Democrats and the Russia issue

Janet Heer this week made a (much-needed) cautionary warning to the media and implicitly to Democrats to be smart about how they handle the Trump-Russia scandal, Is the Russia Investigation Turning the Left Into Conspiracy Theorists? New Republic 03/27/2017. She writes:

Conspiracy theories about Russia are proliferating because of the strange limbo that America finds itself in: The sitting president is under FBI investigation. Further, the president’s party, which is tasked with holding him in check, seems on occasion to be running interference for him. As The Washington Post reports, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has withheld key intelligence reports on this matter “from other committee members even while rushing to present it to the White House.” Conspiracy theories about Russia are also proliferating because of the murkiness of the Russian story, the full dimensions of which are hidden because it’s an ongoing investigation and because Republicans are loath to divulge anything that might be politically damaging to their party.

The best way for the media to dispel conspiracy-theorizing about this story would be to take great care with facts and characterizations.

It's worth repeating the old saw, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Or, in this context, the fact that there are unsubstantiated conspiracy theories floating around about a topic doesn't mean that the topic doesn't involve misdeeds or conspiracies.

Paying attention to the facts as reported and thinking about them critically

Evan Halper reports on Jerry Brown's opposition to the Trump Family Business Administration's climate change policy in, Gov. Jerry Brown calls Trump energy plan a 'colossal mistake' that will galvanize climate change activists Los Angeles Times 03/28/2017.Jerry's comment is interesting in itself. But I want to highlight the part about foreign officials:

“It defies science itself,” Brown said in a call to The Times shortly after Trump signed an executive order that aims to bring an abrupt halt to the United States' leadership on global warming. “Erasing climate change may take place in Donald Trump‘s mind, but nowhere else.”

“Yes, there is going to be a counter-movement,” Brown vowed, predicting Trump’s actions will mobilize environmentalists in a way President Obama never could. “I have met with many heads of state, ambassadors. This is a growing movement. President Trump’s outrageous move will galvanize the contrary force. Things have been a bit tepid [in climate activism]. But this conflict, this sharpening of the contradiction, will energize those who believe climate change is an existential threat.” [my emphasis]

This is one reason that I worry about Democrats and left-leaning commentators and reporters like Rachel Maddow making any contact with a Russian by anyone connected to the Trump team somehow inherently sinister and suspicious. If someone is doing a legitimate business deal with a Russian company and not breaking any laws in the course of it, that in itself is not an indication that they're working for the FSB as a result. It's generally assumed that doing business between countries is a deterrent to war. I would argue that it may not be universally so. But people who might argue against say, close reliance by Country X on oil and natural gas resources from Country Y, would probably make the argument that such a deal makes Country X too dependent on Country Y to take a tough enough stand against Country Y in an international confrontation of some sort.

Here's another example, which I retweeted myself:

UN Amb Haley: US is no longer focused on removing Assad. #Putin will be pleased. #Trumputin https://t.co/0u8Rge5CwJ

— James S. Henry (@submergingmkt) March 30, 2017

Since I've been critical of the recklessness of support for various US regime-change operations, including that in Syria in support of those ever-hard-to-identify Syrian Moderates. So this doesn't necessarily look like a bad policy in itself. From what I know, that's far more of a realistic posture than gambling on the ephemeral Syrian Moderates. Since incompetence as well as corruption is a defining characteristic of the Trump Family Business Administration, there's no guarantee that a good policy will yield good results.

It's also possible that a good policy that turns out to produce good results could have been done as a result of a corrupt and/or illegal deal. James Henry, who is one of the most important researchers of Trump's business deals, also tweeted this:

@submergingmkt I guess Kushner meeting in Paris paid off. https://t.co/UtjmS89i99

— MCleary (@mcleary) March 30, 2017

Was there anything improper or illegal about that meeting? The Guardian article doesn't allege either. Whether it's a good or bad policy or process is another question.

Heer quotes Masha Gessen Don’t Fight Their Lies With Lies of Your Own New York Times 03/25/2017. He also cautions about speculating too far beyond the facts in the public record. But his argument there comes a little too close to Both Sides Do It for me.

But Rachel Maddow is someone who should pay attention to such cautions. For example, Political Strains In West Serve Vladimir Putin Goals MSNBC 03/29/2017:

She has been strangely flippant and careless about her Russia-Russia-Russia reporting. But until about halfway through this clip, I was thinking she was doing a good job describing Russia's current autocratic rightwing Christianist political strategy in Europe. She does sound like she thinks that the idea of trying to create division among adversaries is something that Russia just came up with that nobody had thought of before.

But then she starts talking about the worrisome trend toward secession in California that those devious Russians are trying to exploit. Say what? She has to know that this is silly. There have been even some state legislators in Northern California for decades that say they would like to have Northern California break off and become its own state. But even that is understood to be a running joke reflecting fond prejudices of northern Californians against Los Angeles. If the super-cyber Rooskies think promoting California nationalism is a smart distinformation strategy, then we probably don't need to worry too much about their ability to create coups via "fake news."

Get back to me when Jerry Brown starts channeling Jefferson Davis and John Calhoun and we can have a conversation about that.

Reflecting on the notion of a new Cold War

Aljazeera's Listening Post compiled this report on the state of the Russia-Trump story, Wiretaps, hacks and spin in Donald Trump's America 03/05/2017:

Tony Wood surveys three recent books on Russia and its approach to foreign policy in Eat Your Spinach London Review of Books39:5 03/02/2017. He looks at the question of how post-Soviet Russian relations with the West developed, and at whether the current situation should be seen as a new Cold War.

