Russian Splits

I’ve blogged a lot about Russian efforts to destabilize and further polarize within individual Western democracies by spreading disinformation, individually tailored based on personal data scraped from the Web-available resources (Cambridge Analytica/Facebook anyone?). We’ve seen the results of Russian hacks and some rather clear and dramatic interference with elections in various democracies, most notably the United States. With a rather vulnerable nexus of family global business connections, Trump’s family was particularly susceptible. The Art of the Deal admonition to get dirt “advantage” on “the other side” plus a love money created massive opportunities for savvy Russian operatives to wreak havoc within Washington’s already toxic political schisms.

What has not been given sufficient coverage in the press are the other “divide and conquer” targets of manipulative and secretive Russian efforts. I am certain that the Russians were blindsided by U.S. participation in a pan-European response to the failed assassination attempt (using a nerve agent) to kill former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London. 150 Russian diplomats expelled from the West (60 from the U.S. alone), quickly countered by an equal response by Russia. Up to that moment, Trump had followed the Russian script almost to the letter. Alienating Germany’s Angela Merkel, contradicting and criticizing UK’s Theresa May and generally disagreeing with the EU’s open global trading policies… it was music to Vladimir Putin’s ears.

Putin has also cozied up to increasingly anti-democratic Turkey, seeking to fracture NATO. Further, as global democracies expelled Russian officials, Putin announced a successful missile test (the band new RS-28 Sarmat ICBM InterContinental Ballistic Missile, pictured above), which the Russian president described as capable of reaching anywhere on earth. He also noted that each such missile could easily penetrate any existing anti-missile systems to deliver 15 separately targetable nuclear warheads. The West was his go-to rallying point to his constituents. See also my March 28^th blog, Why Putin Needs Animosity from the West.

So somewhere inside the U.S. government, someone must have realized that Russia had crossed a red line, that Trump was literally forced into making a choice: Europe or Russia. With increasingly damning information – from the clear Russian ties to senior Trump campaign officials to a rather pro-Russian rewriting of the GOP platform on supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia – Trump was now in an awkward position; he could not be the odd man out in a global democracy condemnation of Russian criminal conduct.

But exactly what are Russian goals to disrupted targeted global alliances? The March 30^th The Cipher Brief provides these answers: “[Data] collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a transatlantic, bipartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, shows that fraying transatlantic bonds – a critical part of Putin’s effort to undermine the international order – has been a consistent thread in Russia’s ongoing information war against the West.

“Since August, ASD has been monitoring, via its Hamilton 68 dashboard, pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts that have been linked to influence operations in the United States. Just before the German election in September, ASD launched Artikel 38, a similar tool that monitors the activity of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts in Germany. The two dashboards now automatically monitor these accounts in real time and distill their content – with a focus on the themes and messaging they are pushing – into a readily analyzable format.

“Data harvested from the dashboards over the past six months reveals two primary messaging strategies used by pro-Kremlin accounts to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. “The first involves directly discrediting the transatlantic partners in the eyes of each other by painting a negative picture of Europe to American audiences and of the United States to Germans. The second strategy is a more indirect effort at disrupting the alliance by promoting the Kremlin’s version of ‘traditional values’ and attacking the open, tolerant, liberal ideas that have long defined the West.

“The Kremlin’s indirect attempts at fraying transatlantic bonds look much alike on both sides of the Atlantic. In pushing an ‘anti-globalist’ narrative, Kremlin-oriented Twitter networks exploit issues that are contentious in both the United State and in Germany, most notably migration/immigration issues and the war in Syria. These topics have made Americans and Europeans question the desirability of the global liberal order, which has long formed the ideological bedrock of the transatlantic partnership. The central message behind the Russian-linked Tweets is thus: ‘Look what the post-war liberal order has created!’ – ‘Look what your partnership has brought about!’

“No political event of the past years has challenged the attractiveness of the liberal order more than the European refugee crisis. This is true for Germans that are still struggling to manage the inflow of more than a million migrants since 2015 as well as for Americans that were largely unaffected by the crisis but that have been roiled in debates over their own immigration policies.

“Russian-linked accounts targeting both countries have therefore consistently amplified xenophobic content that portrays immigrants as criminals, rapists, and cultural invaders. Headlines that have been promoted by accounts tracked on Hamilton 68 include: ‘Meanwhile in Sweden, crime hits all-time highs;’ ‘Italian city removes Christmas tree to avoid offending Muslims;’ and ‘Germany: Syrian migrant kills defenseless dog by throwing him out of a high window.’”

As you read some of the above bits of disinformation, you might recognize the basis for several tweets from our President who bought this clearly fake news hook, line and sinker. The subtext in all of this is increasingly that if Trump is stepping away from the traditional American leadership in the free world, as much as China is replacing the U.S. in economic and trading power, so too is Europe stepping in to replace America’s philosophical leadership. When Trump finally leaves the American presidency, he will leave a nation with vastly less power and influence in the world… second or third fiddle on the global power stage.

Just expelling Russian diplomats is just a tiny first step in countering Putin’s aspiration to fracture Western alliances; will Trump actually allow the United States to take all the necessary counter-measures, dealing with cyber warfare… and disrupt Putin’s own alliances?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the shifting sands of global power have rapidly become quick sands for longer-term American interests.