Giving the green signal to Putin?
Without firm condemnation from Trump, Russia may carry on meddling in Western democracies with potentially dangerous ramifications
The detailed indictment by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for meddling in the 2016 presidential election has put the spotlight on the extent and sophistication of the operation launched by the Kremlin to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. While revealing that this had been a years-long effort by Moscow, the indictment confirmed that President Vladimir Putin’s objective was clearly to prevent the election of Hilary Clinton and to tilt the odds in favour of US President Donald Trump.
While the investigation of the special counsel does not seem, so far, to have uncovered any rock-solid evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, what has been remarkable is the reaction of the US President who went into a frenzy of tweets to berate the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), accusing his top federal law enforcement agency “of spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign”. True to his habit, Mr Trump also tried to use the terms of Mr Mueller’s indictment of the Russian individuals and organisation as a confirmation that this showed that it was “a hoax ... that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia — it never did!” This was quite a stretch.
The President went even further, criticising his National Security Advisor General H R McMaster for “forgetting” “to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russian” when Mr McMaster declared at the Munich Security Conference that there was “undeniable proof” of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, adding that “with the FBI indictment, the evidence is now incontrovertible.”
Absent in all this frenzy was any condemnation of the Russian actions, any real indication of the will of the US President to stop Moscow to interfere again in the US political life and the functioning of its institutions, or any warning addressed to Mr Putin not to try to do that again. This is quite astounding considering that the number one priority of a US President — as commander-in-chief — is to ensure America’s security and integrity against any threat or attack and to protect the safe functioning of its institutions.
This very bizarre behaviour is not just another manifestation of an over-sized ego from a President permanently looking for vindication and praise. It represents a very worrisome failure and sends an extremely wrong message not only to Mr Putin, but also more generally in a context where cyber hacking is now recognised as a major national security threat in many countries — even construed in the US as justifying a military response in some cases — and where the potential for manipulation of the public created by the widening use of social media has become only too obvious.
Taking that element into account one needs to understand the significance and the implications of the Russian meddling in the US election — but not only in that case, as there seems to have also been Russian attempts to interfere with the French presidential election in 2017, and concerns about the same threat in the German election last September.
Mr Putin has always considered that the US and Europe had unduly interfered in Georgia’s so-called “Rose Revolution” and Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”— two countries that he continues to see as part of the Russian sphere of influence. These “color revolutions” were characterised by the crucial role of activist students’ movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), both accused by Moscow to be funded by Western countries. Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, went even as far as assimilating these cases of regime change to “a new form of warfare”. In the same way, the Russian President has always been convinced that foreign NGOs were supporting the opposition to him in his country.
Mr Putin is not only a leader bent on doing whatever it takes to restoring Russia’s standing as a great power and forcing the US and Europe to deal with it as such. He is also a very vindictive man. For him, if the West tried to interfere in his country politics and worked to alter the political course of countries he sees as part of Russia’s sphere of influence, then it is fair game to try to do the same when it comes to trying to change the outcomes of democratic processes in the US or in Europe.
The US and Europe of course dispute that kind of assertion. For them, “spheres of influence” are — at least officially — a notion of the past and what happens in the former parts of the Soviet Union since its disintegration is not anymore the Kremlin’s business. However, the important fact is that Mr Putin will continue to operate on the basis of his assumptions. And if the behaviour of President Trump leads him to think that he can do that without incurring a severe cost, he will just persist on this very disturbing and dangerous course until he might go one step too far and will trigger a major crisis.
This is why the lack of very firm condemnation from the US President, the absence of any stern warning from his part to Moscow that there is some heavy cost to pay for meddling with the US or Europe institutional processes, is extremely worrisome and potentially dangerous. This is even more the case considering the greed and hypocrisy of social media operators and “big tech” companies such as Facebook, Google or Instagram, which continue to advocate the phony position of auto-regulation and to escape their responsibility as major channels for propagating fake and/or distorted news and for manipulation of the public opinions. Behind the claims of these giant corporations of having now become more responsible and effective in monitoring what they allow on their sites there is still the same “profit above all” attitude.
It is quite comforting that a company such as Unilever — one of the biggest online advertisers — has threatened to stop putting ads on digital platforms if they don’t act more decisively to prevent the dissemination of “toxic” online content. However, this is by far not enough. As long as the US administration will not show a unified, very strong, stance against the kind of practices the Kremlin is indulging in, as long as there is not a very effective coordination among the US and Europe, and as long as social media companies will not be well regulated and forced to assume their responsibilities, Mr Putin will continue to think that the benefits from meddling may outweigh the cost. And he will have more and more imitators of all kinds. This is not a nice prospect, to say the least, as nobody will be immune from such attacks and interferences.