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Speechless
I was working all day on a response laying out my reasons for believing what I wrote in this post. I was taking the assignment very seriously. So much so that I didn’t check the news all day. I just checked. Trump has just said that he believes Vladimir Putin when Putin tells him he didn’t interfere in the elections.
The CIA “stands by and has always stood by the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment entitled: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections. The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed,” according to General Michael Hayden.
We’ve entered the world of the utterly surreal.
I’m going to post what I wrote today anyway.
***
Let’s revisit the claims I made. I’ve separated them a bit for analytic clarity, and indicated my confidence in them:
1) Russia interfered with the 2016 election, and continues energetically to interfere with our political life, with the aim of destroying the United States and the ideals it represents, alienating us from our allies, and alienating our allies from each other. ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY
2) Russia interfered with the 2016 election with the intention of aiding Trump and harming Clinton. HIGH CONFIDENCE.
3) Russia has the ability to do us enormous harm, and may even succeed in the goals stated in Point 1. MEDIUM CONFIDENCE.
4) Russia is much more dangerous than Americans generally appreciate. ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY
5) Donald Trump wittingly and illegally colluded with Russia’s efforts to swing the election in his favor. MEDIUM-TO-HIGH CONFIDENCE.
6) Russian interference made the difference between “President Clinton” and “President Trump.” PLAUSIBLE, BUT INHERENTLY UNPROVABLE.
Note that I am making none of the following claims, and believe all the following claims to be prima facie absurd:
1) No voter had any valid reason to prefer Trump to Clinton.
2) All voters for Trump (or even many voters for Trump) behaved as they did as a result of Russia’s actions. (This is obviously categorically absurd, and the only reason I put it on the list is because some of the comments on my post seemed to suggest some of you believe I think this. I do not.)
3) Everything Trump has done in office has been bad.
4) Hillary Clinton is innocent of any wrongdoing or crime, including wrongdoing related to Russia.
Let’s start with 1).
I’m going to suggest some background reading, because I honestly cannot do this all in one post: This isn’t because “the evidence isn’t there,” but because “there’s too much evidence.”
Let’s start with Molly McKew’s Putin’s Real Long Game. It will only take you ten minutes. I wish I had written it, because it’s pretty much exactly my assessment of the nature of the conflict between the United States and Russia. Feel free to take her arguments as my arguments and challenge them as if I had written them.
McKew has lately been pilloried as “not a real Russia expert” by the professional Russia experts who are enraged that she’s taken charge of this debate. They whine that she “simplifies” things — as if anyone could write an article-length piece about the mystery-within-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a-riddle that is Russia without “simplifying” things. I think she deserves every bit of her success. First, she does know what she’s talking about. Second, she’s good at explaining it, which professional Russia experts tend not to be. So please start by reading that article to get a sense of where I’m starting—in fact, consider that article the formal introduction to my argument. What she is saying is entirely consistent with everything I’ve seen—some of it more personally than I care to detail.
Note that she wrote that when Obama was still in office and that it is a scathing criticism of the Obama Administration’s blindness, one with which I fully agree. Note also that she was (initially) hopeful that Trump might still be able to spot the danger and react to it with some agility. She was not a partisan critic of Trump, or at least, she didn’t begin as one. As the evidence has come in, she’s become less hopeful, to say the least.
Every paragraph of that essay is worth reading, but here are a few critical ones:
From Moscow, Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have been limited and slow. Even this week, as Barack Obama tries to confront Russia’s open and unprecedented interference in our political process, the outgoing White House is so far responding to 21st century hybrid information warfare with last century’s diplomatic toolkit: the expulsion of spies, targeted sanctions, potential asset seizure. The incoming administration, while promising a new approach, has betrayed a similar lack of vision. Their promised attempt at another “reset” with Russia is a rehash of a policy that has utterly failed the past two American administrations.
What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests. …
Her capsule summary of Russia’s post 1989 history is exactly correct:
To understand the shift underway in the world, and to stop being outmaneuvered, we first need to see the Russian state for what it really is. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade reorganizing themselves into the newly-minted FSB, expanding and absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks, other security services, economic interests, and parts of the political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build. …
…. Today, as a result, Russia is little more than a ghastly hybrid of an overblown police state and a criminal network with an economy the size of Italy — and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. …
This is, of course, a complex history. Book after book has been written about it. If you’re looking for a good place to start reading about it, I recommend Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West, written in 2008 and painfully prescient.
The key point: We did not win the Cold War. Lucas, you may remember, was a dedicated Cold Warrior who had spent his life as an anti-Soviet campaigner. He lays out the whole painful case in that book.
The same cadre of KGB officers are still in power, “a powerful, feral, multi-headed, and obedient hydra,” as Mark Galleotti puts it in this useful analysis of Russia’s intelligence services. They are “locked in a Cold-War mindset where ‘If the West loses, we gain.’” The threat, he observes,
is not likely to materialise in military form. Rather, it comes from covert, indirect, and political operations, typically conducted, controlled, or facilitated by the numerous Russian intelligence and security agencies, which strike from every side but are driven by a single intent. …
many of the people closest to Putin hail from the ranks of the Chekists (veterans of the security agencies, after the first Bolshevik political police, the Cheka) or siloviki (“men of force” from the military, security, and intelligence services). This is especially important given that many of the formal institutions of Russian foreign and security policy making – the Foreign and Defence Ministries, the Security Council (SB), the cabinet – have become nothing more than executive agencies where policies are announced and applied, not discussed and decided. Instead, decisions are made informally by Putin and his confidants and cronies. The Soviet KGB security service was powerful and willing to use espionage, destabilisation, and subversion, but was tightly controlled by a political leadership ultimately committed to the status quo. Under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the state was weak, but the intelligence agencies doubly so. The agencies began renewing their powers during Putin’s first terms as president, but his policy was one of pragmatic accommodation with the West. Since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, though, the regime has unleashed increasingly powerful intelligence agencies in campaigns of domestic repression and external destabilisation, appearing to genuinely want to revise the structures of the international order.
.. The emphasis on coercive methods, active operations, taking chances, and risking international opprobrium reflects a wartime mindset across the agencies. (My emphasis.)
Galleotti, by the way, is a very serious and knowledgeable specialist in Russian security issues. This is no lightweight speaking.
Russia did not become “a normal country.” This is the same Russia we grew up fearing, but it is in many ways more dangerous, for the reasons above–and for many more reasons.
A point I argue in my book that Russia has pioneered a very particular kind of 21st century authoritarianism. It’s distinct from the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. This doesn’t look like an old-fashioned dictatorship, which is one reason we’ve been so slow to realize what’s going on. It rests on different structures—above all, its chief tool of control is not the gulag but saturation propaganda. That there is less terror is a very significant moral difference. Thank God for the Russian people that this regime is less cannibalistic than its predecessors. But this doesn’t indicate that Russia’s any less of an enemy, or a danger, to us.
I argue that Russia is, unfortunately, now the vanguard. Other countries are studying the Putin model for acquiring and keeping power, learning from it, emulating it. There is a real ideology behind it. This ideology, like the ideology that animated their communist forebears, is critical. Ideas matter, and Russia has again harnessed its formidable state security apparatus to spread this ideology. I say much more about this in the book.
I recommend all of Lucas’s books, including (especially including) his more recent ones. I also highly recommend David Stater’s The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin.
Those of you who have asked me to lay out the evidence for my beliefs should start with the first chapter of that book, at least: The significance of the Moscow apartment bombings can’t be understated. His is the most compelling marshaling of the evidence about this in print. Peter Pomeranzov’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible has also been helpful to me in shaping my understanding of Russia. It’s less important as “evidence,” but the book will give you a good feeling for what I mean by “saturation propaganda” and its integral relationship to the regime.
