THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DID NOTHING TO DETER RUSSIA.

during the reset. This included breaking into the homes of NGO workers and diplomats. In one case, an official with the National Democratic Institute was framed in the Russian press on false rape charges.

In 2013, when the Obama administration appointed Michael McFaul to be his ambassador in Moscow, the harassment got worse. McFaul complained he was tailed by cameramen from the state-owned media every time he left the Embassy. He asked on Twitter how the network seemed to always know his private schedule.

In June 2016, a CIA officer in Moscow was tackled and thrown to the ground by a uniformed guard with Russia’s FSB, the successor agency of the KGB.

In 2011, the former Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Christopher “Kit” Bond, told me: “It’s not the intelligence committee that fails to understand the problem. It’s the Obama administration.”

This lax approach to Russia was captured in the memoir of Obama’s former defence secretary, Robert Gates. He wrote that Obama at first was angry at his FBI director, Robert Mueller, and his CIA director, Leon Panetta, for recommending the arrest in 2010 of a network of illegal Russian sleeper agents the FBI had been tracking for years.

“The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians,” Gates wrote. He quoted Obama as saying: “Just as we’re getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?”

After some more convincing, Obama went along with a plan to kick the illegal spies out of the country in exchange for some Americans. But the insight into the thinking inside his Oval Office is telling.

Obama did respond to Russian aggression after its invasion of Ukraine in 2014. He worked with European allies to impose sanctions on Russia for their violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. But he never agreed to sell the Ukrainians defensive weapons. In the final years of his presidency, as Wired magazine reported, the Russians engaged in bold cyberattacks against Ukraine’s electric grid. The U.S. has not responded openly to that, either.

Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Obama policy toward Russian aggression was inconsistent. As Foreign Policy magazine reported in May, Obama’s State Department slow-rolled a proposal from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to lay out a set of options to punish Russia’s client Syria for its use of chlorine bombs against its own citizens in 2014. Russia and the U.S. forged the agreement in 2013 to remove chemical weapons from the country.

In 2015, the Obama administration did nothing to deter Russia from establishing airbases inside Syria, preferring instead to support John Kerry’s fruitless efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement with Russia in Syria. That inaction now haunts the U.S. as Russia declared its own no-fly zone this month in Syria, after U.S. forces shot down a Syrian jet.

All of this is the context of Putin’s decision to boldly interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. Perhaps Putin would have authorized the operation even if Obama responded more robustly to Russia’s earlier dirty tricks and foreign adventures. But it’s easy to understand why Putin would believe he had a free shot.

Russia probed American resolve for years. When Obama finally did respond, it was too late to save Ukraine and too late to protect our election.