Putin on the March. Douglas E. Schoen
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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.
As we argued in Putin’s Master Plan, Russia works relentlessly to undermine NATO, destabilize Europe and America, dominate the Middle East, and project its power around the globe, in a way that some argue makes it even more dangerous than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. From Ukraine to Syria, from the Baltics to the Balkans, Putin presses forward aggressively in order to restore what he feels is Russia’s rightful status as the superpower dominating Europe, Asia, and even further afield. Consider his moves in Syria, his continued menacing of Ukraine, his serial violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty, and even his brazen penetrations of American airspace and sea lanes in the Atlantic. Such provocations follow a concerted strategy, and all of them will worsen without a coherent, strategic American response.
There is little sign that what many now regard as a Putin victory in Ukraine will be reversed or even contained. In May 2017, Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel met and pledged to push to finalize the Minsk accords—the 2015 deal stipulating ceasefire terms in Eastern Ukraine, which are still on the table but no closer to fruition. Talk is cheaper than ever. The fighting continues.
In January 2017, more than thirty died in a clash between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia rebels in the town of Avdiivka. Ominously, both sides used weapons banned under the ceasefire terms. Both accused the other of instigating the violence.