Pomeransov’s description of the way the regime speaks of information is critical: “not in the familiar terms of ‘persuasion,’ ‘public diplomacy,’ or even ‘propaganda,’ but in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert, and paralyze.” Understanding how critical the weaponization of information is to Putin is really key–as is understanding the particular way Russia has learned to control the Internet.
Here, I’ll have to digress a bit, but bear with me. As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has put it–and it is a profound observation–the Internet has created a world in which information is abundant but attention scarce. The large majority of the world now receives all of its information through a handful of technology monopolies: Google and Facebook, primarily. Facebook has become the world’s de facto public square. Facebook is designed—this is its business model, not a bug—to seize your attention and hold it as long as possible. The longer you’re on the site, the more likely it is that you will click on the ads. All of their exceptionally sophisticated algorithms serve this end, and this is why they collect an enormous amount of political and social information about you. They are collecting it so better to figure out what will make you click on the ads.
Putin’s insight—and it is pretty obvious, really, so perhaps we should not call it an insight of genius, but it was certainly an insight of significance—was that this technology, which everyone loves, and to which everyone is addicted, could be used to conduct surveillance on a hitherto unimaginable scale and transform the electorate’s view of reality. He realized he didn’t need gulags to ensure that no opposition party ever won an election, no protest movement ever got off the ground. All he needs to do is target his citizens’ attention by controlling key information networks—search engines, hosting sites, social media—and keeping them so distracted that they pay no attention to opposition and protest movements. In an attention-scarce world, you don’t need to kill a dissenter to suppress his voice. You just need to flood the Internet with something more entertaining—real or fake, it doesn’t matter, so long as it’s more interesting than a dissenting opinion. Atrocity stories are particularly good for this purpose.
He practiced the techniques on Russia for a long time before he started testing them abroad—but then he did start testing them abroad, and I’ll get back to this point in a minute. Key point: in the early 2000s, Russia established the “web brigade” (Веб-бригады)—the infamous troll army. The army churns out pro-government views around the clock. It simply drowns out voices the regime doesn’t want people to hear, usually with floods of pure distraction. The Internet Research Agency, in St. Peterburg, produces content for every popular social media network in Russia, as well as the comments sections of all its newspapers:
Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.
“There are three hallmarks of the Russian approach,” writes Tim Wu of the Knight First Amendment Institute:
The first is obscuring the government’s influence. The hand of the Kremlin is not explicit; funding comes from “pro-Kremlin” groups or nonprofits, and those involved usually disclaim any formal association with the Russian state. In addition, individuals sympathetic to the cause often join as de facto volunteers. The second is the use of vicious, swarm-like attacks over email, telephone, or social media to harass and humiliate critics of Russian policies or President Putin. While the online hate mob is certainly not a Russian invention, its deployment for such political objectives seems to be a novel development. The third hallmark is its international scope. Although these techniques have mainly been used domestically in Russia, they have also been employed against political opponents elsewhere in the world, including in the Ukraine and in countries like Finland, where trolls savagely attacked journalists who favored joining NATO (or questioned Russian efforts to influence that decision). Likewise, these tactics have been deployed in the United States, where paid Russian trolls targeted the 2016 presidential campaign.
So we’ve got a regime that views this kind of information control as the key to its political survival and its central tool of war. Putin’s Russia sees conventionally military conflict with the West as stupid (though not out of the question), an obvious waste of life. They don’t think they need it. They believe they’ve mastered information warfare. They see themselves as a superpower without peer in this domain. They believe this will be sufficient to achieve their geopolitical ends.
They are absolutely clear that they see themselves as engaged in all-out, full-scale information warfare against the West. Every strategy document shows this. You don’t need 17 intelligence agencies to come to this conclusion, because Russia’s not remotely interested in concealing it. Read their December 2014 Military Doctrine, for example. I can’t vouch for the quality of the translation, but notice especially, on page 2, who they think the main enemy is — see (a)? — and by comparison where terrorists rank (See (i)? So if we have a president who seriously thinks we’re going to be teaming up with this country to “knock the hell out of ISIS”–well, I’ll be charitable: Maybe there is some entirely innocent explanation of this.
Then scroll down to page 4 and their list of the “characteristics of modern conflict.” What’s the first item? Where does information war rank, for Russians, vis-à-vis, say, “hypersonic weapons, their means electronic warfare, weapons based on new physical principles, comparable in efficiency with nuclear weapons, management information systems, and unmanned aircraft and autonomous marine vehicles controlled robotic weapons and military equipment?”
You see my point. If you pay any attention to Russia at all, you see that it views itself as in a war, already, with the West. They’re not obsessed with China, they’re obsessed with us. And they believe we’re losing. The “erosion of the global economic and political dominance of the traditional western powers’ is now a reality.” They see the West as being in a state of chaos (which they’ve helped along nicely), and they expect to use this window of opportunity to emerge as the architects of a new world order.
They believe, as General Gerasimov put it, that, “frontal engagements of large formations of forces at the strategic and operational level are gradually becoming a thing of the past.” They’re winning and will win by means of “long-distance, contactless actions against the adversary.”
They get it that their conventional military power lags and always will in size, spending, technology and personnel behind NATO. But they think — and have so far been proven right — that they can win with the tools they used in Crimea and Donbas. They used their military, yes, but it was secondary to the cyber-attacks, the political and economic pressure, and an astonishingly audacious disinformation campaign.
Gerasimov is perfectly clear: “non-military means to achieve political and strategic goals has [in recent years] significantly surpassed the force of arms.” He lists the stages: “political, economic, information, humanitarian and other non-military measures,” then “military measures of a covert nature—focusing on information warfare—and only then overt force, “under the form of peacemaking (mirotvortcheskaya deyatelnost) or crisis management, in order to achieve the final success in the conflict.”
So if you’re being Gerasimov-doctrined, please understand: It does end in force. But by that point they’ve already screwed you up so much that you welcome them as peacemakers.
Back to Molly McKew:
Even Russian policy hands, raised on the Western understanding of traditional power dynamics, find the implications of this hard to understand. This Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its leaders want the West—and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.
We can only confront this by fully understanding how the Kremlin sees the world. Its worldview and objectives are made abundantly clear in speeches, op-eds, official policy and national strategy documents, journal articles, interviews, and, in some cases, fiction writing of Russian officials and ideologues. We should understand several things from this material.
First, it is a war. A thing to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or bargained.
She explains why she says this in the article. Above all, believe her about this: To grasp how hostile and determined Russia is, and to understand the strategy they’re pursuing, you only have to read the speeches, op-eds, official policy and national strategy documents, journal articles, and interviews of Russian officials and ideologues. If you do, you will, like me, like anyone else who has done this, find the things Donald Trump has said and done unfathomable.
I don’t read Russian, sadly, but we live in an age of miracles: The new Google Translate is a stratospheric improvement on any previous effort at machine-language translation. It’s more than good enough for anyone here to make quite good sense of the documents she’s talking about. They are part of the evidence you’ve been asking to see. It is grim. I don’t have space to reproduce these documents here, but a bit of time with Google Translate and the links I’ve given you here will tell you the story.
Russia wants — and is open about wanting — to re-enslave the nations on its periphery, corrupt and dominate the rest of Europe, and render the United States irrelevant. They believe they can achieve this, as was said of Reagan’s victory over the Soviet Union “without firing a shot”–or at least, not firing anywhere near as many as you’d think it would take.
