Putin on the March. Douglas E. Schoen

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      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