Battlegrounds

Putin, of course, took advantage of tensions among European nations and between the United States and Europe. Indeed, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, he has been undeterred due to a lack of unity among these allies, to diminished confidence among them, and to their failure to impose costs on the Kremlin sufficient to force Putin to abandon his playbook. Putin’s perception of Europe as weak, combined with the unenforced red line in Syria in 2013, almost certainly contributed to his 2014 decision to annex Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Perceived European impotence and American reluctance probably contributed to other Kremlin decisions, such as attacking elections in Europe and the United States, the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom, and support for Assad’s use of chemical weapons to commit mass murder in Syria. Despite sanctions on Putin’s regime and the Russian defense industry, Nord Stream 2 was a reminder of how Russia could extend its influence in Europe despite egregious violations of international law and infringements on European sovereignty. While subverting Europe politically, Russia was rewarded financially and gained coercive economic influence.

Russia’s appearance of strength, however, belied significant weaknesses that cut across its economy, demographics, public health, and social services. As former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has observed, Putin’s Russia played a poor hand well.71 The United States and its allies, particularly in Europe, played a much better hand poorly. Or, as the Stanford professor of international relations Kathryn Stoner pointed out to me, understanding the game that is being played is more important than the face value of the cards a player holds. Understanding the Kremlin’s strategy and the fear, sense of lost honor, and ambitions that drove its actions is the first step in parrying Putin’s playbook and protecting our free and open societies.

* In the 2010 Census, the Agriculture Department estimated that 11.5 million poor Americans (4.1 percent of the U.S. population) lived in food deserts.

CHAPTER 2

Parrying Putin’s Playbook

A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.

—ANDREI SAKHAROV

THE UNITED States and Europe were ill-prepared for Russia’s toxic combination of disinformation, denial, dependence, and disruptive technologies. Responses to the Kremlin’s sustained campaigns of subversion not only were slow and inadequate, but also tended to aid and abet those who sowed dissention and division. In her November 21 testimony before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Dr. Fiona Hill observed that “when we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, to degrade our institutions and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.”1 When we are considering how best to counter Russian aggression, Hill’s admonishment is the best starting point. Putin seeks to divide; Americans and Europeans should not divide themselves. Putin employs disinformation; Americans and Europeans should restore trusted sources of information. Putin cultivates dependencies; Americans and Europeans should depend more on each other and like-minded nations. Putin employs disruptive technologies to compensate for Russia’s weaknesses; Americans and Europeans should counter those efforts and maintain their considerable competitive advantage. The United States and European nations should be confident.

When I met Patrushev in Geneva, the combination of fear and injured pride was palpable. He appeared tough, but his was the kind of toughness that comes from bitter disappointment, in his case, in a system he had spent his whole life defending. The Soviet Union was corrupt to its core, but Patrushev had been taught to look—from the inequality in a system that professed egalitarianism; from the brutality that belied the Soviet concept of social justice for workers as a fraud; and from the cynical patriarchy in the Stalinist order that during and after World War II killed six million of its people and put approximately one million others in barbaric prisons in which many more perished.2 Patrushev’s long face carried his disappointment and anger over the collapse of the corrupt system he had worked so hard to perpetuate. And since 2000, he had joined Putin in an effort to recreate that system—but not exactly. He, Putin, and the Siloviki dropped all pretense of egalitarianism, doubling down on nationalism and pride in Mother Russia. And they added a strong dose of greed, as both Putin and Patrushev became personally wealthy at the top of their corrupt system. Blaming the United States for their failings became a habit, and competition with the United States and Europe was necessary to distract the Russian people from those failings. It was also natural. Putin, Patrushev, and the Siloviki define themselves and their system, as they did during the Cold War, based on a perceived threat from the West.3

Because the Kremlin’s base motivation is unlikely to change while Putin is in power, the United States, its allies, and like-minded partners must parry Putin’s playbook and, in particular, its critical components of disinformation, denial, dependence, and the use of disruptive technology. Because the Kremlin’s objective is to divide and weaken the United States and Europe from within, defeating Putin’s sophisticated strategy will require strategic competence and a concerted effort to restore confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

Putin’s aggressive behavior and Patrushev’s tough demeanor mask Russia’s underlying vulnerability and diminishing power relative to the United States and Europe. In 2019, Russia’s GDP was roughly equivalent to that of the state of Texas and smaller than Italy’s.4 After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, NATO countries finally increased defense spending. Excluding the United States, their combined $299 billion budget in 2019 compared favorably to Russia’s 2018 defense budget of $61.4 billion. The U.S. defense budget alone was eleven times larger, at $685 billion in 2019.5 But although Europe and the United States enjoy tremendous comparative advantages over Russia, parrying Putin’s playbook requires mobilizing those advantages and remediating vulnerabilities that the Kremlin exploits.