They are not stupid to think this. They are not amateurs. They have been practicing and experimenting with this now for quite a long time. The Internet has allowed them to take all of the Soviet Union’s skills in this domain and increase their impact by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost. What they’ve already achieved, in quite a short time, is utterly extraordinary:
Borders cannot be redrawn at the barrel of a gun. Barack Obama, 3 September 201449
We cannot of course forget the events of Crimea. I wish once again to thank our Armed Forces. Vladimir Putin, 19 December 2014
If I were a Russian autocrat superintending over a country with Italy’s GDP and no other talents to speak of, of course I too would say, “Wow, it works. Let’s play to our strengths. There is one thing we’re really good at, and that’s infowar. (By the way, did you see that InfoWars has literally been recycling Russian propaganda, verbatim, for three years? So has Drudge. You just can’t look at that and say, “Heck, what do the Russians know about information warfare.” Give them some credit. They couldn’t build the technology they’re using against us to save their lives, but yes, they sure do know how to use it against us.)
One reason I say they’re more of a threat than the Soviet Union (I said this in a comment on my original post, but some of you may not have seen it) is that the USSR’s ideology was more constrictive. The Soviets had to limit themselves, for ideological reasons, to corrupting and co-opting the American left, while trying to move the center toward the left. Their ultimate goal was to foster a communist revolution — and while a “communist revolution” wasn’t an utter impossibility in the US, it was unlikely for many structural and cultural reasons.
New Russia? No such constraints. It targets the right and the left with equal zeal. The goal isn’t “a communist revolution in the United States.” The goal is “chaos in the US sufficient to turn us into a house divided, an ungovernable basket case, unable to form any kind of consensus on foreign policy.” Why? Because that would make our military strength irrelevant. However powerful our military, we can’t use it to defend our interests if there’s no domestic consensus about what those interests are and who’s legitimately in charge of it. Their other goal is to significantly diminish the prestige of the United States and the ideals it represents, negating our huge advantage over Russia in soft power. “Communist revolution in the United States” wasn’t a realistic goal. “Chaos in the United States so great that the US is almost incapable of acting in its interests on the world stage, coupled with the destruction of American soft power” is a much more realistic goal.
So let’s look a bit at the pattern of the way they do this. I’m again going to suggest some reading (you wanted the arguments and the evidence.) Start with this Chatham House report: Russia’s ‘New’ Tools for Confronting the West Continuity and Innovation in Moscow’s Exercise of Power:
… the techniques and methods displayed by Russia in Ukraine have roots in traditional Soviet approaches. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s military academics have displayed an unbroken and consistently developing train of thought on the changing nature of conflict and how to prevail in it, including – but certainly not limited to – the successful application of military power. As a result, despite modern technological enablers, Russia’s intentions and actions throughout the Ukraine conflict have been recognizable from previous decades of study of the threat to the West from the Soviet Union. Today, as in the past, Western planners and policy-makers must consider and plan not only for the potential threat of military attack by Russia, but also for the actual threat of Moscow’s ongoing subversion, destabilization and ‘active measures’. •
Two specific tools for exercising Russian power demand close study: the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation; and the state’s capacity for information warfare. In both of these fields, Russia’s capabilities have developed rapidly in recent years to match its persistent intentions. The most visible demonstration of this has been the unprecedented near-total transformation of Russia’s armed forces since 2008. This transformation and the accompanying rearmament programme are continuing, and the Russian military is benefiting from ongoing ‘training’ under real operational conditions in Ukraine and Syria
Let’s now look at the ways they’ve applied these techniques in Europe to see why they’re so confident. This is from Galeotti’s report, above.
As far back as 2010, the British Security Service (MI5) warned that “the threat from Russian espionage continues to be significant and is similar to the Cold War […] the number of Russian intelligence officers in London is at the same level as in Soviet times.” Since then, security services across Europe have been registering a continued uptick in the scale and aggressiveness of Russian operations. For example, the head of the Norwegian Police Security Service warned that “Russian intelligence has the largest potential to damage Norwegian interests”, while Sweden’s security service, SÄPO, has characterised Russian espionage as its greatest challenge and warned of “preparation for military operations against Sweden”. The Russians are engaging in massive and voracious intelligence-gathering campaigns, fuelled by still-substantial budgets and a Kremlin culture that sees deceit and secret agendas even where none exists. …
Perhaps the most striking of the agencies’ external operations are their “active measures”: everything from assassination to political subversion. While many countries’ intelligence agencies sometimes conduct such operations, the Russians have put this at the centre of their concept of intelligence work. They also more readily integrate other institutions and individuals — from banks and charities to journalists and truck drivers — into their activities. …
… Georgia before the 2008 war and Ukraine since 2014 have seen killings and terrorist attacks aimed less at specific individuals than at creating a climate of fear and insecurity. This is meant to undermine public and political will and to support a Russian narrative that these countries are falling into anarchy. Where guns or bombs are not called for, sometimes a computer virus or directed denial of-service (DDOS) attack will work. As noted above, the FSB is especially involved with launching cyber attacks or commissioning them from Russian hackers. …
… Far more common is the use of the intelligence agencies to support political and other movements sympathetic to or simply useful for Moscow. This has long been practised in countries Russia regards as within its sphere of influence — for example, the FSB’s interference in Moldovan politics by backing populist candidate Renato Usatii in 2014. However, the Foreign Intelligence Service and FSB are now especially active in Europe, and the organisations they support include anti-fracking environmental movements (which, however genuine in their concerns, usefully maintain Moscow’s gas markets), nationalist and anti-federal political groups, Russian diaspora movements in the Baltics, and separatists from Spain to Scotland.
… Every external operation is first and foremost a domestic one: the single most important role of the agencies is to secure the regime. So it was under the tsars, then the Bolsheviks, and now the new Russians: defending not a constitutional order but a particular incumbent. This means carrying out operations to prevent foreign “interference” as the Kremlin sees it, as well as dividing strategic rivals such as the EU.
… As Putin loses his old basis for legitimacy – his capacity to guarantee steadily improving standards of living – he is seeking to shore up his position with a narrative of foreign threats and external triumphs. The agencies play a crucial role not just in supporting the narrative but also in conducting operations against enemies of the state, both real and constructed.
Now, Galeotti is optimistic:
The agencies are now engaged in a campaign of active measures in the West that, again, may often seem tactically effective but is strategically disastrous. Russia has not created the tectonic pressures currently opening fissures within Europe, from nationalism to the refugee crisis, but it is gleefully taking advantage of them. However, in the long term, it is vanishingly unlikely that Europe will become so divided that it can be dictated to by Russia. Indeed, whether or not some sanctions are lifted, Russia is declining and destabilising at an even faster rate. Furthermore, Russia’s heavy-handed tactics have galvanised NATO, alienated nations such as Germany, and dissipated what minimal soft power Moscow ever had.
I am not so optimistic. In part, I am not so optimistic precisely because I read Galeotti’s work carefully and do not see that his own work supports that conclusion; in part I am not so optimistic because we have a president who says he trusts Putin over our intelligence agencies as well as over those of all of our allies and over all the evidence marshalled by pretty much everyone who’s been studying Russia or even looking at it or even glancing at it for the past century.
Have a look at this report, for example: Controlling Chaos: How Russia Manages its Political War in Europe. What are the patterns he observes?
There is of course the deep cynicism which often sees Moscow cultivating rival extremes, all in the name of spreading chaos and division. In Greece and Italy, for example, it eggs on parties on both the left and right (the Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord, Syriza and Golden Dawn, respectively). In its broader narrative it is happy to encourage anti-capitalist and liberal protest movements such as Occupy, as well as to play to social conservatives. One Russian journalist expressed amazement that “the methods, even much of the language is the same: left or right, radical or conservative, you can use the same approaches with both sides, just change some of the language.” More broadly, though, the evidence suggests different ambitions and expectations for Kremlin operations in different European countries. This has very significant implications not just for understanding Russian policy but also in shaping European responses. …
Often, Russian ‘soft power’ is confined to national leaders, to whom Putin’s image as the model of the decisive modern autocrat appeals. In south-east Europe, it can draw on shared religious faith in Bulgaria, Serbia, and the like, but also play up its historical role as defender, not least against the Ottoman Empire. Elsewhere, Russia has a certain cachet, even if often for mythologised and misunderstood reasons, as an obstacle to supposed American hegemony or as a bastion of traditional values. Organisations including Rossotrudnichestvo, notionally independent charities, and other structures, work specifically with Russian émigré communities. …
…. A crucial instrument of Russia’s active measures is its media, and its capacity to influence media narratives in target countries. That said, its role is often misunderstood and over-stated, perhaps precisely because it is by definition public, and also because it is easy to assume causation where it might not exist. It is not, after all, as though every Eurosceptic or even NATO-sceptic individual was made that way by Russian propaganda. Nonetheless, disinformation – the spread of often false or distorted news – and a deluge of alternative opinions meant to drown out the realities are undoubtedly central elements of the current political war.
