President Trump’s description of Iran as a terrorist state, lauding Tehran as a “good neighbor and reliable and stable partner.”19 And it must be, considering that, according to retired general Jack Keane, the Iranians are helping Moscow run arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan.20 It’s striking that Tehran would facilitate Russia’s assistance of the Taliban—the Iranian regime is Shia, the Taliban, Sunni. But Russia and Iran share a common goal: to destabilize the United States and erode public support for its mission in Afghanistan. For that, the compromises are worth making.
At home, Putin has been relentless and purposeful in his fortification of Russian military power and tightening control on Russian civil liberties and the political process. He has upgraded his military and nuclear arsenal.
At a speech to his top military advisors, Putin declared that the Russian military “is ready to defeat any country that dares challenge it.” He continued: “We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor. Anyone.”21 That pointedly includes the United States. But Putin isn’t satisfied. He has pushed his brass to “strengthen the strategic nuclear forces,” believing that these forces “must be taken to a higher level of quality so that they are capable of neutralizing any military threats.”22 Specifically, he wants to fortify Russia’s nuclear triad—that is, its nuclear weapons based on land, in submarines, and in long-range bombers. And he pushes for these measures with renewed confidence, since he was successful in negotiating deep reductions to the United States’ nuclear arsenal—without corresponding cuts on Moscow’s part.
It’s not all strengthening arsenals and building stockpiles, either. Putin has begun moving these missiles into strategic areas, with recent reports suggesting that he has moved “nuclear-capable missiles close to Poland and Lithuania”—two countries in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence that have embraced Westernism and that he hopes to destabilize. A Putin advisor warned that “impudent behavior” could have “nuclear consequences.”23
While he strengthens his military hand, Putin tamps down opposition in Russia, despite deep despair in the Russian Federation. March 2017 saw the biggest outbreak of protests in Russia in five years, with more than a hundred arrests and warnings given over loudspeakers urging demonstrators to “‘think of the consequences’ and disperse now.”24 The protesters were angry about corruption allegations involving the Russian prime minister. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was jailed for fifteen days after the demonstrations.
The activism was notable because many in Russia have lost heart with political resistance, with a large portion of Putin opponents either demoralized or intimidated. Putin has pushed for new laws that make public assembly more difficult and he has tightened restrictions on speech on the Internet—especially when it’s critical of the government—and political advocacy. Journalists who have reported critically about his rule wind up dead with alarming frequency. Putin also enacted laws cracking down on NGOs. The primary restriction is known as the “foreign agent law,” and it requires NGOs that receive funding from outside Russia to register with the government as foreign agents and subject themselves to audits, with heavy fines imposed on those that don’t comply.
At the moment, it is difficult to tell whether the reawakening of Russian discontent will pose a problem for Putin. He has acted in typically strong fashion to squelch it, but one must hold out at least the possibility that his success in controlling the electorate, as has been the case with most authoritarian leaders, has a finite shelf life—though that might still mean many more years of control to come.
Finally, Putin is achieving major victories in what are perhaps, for the West, the most disturbing areas of all: he is directly and indirectly destabilizing Western democracies and political culture, weakening Western alliances, and helping to hasten the collapse of institutional legitimacy in the West.
Let’s face it: the claimed Russian “hacking” scandal regarding the 2016 presidential election has done major damage to American confidence in elections. The matter is still under investigation in Washington, but intelligence agencies are confident that the Russians were behind the hacking of computer systems of the Democratic National Committee as well as the private e-mail systems of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta. The e-mails were handed over to Wikileaks, which then released them online, to explosive effect. Evidence also suggests that Russian cyberwarriors are responsible for a host of fake-news stories during the 2016 election cycle, which may have influenced voters. A former Russia Today anchor, Liz Wahl, even admitted that the Russian media’s “ultimate goal” was to “undermine democracy” and “faith in our institutions, like the media.”25
It really doesn’t matter whether you believe, as many Democrats do, that Putin and his fake-news propagators, along with the Wikileaks data dumps that only seemed to punish the Democrats, resulted in the election of Donald Trump or you believe, as most Republicans do, that these incidents played only a minimal role in the election results. As usual, we are missing the more fundamental issue: regardless of how much influence the Russian hacking had on the election result—if any—it speaks volumes about the porous nature of our electronic systems and about Russian capabilities to tap into them and shape US news gathering, reporting, and data management.