AFTER TWO decades of Putin’s rule, Russian aggression itself may be most effective at restoring trust in democratic principles and institutions. As the historian and author Timothy Garton Ash observed in 2019, Europe recognizes that it faces an existential threat of disintegration, “like the prospect of death, that concentrates minds.”6 Concentrating minds might lead to the abandonment of flawed assumptions that have, in the past, masked the growing threat. Because of flawed assumptions, the United States and its European allies, in spite of all good intentions, have allowed and, at times, encouraged Russian aggression.

I return here to the idea of strategic narcissism, for America’s failure to develop an effective response to Russian aggression was based in it and, in particular, in a kind of wishful thinking: that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian leaders would accept the status quo. Multiple U.S. administrations neglected the emotional drivers behind Putin’s actions. Even after the pattern of Russian attacks and subversion of European nations was undeniable, over-optimism about prospects for change in Russian policy delayed effective responses.

Nearly eight years before I met Nikolai Patrushev in Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met her counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in that same city. Only seven months had passed since Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the first war in history in which cyber attacks were used in combination with a military offensive and a sustained disinformation campaign. Clinton presented Mr. Lavrov with a “reset button” meant to symbolize a fresh start in the relationship. She described her reset attempt as “a very effective meeting of the minds” that she hoped might lead to “more trust, predictability, and progress.”7 Optimism about the reset policy grew as work progressed on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which reduced the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers by half and limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Also positive was Russian support for the expansion of a Northern Distribution Network to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan and new sanctions on Iran. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on an open microphone whispering to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev—Putin would return to the presidency from the position of prime minister two months later—that he would have “more flexibility” after the U.S. presidential election in November of that year. Obama was referring to the potential for a new arms agreement, but his comment also communicated to Medvedev a willingness to overlook Russia’s transgressions in the interest of making progress on that and other priorities.8 Seven months later, during his reelection campaign for president, Obama mocked his opponent, Senator Mitt Romney, for describing Russia as a geopolitical foe: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”9

Over-optimism led to complacency as the Obama administration pursued a Russia policy based on its hopes to work with the Kremlin rather than the needs to deter and defend against Russian aggression. Those hopes soon vanished when Russia annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, intervened in Syria, hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and attacked the 2016 presidential election. In the 2000s, as the Russian threat grew more complex and sophisticated, the United States wrongly assumed that Russia’s goals aligned with those of the United States. It believed that diplomatic efforts could bring the Kremlin in from the cold to join the community of responsible nations and abandon its disruptive behavior. Psychologists define optimism bias as the tendency of those beginning a treatment to believe in the success of the treatment even if the result is uncertain. President Obama and Secretary Clinton were not the first to succumb to optimism bias and wishful thinking while pursuing improved relations with Russia, nor would they be the last.

In the summer of 2001, President George W. Bush met with President Vladimir Putin and reported that “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciate so very much the frank dialogue.”10 Putin’s talent for deception and manipulation was on full display as he told President Bush a fabricated story about how he had saved from a fire in a dacha a cherished Russian Orthodox cross given to him by his mother and worn around his neck. As he would later do with the Clinton Foundation and the Trump organizations, he tried to do a favor for President Bush by arranging a lucrative job in a Russian oil company for one of Bush’s friends.11 By the end of his second term, Bush was forced to revise his assessment of Putin. In August 2008, as both presidents were in the receiving line to greet Chairman Xi Jinping at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, Russian forces were invading Georgia.