Read the whole thing—it’s very useful, but note a few passages in particular:
Moscow is especially willing to make use of malign non-state actors such as insurgents, terrorists, extremist paramilitaries and, increasingly, organised crime groups. These last may not even know for whom they are working, but are typically Russian-based groups (who can thus be pressurised by the Kremlin) which, like ‘upperworld’ businesses, can occasionally be ‘asked’ to carry out missions large or small, from smuggling someone across a border to an outright murder, to avert Moscow’s ire and perhaps gain some advantage in the future. These assets also include computer hackers. Increasingly, the security agencies are building their own in-house cyber espionage capabilities, but for some time to come Russia will continue to outsource some activities to a motley array of individuals and groups: mercenary computer criminals and individuals working for money or under duress, and ‘patriotic hackers’ inspired by a sense of national pride and duty. They are generally used to provide ‘surge capacity’ in times of major cyber attacks (such as those experienced by Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia), and also smaller-scale sabotage such as the defacing of websites perceived as ‘Russophobic’ or the persecution of individuals likewise considered hostile. Putin’s disingenuous claim that the US electoral hack could have been carried out by “patriotically minded” individuals fighting for a cause “which is right, from their point of view” only swelled the ranks of patriotic hackers in Russia.
(Keep that passage in mind when I get, eventually, to the motley crew surrounding Trump and to Manafort in particular.) He continues:
There are common themes to Russian propaganda, largely relating to the alleged iniquity of the US, the need for cooperation with Russia against terrorism, and the moral equivalence of Moscow and the West. There is also an overarching hope of kicking up a sufficient dust cloud of rumour, speculation, half-truth, conspiracy, and outright lie, to obscure the realities of Russian activities in Ukraine, Syria, and at home, and leave people feeling that it is impossible to know the objective truth. The next best thing to being able to convince people of your argument, after all, is to make them disbelieve all arguments.
Then he explores the ways these techniques are adapted from country to country—with goals ranging from “state capture” to “disruption.” But there is a consistent pattern:
the Kremlin has adopted an innovative and parsimonious approach that, in effect, mobilises the ambitions and imaginations of sundry actors and agencies. It sets broad objectives and aspirations: to assert Russia’s claim to ‘great power’ status; to consolidate dominance over its self-proclaimed sphere of influence; to weaken and distract the West such that it cannot offer any meaningful counters to Russian actions; to undermine hostile governments; and to shatter inconvenient structures such as NATO and the EU. The detail is left deliberately open, so individuals and agencies scramble to identify how they can use the instruments and opportunities at their disposal in ways they hope will further these ends and please the Kremlin.
And note his recommendation, with which I agree:
European responses to Russian active measures have in the main been strikingly limited, typically restricted to direct sanctions against those identified as directly involved, whether expelling spies or revoking press credentials. The only truly negative outcomes have been through unwanted effects, such as alienating Macron or Angela Merkel. In Moscow, the lack of clear and strong responses is considered a sign of extreme weakness and an inducement to continue: “we really have no reason not to carry on as we are”, mused one recently retired General Staff officer.84 Without being needlessly provocative, European countries and the EU as a whole should develop a strategy for consistent and meaningful retaliation. A key point is that they need not be defined by the form of interference: a disinformation campaign can be punished through targeted sanctions of political leaders, supporting opposition groups, or by expelling diplomats. This is, after all, a campaign driven by the Russian state, and so any arm of the state is fair game for retaliation.
But that’s a digression; what I want to point out is how much practice they’ve had, how successful they’ve actually been throughout Europe, and very simply how well-known this is. Here’s another report that I highly recommend, from Chatham House: Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.
Read the whole thing through, and you’ll sense the way the themes of Trump’s campaign fit in well with the narrative Moscow has energetically been trying to promote and the European goals it seeks to achieve. This is not proof of collusion, but it does suggest why Moscow might have been highly motivated to support his campaign. Be honest with yourself: Have you not seen those themes represented, increasingly, in the American right-leaning media in recent years? Kremlin talking points appear with uncanny similarity in almost every “alternative” political movements in the West, from the hard left to the hard right.
Again, we see the same observation about Russia’s use of information warfare and its goals.
Russia is attempting to dominate the information space by injecting alternative messages that are often based on manipulated information. The main aim is to obstruct decision-making in the West, especially in organizations where decisions are based on consensus. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promotes proxy groups that spread the Kremlin’s message more widely in multilateral forums such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the UN, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, and makes efforts to discredit states by means of false human rights allegations. During the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation meetings in 2014 and 2015 Kremlin proxies – in this instance World Without Nazism and the Foundation for the Development of Civil Society ‘People Diplomacy’ – accused Ukraine’s government of ‘mass killings of dissidents’, and claimed that half of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians have no opportunity to learn Russian in state-run schools.96 They also accused OSCE member states of turning a blind eye to violations of human rights in Ukraine.
And we see how well these tools worked in Ukraine:
… Many of these groups also spread Russian state propaganda to radicalize the local population, using social media and Russian state television. Western journalists following the development of military operations in Donetsk and Luhansk reported a noticeable change of mood among the local populations; a more antagonistic attitude towards Kyiv developed in the space of a few weeks.Russian television and websites demonized the Ukrainian army and portrayed Kyiv as a threat to local identity. Once again, there was apparent evidence of the manipulation of information. For instance, media-watching organizations such as StopFake have identified the same witness appearing in multiple clips, posing as different Ukrainians at various protests around the region.133 A multitude of digital information projects have been set up to sustain the Russian narrative about the uprising in eastern Ukraine. Many use the .su domain, a known haven for cyber criminals. …
… While Russia’s gambit in Ukraine may have failed on the grand scale, it none the less succeeded in producing a new conflict in the east that is being used as a lever of Russian influence. Using state controlled media, Russia has apparently been able to marshal public opinion to the extent that 70 per cent of people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine polled in 2014 considered that the events of Euromaidan were an armed coup organized by the West; 45 per cent expressed the view that Russia defends the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Such people waved Russian flags, participated in illegal referendums and provided the false legitimacy for the various efforts of Kremlin-backed spin doctors, mercenaries and volunteer fighters to take control of parts of Donbas, intended to serve as a barrier to the future integration of Ukraine into Western institutions and to destabilize the post-Euromaidan government. The popularity of Russian media in the post-Soviet information space has clearly shaped public opinion in the wider region in line with the Kremlin’s narrative about the role of Russia in its conflict with Ukraine. In Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan the majority of citizens supported the Russian position in the conflict with Ukraine; 60 per cent of Belarusians and 80 per cent of Armenians agreed that the annexation of Crimea was a historically just restoration. Even in Moldova, where many have access to news from Romania, the majority of citizens blamed the EU, the United States and Russia equally for instigating the protests in Kyiv.
As Roman Skaskiw put it in a (good) article about Russian propaganda in in Small Wars Journal,
No matter how ridiculous their propaganda, no matter how many times it is proven to be false, it succeeds in shifting the conversation. Western journalists were consumed with determined if Russia was invading Ukraine, that they had little space left to examine how Russia was invading.
