Battlegrounds Read online

  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.

  Private-sector efforts can be particularly valuable in countering Russia because they are unclassified and can be released to the media, the public, and law enforcement. For example, a private company helped attribute responsibility for the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, United Kingdom. Bellingcat, an international research and investigation collective, conducted an open-source investigation to identify the attackers and connect them to their GRU offices. Combinations of government and private efforts counter Russian denial in the physical as well as the cyber world. Private-sector efforts can create a firehose of truth to counter the Kremlin’s firehose of falsehoods. Still, no combination of private- and public-sector efforts to expose and defend against RNGW activities will solve the problem once and for all. As attacks on the 2020 presidential election made clear, Russian agents will adapt continuously to avoid detection, circumvent defenses, and launch new offensives.

  Countering cyber attacks such as data theft or damage to systems must go beyond the “perimeter” defense or even so-called defense in depth, in which multiple layers of security controls are placed throughout an information technology system. Because capable state actors such as Russia can penetrate elaborate defenses given adequate time and resources, defense requires a good offense. Organizations like the NSA in the United States conduct continuous reconnaissance in cyberspace to identify and preempt attacks before they can penetrate the system perimeter. Furthermore, the creation of U.S. Cyber Command in 2010 marked crucial efforts to “direct, synchronize, and coordinate cyberspace planning and operations to defend and advance national interests in collaboration with domestic and international partners.”26 The command is tackling the problems of integrating and scaling capabilities to the magnitude of the threat under the concept of “increasing resiliency, defending forward, and constantly engaging.”27 This form of active defense appeared successful during the U.S. midterm elections in 2018. In keeping with U.S. Cyber Command’s doctrine of persistent engagement and causing problems for adversaries before they penetrate our systems, cyber operators reportedly blocked internet access to the IRA on the day of the elections.28 In the future, private-sector firms are likely to participate in active defense. Attribution and punishment after attacks will remain important, but these have proven inadequate to deter or prevent attacks designed to cripple critical systems or infrastructure, extort victims, or wage cyber-enabled information warfare. Amplified sharing of information and expertise within government and between government and industry should help provide protection to the dot-com, dot-gov, and dot-mil internet domains.

  Just as the GRU and SVR learned from early attempts to undermine Western democracies, the United States and other nations might learn from countries on the Russian frontier that were on the receiving end of Putin’s playbook. In 2007, Estonia came under a sustained cyber offensive that included disinformation, denial, and cyber attacks on infrastructure. Its disagreement with Russia over the relocation of a World War II statue sparked an offensive that began with distributed denial-of-service attacks, a flood of internet traffic that overwhelms servers and shuts down websites. Estonians lost access to news outlets, government websites, and bank accounts. Russian media stoked the crisis with disinformation, such as false reports that Soviet war graves were being destroyed. Russia has continued this sustained campaign of disinformation and propaganda for over a decade.29 Recognizing that it needed improved and sustained defenses, Estonia, under the direction of President Toomas Henrik Ilves, formed a civilian cyber defense reserve unit, attained a high level of security through end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication, and constantly monitored systems for potential threats. Estonia demo
nstrated that a clear understanding of the problem, determined leadership, a comprehensive strategy, and close cooperation across public and private sectors can defend successfully against malicious actors. Estonia’s cybersecurity now includes high-functioning e-government infrastructure, digital identity, mandatory security baselines, and a central system for identifying and responding to attacks. Private-sector service providers are reviewed to assess and reduce risk. President Ilves recalled that citizen and private-sector involvement is essential to effective defense and that the keys to success were incentivizing online security measures, implementing cybersecurity public education programs, and constantly monitoring cyberspace and power grids.30

  In Finland, the government sought the participation of its citizens in an effort to track, fight, and prevent cyber attacks. Mandatory cyber education is meant to “bolster Finland as an information society” and contribute to cyber research. The National Cyber Security Centre is accessible to all. It provides information, posts vulnerabilities, and runs “exercises” that include simulated cyber attacks to increase awareness of vulnerabilities and motivate organizations to protect themselves. The goal is to achieve comprehensive security.31