President Donald Trump continued this trend of U.S. presidents believing that they could appeal to mutual interests, build personal rapport with Putin, improve the relationship between Washington and Moscow, and change Russian strategic behavior. Trump often stated that improved relations with Russia “would be a good thing, not a bad thing.” The candidate was appreciative of Vladimir Putin’s flattery, stating in December 2015, “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.”12 Trump treated some of Putin’s most brazen criminal actions with dismissiveness and moral equivalency. For example, in 2017, when asked by Bill O’Reilly in a Fox News interview if he respected Vladimir Putin even though, as O’Reilly stated, “he’s a killer,” the president responded, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”13 President Trump, in public statements made before and after his election, appeared to waver in his determination to hold Russia accountable despite policy decisions that strengthened Europe’s defenses and imposed significant costs on Putin and those around him, mainly in the form of sanctions. Indeed, the president seemed at times to abet Russian disinformation and denial. For example, after U.S. intelligence agencies determined unequivocally that there had been a Russian attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, President Trump described his conversation with Putin: “He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. But I just asked him again, and he said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they’re saying he did.” Commenting further in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2018, after a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin, the president stated that “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”14

While some speculated that President Trump sometimes appeared to be an apologist for Russia and Mr. Putin because the Kremlin was extorting him with damaging evidence of business improprieties or embarrassing personal conduct, Trump’s over-optimism about improving Russian relations fit a pattern of optimism bias and wishful thinking across two previous administrations.15 And the unreciprocated efforts to improve relations with Putin left U.S. presidents vulnerable to the KGB case officer’s subterfuge. At the 2018 press conference in Helsinki, when asked directly by a reporter if he had “compromising material” on President Trump, Putin did not give a direct answer. He responded, “Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this, when President Trump was in Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect, but back then when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow… . Do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it’s difficult to imagine utter nonsense on a bigger scale than this. Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.”16 Putin was never going to be Donald Trump’s friend. He used the Helsinki summit to undermine the U.S. president and keep alive speculation about the slanderous contents of the Steele dossier.

The basis for Trump’s persistent optimism bias, even as Putin undermined him publicly, had an added dimension. For some of the self-proclaimed strategists around President Trump, the pursuit of improved U.S.- Russian relations despite continued Russian aggression was based mainly on two rationalizations: first, a misunderstanding of history and an associated nostalgia for the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II; and second, a peculiar sense of kinship with and affinity for Russian nationalists. This latter rationalization is based on a perceived commonality of interest in confronting Islamist terrorism and protecting what these Trump strategists regarded as wholesome and predominantly Western, Caucasian, and Christian cultures from dilution through multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious immigration.17 In a July 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News, President Trump said that the characterization of Russia as an adversary was “incredible” because of the country’s tremendous sacrifices during World War II. “Russia lost 50 million people and helped us win the war,” President Trump said. Some Americans and Europeans view Russia as the repository of a purer version of Christianity and, under Putin, a bastion of conservatism that is protecting Western civilization from postmodern ideas that are anathema to some conservatives.18

But both rationalizations are fundamentally flawed. The alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II was an “alliance of necessity.” In the midst of that war, Russia had initially tried to stay out of the conflict by signing the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the brutal dismemberment of Poland and the inevitable annexation by the Soviet Union of the three Baltic states. It was only when Nazi Germany turned on its accomplices that the Soviets found themselves unexpectedly fighting on the side of the Western Allies and (after the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 1941) the United States. It was an alliance that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had tried his best to avoid; he had been hostile to the governments and people of the West.19 The only factor that held the unlikely allies together was Adolf Hitler. And while it is true that the Soviet Union bore the largest sacrifice of fighting in terms of lives lost, once the war ended, the alliance of necessity dissolved and gave way to a cold war between the two powers.

Despite the U.S. desire to regard Russia as an erstwhile ally grateful for American bloodshed for a common cause and the $11.3 billion in U.S. assistance under the Lend-Lease policy, Russia’s memory of the alliance in World War II does not evoke warm feelings among Kremlin leaders.20 Some Russians view U.S. and U.K. delays in opening a second front in France as an intentional effort to allow the Soviets and the Germans to bleed each other to death on the Eastern Front. And they believe their exclusion from the joint American-British effort to build an atomic bomb was part of a plan to dominate the Soviet Union and the postwar world. If the prospect of improved relations with Putin relied on a natural confluence of interests with respect to Europe or to Russian nostalgia for the World War II alliance against Nazi Germany, that prospect was dim.