He also wrote, by the way, an excellent case study documenting the way Russia is particularly skillful at infiltrating and promoting its narratives among any “alternative” political grouping in the West: Putin’s Libertarians.
Right. If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll see why I’m — speechless? no, obviously not, but distressed, surely, that Trump just announced he takes Putin at his word when he says Russia didn’t interfere with the 2016 election. (Even though Putin boasts of it.) Not only did Russia interfere, it continues energetically to interfere with our political life, with the aim of destroying the United States and the ideals it represents, alienating us from our allies, and alienating our allies from each other. So I find the President’s remarks–what’s that phrase they keep using these days? Problematic.
I’m going to rush through the rest of this a bit, because no one will read this far, but consider now the number of dark connections the Russians have had with Trump’s campaign and Administration. It is stunning. It is absolutely aberrant. Manafort worked for Russia’s man in Ukraine and is connected to the Russian mob. He was in hock to Russia to the tune of 17 million dollars when he joined the campaign.
Trump Jr.. was promised damaging information about Clinton by a “Kremlin-connected lawyer” — a Russian spy, in other words — and cheerfully replied, “If it’s what you say, I love it.” Not in doubt: documented in e-mail records.
Kushner has had to amend his foreign disclosure forms over and over. He met with head of a sanctioned Russian bank. He discussed creating a secret back channel to Moscow. He sat in on a meeting with Russian spies offering dirt on Clinton. Kremlin-connected interests invested in Facebook and Twitter through one of Kushner’s business associates.
Stone released his own DMs of his exchanges with Guccifer–who is Russia. He boasted of his connections to Wikileaks–which is Russia.
Caputo lived in Moscow for years, actually claims he worked for the Kremlin.
We know that Russian spies targeted Carter Page: Page himself now says so.
Michael Flynn–you know all about that.
Papadopoulos: You’ve seen the plea agreement.
On or about April 26, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor for breakfast at a London hotel. During this meeting, the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian government officials,” the Justice Department document reads. “The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS, as defendant PAPADOPOULOS later described to the FBI, that ‘They [the Russians] have dirt on her’; ‘the Russians had emails of Clinton’; ‘they have thousands of emails.’
Tillerson was given Russia’s Order of Friendship–the highest state honor possible for a foreigner.
What’s especially notable is that everyone involved has exhibited a remarkable, repeated lack of candor about these connections. There has been constant deception and lying from this administration whenever anything Russian is involved. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” the president has said. “To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.” That is obviously–well, you be the judge.
The leaking of the so-called Paradise Papers has revealed even more of these connections:
Among the Trump administration officials implicated in the leaks is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who according to the documents concealed his ties to a Russian energy company that is partly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s judo partner Gennady Timchenko and Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. Through offshore investments, Ross held a stake in Navigator Holdings, which had a close business relationship with the Russian firm. Ross did not disclose that connection during his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.
I just don’t know how anyone could doubt, at this point, that Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign and some campaign officials were open to this.
Then we have the sheer weirdness of the President’s behavior. He has never once (to my recollection) criticized Putin. The “We’ve got a lot of killers… you think our country’s so innocent?” line — that is unreal, unprecedented, unheard of. He harshly criticizes NATO. He’s cast doubt on our commitment to NATO allies.
The platform. It was the only thing the Trump campaign seemed to care about–making sure the Republican platform dropped the call to give weapons to Ukraine. It put Trump at odds with every other Republican foreign policy leader. And according to report after report, it is the only thing they really cared about. The rest of the platform? Whatever, they were apparently indifferent. But they were determined to strip language about supporting Ukraine from the manifesto. Remember: Thousands of hacked DNC emails were meanwhile published by WikiLeaks (Russia) on the eve of that convention.
Trump’s insisted he had no contact with Russia even though he hosted the Miss Universe pageant there — he was pursuing a deal for a Trump Tower in Russia during the campaign, even as he was saying “I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years.” He’s traveled extensively to Russia, everyone knows this, so why is he saying this? He’s done a lot of business there: It’s all amply documented.
He tried to stop Comey from investigating Flynn and then fired Comey, who was investigating the Russia connection.
He’s revealed highly classified information to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister.
He refuses to acknowledge that Russia meddled in the campaign at all.
I’m done for the day. I could go on and on. I could write a book about this. I have. But I’ve only got enough energy left in me today to leave you with these words:
“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump said on the flight from Da Nang to Hanoi. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
***
Edited: I took out the reference to the Alfa Bank story because I don’t have the technical expertise to make sense of it. I don’t want to muddle things up with an argument I don’t really understand and thus can’t really defend.
Published in General
He had to have a radical thesis e.g. “we did not win the cold war” to sell his book. Doesn’t make it correct, however.
If we did not win the Cold War, why does he call this a “new cold war”?
Remind me again which country voted to dissolve itself?
Which one lost every single one of its client states?
Which North Atlantic based international organization dissolved and had its former members join the other side (including the country containing the city for which the Pact derived its name)?
You read this twaddle? regularly?
–Signed, An actual Cold War Warrior (I even had the certificate – lost it in the divorce/move)
I don’t think it should surprise anyone that the Russians were meddling in our last election. It wouldn’t have been the first one. They specialize in disinformation.
They also specialize in more than disinformation. There are two types of homicides in Russia, solved and unsolved. Solved homicides are committed by the common criminal, unsolved homicides are committed by the State. The Russian State has been willing to export homicide. For example the radiation poisoning in London. Ukraine is being rocked by car bombings in Kiev against Russian dissidents, to include a shooting of a former Russian lawmaker as well as the car bombing of a high ranking Ukrainian military officer.
Journalists in Russia have a short life span, and one orthodox priest was hacked to death who was gaining a following outside Russia due to his ecumenical views that were displeasing to probably both the government and FSB agents within the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, you can place those in the unsolved category.
They may also have been involved in the attempted murder of an American citizen in Washington DC. who was an expert on Russian intelligence methods, and wrote articles critical of Putin. Maybe I’ll write a post about that one. That one is in the unsolved category.
Russia is also selling arms to the Taliban, as well as to Iran. No need to say too much about their involvement in Syria, other than they had no interest in ISIS, other than to keep ISIS involved in Iraq to help destabilize Iraq to benefit Iran so Iran could exert more influence and eventually make Iraq a client state to threaten Turkey on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians are involved with providing comments on social media against President Trump as well as trying to feed Antifa. They will work both sides of the American political spectrum, to include anti-fracking, and pro-green propaganda to protect their natural gas monopoly in Europe. They would have worked against Hillary if she had won.
I went and looked at the Drudge link. It goes to a WAPO story. Toward the end of the story, the WAPO posts this chart for context. It compares the times Drudge links to RT+ Infowars+Sputnik (in toto) to the times Drudge links to WAPO or Breitbart. Just WAPO and Breitbart. If they included the links to every other source that was not WAPO, Breitbart, or RT+Infowars+Sputnik. it would show that Drudge’s links to RT+Infowars+Sputnik are a miniscule amount of the work Drudge does.
Decide for yourself:
Okay, so remember I began this by saying, “I disagree with you about something really significant. But I don’t want to lose my Ricochet friends. So I’ll make my case in my book, and let’s for now agree to disagree.”
General response: No way, Claire, let’s hear your case now.
Me: Guys, are you sure? This is really almost impossible to summarize in a post without both sounding like I’m throwing the kitchen sink at you and making the arguments too quickly for them really to be persuasive. I really think this is a book-length thing. Can’t we agree to disagree for now and I promise I’ll come back to this at the length I think the argument requires?
General response: Nope. If you can’t sum it up, you don’t have a book worth writing.
Me: Uh-oh. That’s not a bad point. It’s kind of calculated to appeal to me, because I do believe that. Yeah, I’ll try to sum it up.
General response: Yep. And hurry. We think you’re stalling us.
Me: Can you just give me a couple of days to think about how to do this and make sure it’s organized?