And that, in turn, leads to the real impact of Putin’s electronic skullduggery: it has further exacerbated our political divisions and further eroded the American public’s confidence in our institutions. Even before the hacking scandal broke out, that confidence was pretty low: A March 2016 Gallup poll found that only 30 percent of Americans thought that the election process was working well, with 66 percent considering the system “broken.” Americans expressed majority support in just three institutions: the military, the police, and small businesses.26
Why should Putin care whether his hackers helped defeat Hillary or whether they had minimal impact? He has achieved something much more substantial: American political dissolution. If you create doubt in the minds of Americans that their voting systems and the heart of their democracy itself is up for grabs, it is irrelevant whether your efforts “changed the election” or just “influenced the election.” What matters is that Americans, who had already lost confidence in their main political institutions, now have pretty much the same doubts about their election system.
In eroding American confidence in this way, Putin succeeds in putting Russia, with its corruption and notorious oligarchs, on the same footing with the United States. It helps him reinforce the message that he has been sending for years: Your system is just as corrupt as mine; stop preaching and clean up your own backyard. And now an American president is repeating that message. Trump has cynically shrugged off interviewers’ questions about Putin’s repression and the mysterious deaths that haunt the Russian political system by more or less asking: You don’t think we kill people, too?27
Beyond the hacking scandal, Putin has been roiling American politics for years. Depending on changing political fortunes, our two political parties have sounded different messages about Russia: Under Obama, first it was reconciliation and then it was impasse; under the Republicans, first it was impasse, with Romney’s warnings during the 2012 campaign, and more recently, under Trump, we’ve heard themes of reconciliation, or, at least, constructive engagement. This volatility points up how destabilizing of an influence Putin has been, and how Russia’s international behavior has unmoored both parties from traditional judgments. Neither party has figured out how to think about the Russian challenge.
Finally, it has only recently dawned on Washington and its Western allies that Russia has devised and implemented a new form of information warfare that often includes fake news or conspiracy theories, and which is designed to undermine Western politicians and governments and spread Russian nationalist or other oppositional viewpoints. Whether doing it through news-and-commentary networks like Sputnik and RT or through social-media accounts, the Russians have become diabolically effective at undermining political stability and sowing the seeds of public dissension and upheaval by way of spreading disinformation about Western political leaders, governments, and news events. Whereas Cold War Russian propaganda often looked ponderous and obvious to Western eyes, the new Russian information warfare is highly effective, and it fools Westerners regularly—making it another key element in Putin’s toolkit of provocation.
To take just one example among many, Russian operatives used Facebook to post bulletins calling citizens of an Idaho town to an urgent meeting to address the “huge upsurge of violence toward American citizens” by Muslim refugees recently settled there.28 There was no such upsurge in violence; the bulletin was posted by a group called Secured Borders, which, it was eventually revealed, was a fake account created by a Kremlin-linked Russian company that regularly spreads fake news.
What is the point of all this information warfare? Former State Department official Jonathon Morgan summed it up best, pointing out that Russian aims are less about single specific goals—like influencing who wins a US presidential election—and more about making a broader, enduring impact: “This is more about destabilizing democracy and pitting us against each other to limit the influence of the United States on the world stage.”29
A year ago, at the end of Putin’s Master Plan, my coauthor and I concluded:
The fundamental issue . . . is that the United States is not engaged. If the history of the last century has made anything clear, it is that failing to counteract the behavior of aggressive nations will only encourage more of the same. That is what we have seen here. The United States is simply absent. It is not that we are leading from behind; we are not leading at all . . . we have no clear policy, no strategy, and no plan.30
I would like nothing more than to be able to now write that—better late than never—the United States has grasped the magnitude of the Russian challenge and how much ground we have already lost to Putin. So far, however, the signs remain grim. Donald Trump remains blase at best and dismissive at worst about the audacious and outrageous Russian interference in the 2016 election. It is remarkable to me, a lifelong observer of American politics, that an American president would be so unconcerned about this obvious attempt to compromise our electoral process. The attempt—regardless of its success—deserves nothing but absolute condemnation and resolute determination to prevent a repeat. But Trump has spent most of his presidency minimizing the seriousness of what Russia has done.
On the foreign policy front, the administration, as yet, seems incoherent in its response to Putin and Russia. Trump sent signals during the presidential campaign that he wanted a new kind of relationship with Putin, but as president he has flirted with confrontation—especially in April 2017, when the United States bombed Syrian positions after Assad unleashed gas on his own people. That action led to several days of high tensions, in an atmosphere that briefly reminded some of the Cold War. Was Trump’s move a sign of a new and principled American posture on Russia or merely a one-shot? Time will tell.
In this brief follow-up to Putin’s Master Plan, I want to bring the story up to date: by making clear that Putin remains very much on the march, that he wins much more often than he loses, and that he continues to pose a mortal threat to the Western Alliance. We are running out of time to wake up to the dangers he poses.