Ignorance of history combined with bigotry to generate another source of delusional thinking about Putin’s Russia. Some Americans were easy targets for Russian disinformation because they felt a kinship with and a cultural affinity for Russia as a defender of social conservatism and Christianity. That basis for optimism about improved relations with the Kremlin was not confined to the United States; it was even more prevalent in parts of Europe. For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban expressed alignment with Russia, declaring that Hungary would be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West” in order to build a “new Hungarian state.” Some saw Putin as a modern-day crusader who was protecting Christianity from Islamist terrorists after U.S. interventions in the Middle East made the world less secure. The Russian Orthodox Church, which acts as an arm of the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services, praised Putin’s intervention in Syria as part of the “fight with terrorism” and a “holy battle.” Russia actively cultivates these feelings of racial and religious kinship to further polarize and weaken Western resolve to confront the Kremlin’s aggression.21

ONCE SPECIOUS rationalizations for seeking improved relations as an end in themselves are rejected, we can develop a consistent strategy designed not only to defend against Russia’s ongoing campaign and deter further aggression, but also to set conditions for a post-Putin era in which Russian leaders recognize that they can best advance their interests through cooperation rather than confrontation with the West. The public and private sectors both have an important role to play. Because Putin’s playbook depends so heavily on disinformation and denial, defense begins with exposing the Kremlin’s efforts to sow dissension within and between nations.

Governments have powerful tools available to identify malicious cyber actors and act against them. Law enforcement and sanctions against individuals and organizations engaged in political subversion have proven effective. Because most of the evidence that underpins indictments and sanctions is public, the results of law enforcement investigations, such as the Mueller Report in the United States, are particularly valuable in pulling back the curtain on Russian cyber-enabled information warfare. Named after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the report on the two-year investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election exposed the level of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and the overall effort to divide Americans through cyber-enabled information warfare.22 Armed with the Mueller investigation and other sources of information, on March 15, 2018, the Trump administration placed sanctions on Russian individuals and companies, including those associated with the IRA and GRU.23 The U.S. Department of Justice also announced criminal counts against twenty-six Russian nationals and three Russian companies.24

In the fight against Putin’s playbook, citizens and their representatives in government have an important role to play. As Fiona Hill suggested, they might resolve, at the very least, not to be their own worst enemies. The reaction to the Mueller Report among President Trump, his supporters, and his opponents demonstrated how political divisiveness can mask what all sides should have agreed upon: that Russia attacked the U.S. election and that the attacks continued beyond the election to divide Americans and reduce confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. Some glossed over that point of agreement to either echo President Trump’s description of the investigation as a “witch hunt” or to claim that the report did not go far enough to reveal either “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians or obstruction of justice on the part of the president. As Hill observed in her testimony before the impeachment inquiry committee in November 2019, Russia’s goal was to put the U.S. president, no matter who won the election, “under a cloud.” She warned that those who support fictional narratives reinforce the Kremlin’s campaign.

Sadly, Hill’s observation seemed to fall on deaf ears. February 2020 revelations that Russia was using disinformation to bolster the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump spurred President Trump to fire Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire as the president dismissed Russia’s continued subversion of America’s democratic process as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, some Democrats resurrected the already investigated allegations that Trump was somehow in collusion with the Kremlin. Putin could not have written a better script. Social media remained the Kremlin’s weapon of choice.25

Deterring Russian aggression in cyberspace requires more than a purely government response. While the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has exquisite capabilities to attribute actions in cyberspace, it is often reluctant to do so because attribution might reveal its tools and methods. The scale of the problem alone demands efforts across the public and private sectors. Social media and internet companies must continue the work they began after the 2016 election to expose and counter disinformation and propaganda. Facebook, which took the most blame for the vulnerabilities its system created, identified and deleted Russian bots on both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook also had Cambridge Analytica (the UK-based firm that harvested data from millions of people’s Facebook accounts without consent) delete Facebook data and improve users’ awareness of how to strengthen their privacy features. Twitter identified and deleted bots as well. But Russian bots and trolls adapted, trying to stay ahead of those protecting infrastructure, exposing disinformation, or countering denial. Moreover, these defensive actions did not adequately address the safeguarding of personal data that Russian or other malign actors might use in cyber-enabled information warfare or the economic incentives that drive users toward extreme content.

Because social media companies have economic incentives to gather and use personal data to generate revenue (mainly through advertising), regulation may be necessary. A combination of removing the cloak of anonymity for some users (such as advertisers), protecting individuals’ personal data, and requiring internet and social media companies to be held liable for damaging compromises of data or blatant abuse of their platforms are all actions that could shift industry incentives in favor of protecting against disinformation and denial. Regulation may also help ensure that those companies do not become the arbiters of freedom of speech in democratic societies.