General response: No. With every minute you wait, the more we believe you don’t have an argument at all.
Me: Okay, this is a tough crowd. Better hop to it. Let’s get this up there, even if it’s not perfect. At least this will give them some of the links and tools they need to see how I’ve been thinking about this.
General response: What the hell, Claire? You threw the kitchen sink at us and you made the arguments too quickly for them really to be persuasive. Besides, you’re insane.
Me: This is awfully discouraging. This is kind of why I wanted to avoid this topic in the first place and maybe talk about other issues, like third-party healthcare or my top tips for visiting Paris or whether this Weinstein business is going too far (it is).
So I’m sitting here thinking … okay. Two competing impulses. Two competing moral imperatives. I could keep arguing with you. Part of me feels obliged.
On the one hand: I, Claire Berlinski, did solemnly swear that I would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I would bear true faith and allegiance to the same — so I can’t really say, “Whatever, I give up,” given that I actually do believe we’ve got a damned serious foreign and domestic enemy on our hands. I’ve just got to keep arguing until I win you all around, because the Republic depends on me ...
Oh, wait, no. That’s nuts. It doesn’t. Mueller’s got this one. His job, not mine.
Then my other impulse. I’m not a Christian, but I take Christian doctrine extremely seriously: There is great moral wisdom in it, wisdom so profound that at times I’ve wondered, “Could it be that the only way you get this kind of wisdom is divine inspiration? Might it be true?” (And then instantly I’ve felt guilty because you know, I’m a Jew, and to think that is a heresy, basically.) But I take it very seriously, especially this part: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. That was on my mind when I said, “I cannot not allow Russia — or Trump — to turn my friends and my fellow Americans into my enemies. I cannot allow that. I must not. I must go back to Ricochet and make peace with my friends … somehow while also remaining faithful to the spirit of that oath.”
And thus I propose, again: Let’s not speak of this anymore. I’ll say more in the book. Maybe by then we’ll know more from the Mueller investigation. Maybe by then we’ll be in a war with North Korea that will make all of this seem quaint and ancient (God forbid). Maybe by then something so wonderful will happen to the world that this disagreement will seem quaint and ancient. (I pray.)
Let’s talk about other issues we care about, the many issues about which we largely agree, and let’s stop poking at this wound, because it’s just making us all upset. It’s making you think I’m crazy and at times vice-versa. But I know this isn’t so. We just disagree about politics. This happens a lot in free societies, that is in fact the way it’s supposed to be in a free society. So let’s just put this in a compartment for now and say, “That elephant in the room is a bit weird, but for now it’s not bothering us. Let’s sit down for dinner anyway — let the elephant do its thing — and let’s toast to our friendship.”
I gave it my best shot in the space and time I had, but I really, really, think this is an argument best made carefully, at the length of a book. So my views and many of yours overlap in a way that results, I think, in a good compromise: I won’t talk about this here anymore.
Okay?
Some of you may think it’s okay. Some of you won’t. Those of you who think it’s okay, let’s have fun on other threads.
Those of you who don’t — feel free to ignore me. There’s lots of Ricochet left to love.
Update/edit: There are some good questions on this thread and I’ll answer them as time permits; I don’t want to ignore questions that look like they might be avenues for finding points about which we might agree. So I’ll talk about it a little more here. But basically, as we yids say, Genug. Hock mir nicht kein chinik. (Or as I understood that when I was a kid: “Stop hocking me to China.”)
Sorry, sounds like I represented his arguments in a confusing way. He did not say that. That wasn’t a quote. That was my description of what I took from his book and what it really means, ultimately.
We won the Cold War in exactly the sense you describe. But we didn’t win it in the way we initially hoped and imagined. Russia did not become a normal country with which we could “do business.” It did not experience the purgative process Germany did, the trial of its criminals, a restructuring of its security organs, a reconciliation with its history. It is basically still run by the same sinister people with the same sinister geopolitical aims.
That’s my argument, which Lucas’s work supports. But he didn’t use the phrase “We didn’t win the Cold War.” Those are my words.
Lose: The nations on Russia’s periphery re-enslaved; the rest of Europe corrupted and dominated by Russia, and the United States rendered globally irrelevant. Russia succeeds in creating the architecture of a new global order in which the dominant mode of governance is the kind of illiberal democracy Putin has established. American ideals are globally viewed as a fairy tale and a failure, not an inspiration and model. The United States becomes an isolated backwater, its best days long behind it, and Russia calls the shots in the West while China calls them in the East.
Win: Russia becomes a normal country, with liberal institutions such as the rule of law and an independent media and real opposition parties. It is successfully integrated into Europe and a threat to none of its neighbors.
Yeah, so do I. I believe we’ve all got to keep talking to each other, even to people who don’t agree with us about basic principles, and we’ve got to keep talking and keep trying as long as we’re all citizens. The arguments for freedom of expression need to be made, politely and persistently, to people who don’t yet accept them, and they’re good arguments, so maybe we’ll win some of them around. Maybe they haven’t ever heard anyone make these arguments before: That’s entirely possible, given the state of our educational system and the degree to which we’ve been filter-bubbled into such narrow, ideologically straightjacketed communities. Give me any teenager, and give me a week: I bet you nine times out of ten I will send you back a kid who at least is thinking twice about whether banning speech is a great idea. And that’s how it works: One person at a time, preferably when they’re young enough not to be totally closed off to new ideas.
Read the sentence again. I said you didn’t need a single one of those agencies to establish the point I was making. That what I was saying wasn’t a secret at all. That it’s right out in the open.
Brava, Claire.
Shapes begin to emerge from the mist of “nothing is true, everything is possible” – which BTW seems a reasonably accurate description of post-modernism.
There is “nothing outside the text” and the text could mean anything you like.
I believe I was talking about not being persuaded by Trump. Every interview I heard in the campaign was a series of evasions and assertions – i.e., I don’t know what that is, you’re third-rate for bringing it up, we’ll have the best people on the issue. It was all about as persuasive as an air horn.
Interesting question, and one that has had a lot to do with how I view this, actually. When Americans began telling me that Europe was facing a threat from immigration from the Middle East and North Africa that threatens wholesale changes to the culture and thus the political future (a point that’s worth concern), but saying so in much stronger terms than I felt at all reasonable or related to reality, I began to wonder why. I mean, I’m sitting in the heart of Europe. I’ve travelled a lot here looking at the scale and impact of the refugee crisis. I’ve written a lot about immigration to Europe and the challenges of integrating, especially, Muslim immigrants. This is something I’ve been studying for years, thinking about for years, I’m looking right at this, with my own eyes, and I’m not seeing what many Americans seem to think I’m seeing. I’m hearing from the President, or maybe when he said this he was still a candidate, I don’t remember, “Take a look at what’s happened in France. I have a friend, he’s a very, very substantial guy, he loves the city of lights. He loves Paris. Hadn’t seen him in a while.“And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question, how’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.” And clearly he’s intimating that Paris has already been overrun by immigrants to the point of being unrecognizable.
At which point I ask myself, “Who do I believe? Donald Trump or my lying eyes?” Answer: I believe what I’m seeing. I believe that yes, Europe has a significant problem on its hands; immigration is a big challenge, one I’ve written about a lot. But the stuff I’ve read about this in the comments sections of American news organs like Breitbart are so far off the wall, so wacky, so distorted, so extreme, and so dissonant with reality that I began to think, “Maybe someone is pouring crazy-juice into our information ecosystem.” Because Europe is easy to visit: Anyone who wants to see how bad this situation really is can get a discount ticket on the off-season and see for himself. He’ll instantly see that the way this has been represented is totally ludicrous. I do not say there’s “no cause for concern whatsoever,” but I do say, “What many Americans seem to believe both about the scale of this crisis and the European response to it is so far off base — so different from what I see right in front of me — that I suspect mischief at work.” This is the standard Russian narrative: Europe has been overrun by migrant hordes. It has done nothing at all about this because it’s decaying and decadent and run by the EU, not the “real people.” This is why liberal democracy in Europe has to go–only a strongman can fix this mess–and why the EU has to break up–they’re part of the plot–and why Americans shouldn’t waste money on NATO: Why would you defend a bunch of people who’d let this happen to them?”
It is, truly, verbatim, the Standard Russian Narrative. The SRN. I became as sensitive to it as I did precisely because I could see — the evidence is literally in front of my face — that it’s a crock. I mean, look at this article about the role Italy alone has played in mitigating this crisis and securing the Mediterranean, and I can show you tons of other research to the same effect. Italy has not always been utterly pure in its approach to the problem, or necessarily strategically foresighted, but given that it is a real problem, with no good solutions, I’m willing to cut them some slack. And as a result, the migrant flow to Italy from Libya is down 70 percent, which somehow never gets reported in the US. And this is just Italy, a country that few of us think of as “essential to the NATO alliance.”
So to say Europe “doesn’t see fit to deal with this crisis” is just wrong — as it is to say that the crisis manifestly threatens wholesale changes to Europe’s culture and political future: I guarantee you that if you come and take a long walk through Europe, from north to south, from east to west, you’ll see that immigrants remain very much in the minority and most are sufficiently well-integrated that no one would conclude, “My God, Europe isn’t Europe anymore.”
So why has this become such a dominant view in the US? Why have the voices of the small number of people in Europe who seriously believe Europe’s being overrun by migrant hordes been amplified as they have? I stress that many of the Europeans who believe this are, really, extremists; they are often members of parties that were established by actual Nazis, by which I don’t mean “people we dislike so much we say they’re like Nazis,” but actual, literal Nazis. People whose voices really shouldn’t be amplified, or taken as representative, any more than Richard Spencer’s voice should be amplified or taken as representative. So I started wondering — how much of this is just happening for no reason, undirected, just an accident of history, and how much of it really involves a campaign to make Americans believe things that aren’t true about Europe, and vice-versa, and to make Europeans believe things that aren’t true about each other?
If you have Russia explicitly saying that its foremost geopolitical goal is to weaken the EU and NATO, and explicitly saying that its chief tool in the service of this goal is the use of information warfare; and if you have tons of evidence — as we do — that Russia is recruiting, cultivating, and funding exactly the people and parties who promote these views, and doing everything in its power to make sure their minority voices sound louder and far more significant than they really are–well, it really makes sense to wonder if the reason I’m hearing that Paris isn’t Paris anymore (even though I can look outside and see clearly, “Yep, still Paris”) is in part because Russia’s doing exactly what it openly says it’s doing.
Interestingly, it doesn’t push this kind of line at home. Hey, here’s a really good article about that, it’s by Steven Fish and called What is Putinism. Highly recommended. The propaganda in Europe and the US is all about Muslim Hordes, Muslim Hordes, Europe’s been overrun, etc. etc. — but domestically? As Fish puts it:
If you read, for example, the 2014 Ministry Doctrine I linked to in the OP (here it is again for your convenience) you’ll see that — look at the language they use on page 3, in point i., it’s like the Obama Administration:
Putin does not whip up anti-Muslim sentiment at home, he avoids any hint of ethnonationalist rabble-rousing domestically. He grasps full well that this is a recipe for destroying a country: He uses this tools on his enemies, not his own country. Since about 15 percent of the Russian population is Muslims (far more than in any other European country), you’d think that if he really believed that having a Muslim minority in one’s country was a path to certain doom, he’d focus just as monomaniacally on that point domestically as the groups he supports abroad do. But he doesn’t. He’s just completely cynical. He sees that the issue can be used as a tool against the West. He knows perfectly well that Europe has not and will not be overrun by these hordes. It’s absolutely a problem Europe must deal with, and is dealing with, but it’s not an existential threat.
Russia? Maybe Paul Rahe and Galleoti are right — maybe long-term they’re not an existential threat, either. But this depends to an extent on how seriously we take the threat and how intelligently we react to it. Putin thinks right now that we’re utterly, ridiculously spineless, and he’s going to keep pushing until someone stops him. If it were up to me, the president wouldn’t be causing spasms of hysterical laughter in the Kremlin (as I’m sure he is) by saying, “Well, you know, Putin told me he didn’t interfere, so what am I supposed to say.” If it were up to me, we’d long ago have punished him and his oligarchs in a way that really hurts, one that says, “Don’t screw with us. Don’t take us for fools. And don’t forget who we are.” My best guess is that Putin’s actually the kind of bully who backs down when someone stands up to him. Just a gut feeling.
But no one ever does.
The president has had so many kind things to say about the the leader of China this week that even Chuck Schumer has called him out.
I think that’s just the way Trump and many politicians often talk in front of many foreign (especially non-Western) leaders, especially in a foreign country.
Even if Trump’s pursuit of reconciliation with Russia is dangerous, this call for a new Cold War is equally troubling. If Trump underestimates Putin’s malevolence (or thinks he can use it to his advantage), McKew and those who think like her are engaged in reckless threat inflation, wildly overstating the extent of Russian ambitions and power in support of a costly policy.
The old Cold War was fueled by stark ideological differences between communism and capitalism, played across a planetary chess board. Both the U.S. and Russia had allies all over the globe, with hotspots ranging from Cuba to the Congo to Vietnam. Current U.S. troubles with Russia aren’t the result of such ideological differences—Putin’s mix of authoritarianism and crony capitalism being no different than many regimes America works with happily—and are intensely localized along Russia’s borders, in countries like the Ukraine and Georgia. One could argue that America should defend such countries (a position McKew was paid to do) but such a policy can hardly be the pivot on which American foreign policy turns.
https://newrepublic.com/article/139600/new-cold-war-russia-terrible-idea
Got it, I’ll slander him no further.
And those words are twaddle.
No one in my line of work imagined that Russia would become all sweetness and light once they became bankrupt. That was an aspirational goal, not an objective outcome as evidenced by what happened in the 1990s to early 2000s. In fact, your preferred presidential candidate gave the aspirational goal more credence when she gave the Russians a large “overcharge” button, while telling the rest of us it actually meant “reset“. Thank God for Google Translate.
Your preferred presidential candidate did nothing during her tenure in office to disabuse him of this notion. Obviously that was not a bar to serving as president, as you voted for her anyway.
Ummm, just what the hell “training in persuasion” is that? That Adams took a weeknight course in hypnotism? Which is what he cites as his “expertise” in persuasion?
The man draws doodles, which are mildly amusing. His soidisant status as an expert in “persuasion” is laughable. If he wants some credibility on that, let him spend 20 years in litigation or advertising.
And, for what it’s worth, Trump never used the word “bigly.” He frequently used the phrase “big league,” which many others have used before him. Is that mischaracterization supposed to be “persuasive”?
Yeah, but it would wind up being as long as Claire’s book and, unlike Claire, I don’t have a publisher.
2) Russia interfered with the 2016 election with the intention of aiding Trump and harming Clinton. HIGH CONFIDENCE.
Nonsense, the opposite is true. Russia “interfered,” ineffectually, in support of Clinton. Why, because Clinton and her political party would vastly enrich Russia with their carbonphobia and the concomitant rising hydrocarbon prices, Russia’s chief source of foreign exchange. Clinton, bowing to the American green church, would have curtailed fracking, prevented NG export, stopped pipeline development, stopped refinery expansion, stopped oil exports, and prevented exploration in much the available undeveloped areas. The Clintons are oligarchs similar to the Russian oligarchs.
“By 2012, Skolkovo, an “innovation city” near Moscow, boasted 28 “Key Partners” in the U.S., Europe, and Russia. Among these major supporting organizations, three-fifths had donated or pledged funds to the Clinton Foundation or paid speaking fees to Bill Clinton. According to From Russia with Money, an August 2016 study by the Government Accountability Institute, these 17 “Key Partner” entities donated between $6.5 million and $23.5 million to the Clinton Foundation. The U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth concluded in 2013: “Skolkovo is arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage.”
“Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul and major Clinton Foundation donor, led a group of investors in an enterprise called Uranium One. On June 8, 2010, Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, announced plans to purchase a 51.4 percent stake in the Canadian company, whose international assets included some 20 percent of America’s uranium capacity. While CFIUS (The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) evaluated Rosatom’s offer, Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer observed, “a spontaneous outbreak of philanthropy among eight shareholders in Uranium One” began. “These Canadian mining magnates decide now would be a great time to donate tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.” October 23, 2010, CFIUS approved Rosatom’s purchase of a majority stake in Uranium One. Thanks to subsequent investments, Rosatom’s share of Uranium One grew to 100 percent by January 2013.”
Russia had every reason to support the Clintons and vital interests opposing Trump
@claire, I appreciate the frustration you express in #101. You believe you see something clearly, and yet you cannot present it in a concise and persuasive manner. And you have the nagging awareness that anything that cannot be presented in a concise and persuasive manner is probably not so clear. And yet, you see it clearly. And, so, around and around.
Let me try to give you a hand here. One of the core problems in your argument is that you define the Russian objective so broadly that it is impossible to determine whether any activity advances that objective or not. Does Russia want to use Facebook to sow dissension and strong emotional (even furious) disagreement? Sure, I assume it does. But everyone who posts political topics on Facebook (or even on Ricochet) sows dissension and disagreement. Take any position at all, and half of the American public will violently disagree. Thus, (like climate change) absolutely anything that happens can be cited as evidence for your thesis. And, (as with climate change) the public will shrug.
The way you define the issue, any political post on social media that can be somehow linked to Russia (the author had Russian dressing on his salad?) is evidence for your thesis. You can’t build an argument that way. Basically, you are saying that the Russian objective is to make us disagreeable, so that we lose the political will to use our military or economic power. But we all know that the American population is plenty disagreeable already, without any help from Russia. And our political will has been weakened ever since Vietnam.
Claire, if you want to salvage your argument you need to start by doing two things. First, you must clarify your position on the Russian objectives to the point that someone can look at some event and say, “yes, that is consistent with the Russian plot” or “no, it is not consistent and does not further the Russian objectives.” If everything is evidence of a Russian plot, then nothing is evidence.
Second, you need to give us at least a few examples (other than the 2016 elections) where Russia has actually succeeded in influencing some change in the US; something that wouldn’t have happened without Russian interference. You can say that Russia wants to bring the US to its knees. You can shout that from the rooftops. But if you can’t show that any Russian activities have any effect, ever, then you sure aren’t going to get people too worried about it.
I’m happy to wait for the book. As I said, I’ll buy it and read it. And might even comment on it here.
I’m happy Claire attempted to set out her stall so clearly here. At the least it means we can continue to discuss matters in her absence.
I hope Claire spends more time bridging over the leaps of logic than she has in this short form summary, and less time roaming the swamps of the neo-Bircher internet.
The size of the Russian economy is about the size of Italy’s, but without the diversity. They have only two things they can trade – second-rate weapons and fossil fuels. The Russians need high energy prices. Clinton would have given them these.
Russia did amazingly well with the Obama administration in place. Invited back into Syria. Increasing domestic racial strife. Slow economic growth as the “new normal”. Corrupt Justice, Treasury, and State Departments. And the resultant turmoil in the citizenry.
I have no doubt that Russia wishes the West ill, and uses propaganda to that effect. Wanting a weak, discredited, US is totally consistent with wanting a Clinton administration.
I am glad that Claire posts at all. I like her posts; even the link blizzards.
Yes, Putin’s vital source of income is energy. Fracking had already hurt him in spite of Obama’s limitations on it. Trump’s free market approach to energy is a threat to Putin. This is the bottom line. I haven’t seen Claire answer this, though I’ve only read a small portion of what she’s produced here.
Nah. I’ve lost confidence in her being rational. I’ve read about rapes by Muslims in England on a massive scale. I’ve seen in the news how Muslims have sawed off the head of a soldier on a large, highly trafficked road in broad daylight with people watching and doing nothing except argue with them. I’ve read about large parts of France and Sweden and other countries where Muslim gangs intimidate even the police. Even here in the US, Muslims are building training camps (one is less than a half mile from my office in the outskirts of Austin). We are at war with radical Islam and European leaders and American democrats think open acceptance of all Muslims (not just those who worked as interpreters or otherwise helped us) is a good policy. I’ve seen how progressive (read, communist) policies in Canada and England have stifled debate about the dangers of Islam (just ask Mark Steyn) and I see progressives in the US wanting to instill the same lack of good values here.
I think Claire keeps doubling down on convincing me that she has no longer any claim to being able to observe and explain political or social events and I think I’ll not be buying any book she will write.
I’m not sure that is true anymore.
S-400 “one of the best air-defence systems currently made.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system
Su-35 “It’s a great airplane and very dangerous, especially if they make a lot of them,”
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-russian-bear-roars-the-sky-beware-the-deadly-su-35-11799
There are so many good comments here on this post it’s hard to come up with new ones. Please post about the American citizen in DC that you spoke of Doug. To spend so much time dispensing dis-information, especially here in the states, they must be afraid of something. There was a 1 in 5 chance Trump would win. Russia was already sowing seeds of discontent throughout the world prior to the election, and partnering with our enemies, so their bad behavior has picked up steam because they never changed their stripes. They have the same goals as when they were the former USSR.
America voted in Trump because of Obama’s policies – real life consequences which included lousy foreign policy (which included Hillary as SoS). Clinton was proven to be associated with Russians, lied, cheated, erased, so that’s why Trump was elected.
Trump tweeted this yesterday afternoon (I think Vietnam time). He sounds like Barack Obama!
Claire, it seems that your thoughts can be broadly split into two categories:
the first is indisputable (the intention)
subarguments from that include showing what actions Russia is taking and arguing that those actions (or even some portion of them) are effective.
the second: considering the damage to our internal politics ensuing from consideration of that charge, you need to be extra skeptical. For every action or statement that you see as evidence of Trump’s favor for Putin, you need to explicitly search for plausible explanations/interpretations that do not require such favor, to explain the action/statement. And write them down, in the most persuasive way you can (debate prep!), so you can’t “fool” yourself into thinking you’ve argued it persuasively when you haven’t. And, yes, I think you would probably benefit from bringing those arguments here, and encouraging us to “rip” at them. Doing that will strengthen those arguments that are strong and destroy those that are weak. And you need that, before you publish this book. Because weak accusations against President Trump only weaken *us.*. (Yes, it’s also bad if your accusations are true. But even if they’re true, accusations that can’t lead to resolution will cause additional damage while also not correcting “the problem.”)
and consider that you may need to soften your attacks on Mr. Trump in order to effectively communicate your message about the Russian menace.
I agree. Without “smoking gun” evidence, which you don’t have, arguing Trump personally colluded will just distract from, and potentially discredit, your arguments about Russia.
Also, what is the point of making your arguments about Trump in the book. Even if true (which I still do not believe), that is Mueller’s job, not yours. He has subpoena power, you don’t, so you will never be able to make a better argument than he can, and you run the risk of his report completely discrediting anything you say. Futher, Trump is President and he can only be removed before 2020 by impeachment, which won’t happen regardless of what you write.
The important thing is to open our collective consciousness to the risks we face from Russia and change our behavior towards Russia going forward. Spending any time focusing on what Trump said or does accomplishes nothing towards that end.
In other words, focus on Russia, not Trump.
She is self publishing this book, partially bankrolled by Ricochetti.