He borrows a bit from postmodern views of narrative when he writes, "The notion of a ‘cold war’ is a kind of geopolitical speech act: if enough people in power decide they are in one, it will materialise."

This is true. Or in a slightly more realist view, we could put it that mutual perceptions and misperceptions on both sides shape how each side in a adversarial or potentially adversarial posture view the actions of the other in foreign policy. And of their own actions.

Wood observes:

The debate over whether we are or are not in a new Cold War reflects different views of what has happened over the last quarter-century. The story that is most often told in the West sees Gorbachev and Yeltsin making great strides towards democracy and free markets at home, matched by an unprecedented degree of co-operation with the West on the global stage. In this narrative, the rise of Putin meant a reversal of all these trends, resulting in a steady reassertion of Russian power after 2000 that fuelled a series of ugly confrontations. In Who Lost Russia? Peter Conradi attempts a more balanced view, providing a brisk run-through of the post-Cold War era in which both Russia and the West are faulted for a string of misguided moves. ... From Russia’s perspective, these were the steady enlargement of Nato; the interventions in Kosovo, Iraq and Libya; US support for protest-driven regime change in former Soviet states from the mid-2000s onwards; and US and EU attempts to pull Georgia and Ukraine into the West’s orbit. From the Western point of view, the charge sheet includes Russia’s suppression of internal dissent and rigging of the electoral system; attacks on the principle of private property (most notably with the dismembering of Yukos); the invasion of Georgia; the annexation of Crimea and military incursions into eastern Ukraine; as well as the more recent signs of interloping in the US elections.

And Wood stresses the importance of recognizing "the huge imbalance in power and resources between the two parties," i.e., the overwhelming advantage of the United States military and economically compared to today's Russia:

Those who point to this fact are often depicted as supporters of the Kremlin, as if to note the disparity were somehow to take the weaker side. ... But there is a huge distance, politically and ethically, between measuring how much power Russia really has and defending what Putin does with it. One of the effects of the ‘new Cold War’ rhetoric is to conflate the two, and thus to prevent any discussion of the actual international balance of power. But it’s impossible to understand the story of relations between Russia and the West without taking it into account: all other geopolitical calculations have flowed from it – including both the West’s impulse to drive home its advantage through expansion of Nato, and Russia’s growing resentment of that process, as well as its inability to halt or reverse it. [my emphasis]

Wood gives us this perspective on Russia's economic strength compared to the West:

In 1999, Putin said that it would take 15 years of rapid growth for Russia to draw level with Portugal’s current level of per capita GDP. It reached that milestone in 2011; but by then Portugal was further ahead, and even amid the deep recession sparked by the Eurozone crisis, its GDP per capita was still more than one and a half times that of Russia.

Flynn and the Trump-Russia scandal

Sen. Patty Murray wrote on her Facebook page 02/15/2017 about the departure of National Security Adivser Michael Flynn from the Trump Family Business Administration over his :

To say that this is deeply concerning would be an understatement, and people deserve answers. I'm glad Michael Flynn is now out of the White House and away from influencing our national security, but this should not be the end of the story. So I'm calling for an immediate and independent investigation to get to the bottom of President Trump's communication with Russia and Vladimir Putin, both during the campaign and after the election. Democrats and Republicans may disagree on a lot of things, but when it comes to our national security or the integrity of our elections, everyone should put their country over protecting their Party's leader.

There are a lot of factors at play in this drama, which in some ways may be the first major exposure of the extent of the corruption that seems to be the basic operating model of the Trump Family Business Administration. Because I won't be surprised at all if Trump's attitude toward Russia turns out to be based on some business deal in which his family business expects to profit. ExxonMobil's $500 billion deal with Russia that was suspended by the sanctions on Russia over Ukraine is a big one to watch in this context.

There definitely needs to be a serious investigation of the Trump-Russia connections, as Bernie Sanders describes here, Bernie Explains Questions around Trump's Ties to Russia 02/15/2017:

Paul Pillar lays out the seriousness of this already-major political scandal, Shaking the Foundations of Loyalty The National Interest 02/15/2017:

What is intriguing and entertaining in fiction constitutes a political and even constitutional crisis if it arises in reality. Given what we, the public, know so far, such a crisis is at hand now involving Russia and the Trump administration and Trump entourage. A string of revelations can be explained away individually, but collectively they give rise to profound and legitimate doubt about whose interests are being served by those in power.

The earliest press reports, back during the election campaign, involved relationships between senior members of the Trump campaign and Russia. Then there were the intelligence-based findings about a comprehensive Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, partly with the objective of tilting the election toward Trump. There were reports from a retired British intelligence officer about Trump-related shenanigans in Russia, reports that seemed to many eyes to be too deliciously salacious to be true, but the officer has a sound reputation and subsequently some of the details of his reports have been corroborated. Add to that the behavior of the new president himself, who does not hesitate to insult longstanding allies and to attack targets ranging from Broadway casts to an American department store company, but who has an oddly soft touch when it comes to Vladimir Putin and his regime in Russia—even as that regime engages in behavior such as violation of an arms control treaty that is one of the foundations of European security. Trump’s national security adviser takes a fall for lying about pre-inauguration dealings with Russia about sanctions. Couple that with the uncharacteristic non-response by the Putin regime to the most recently imposed sanctions. And now the earliest reports come back in more glaring form with further press reporting that aides to Trump were dealing before the election not just with Russia but with Russian intelligence officials.

Eli Lake defends the Trump crew over the Flynn fiasco in The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn Bloomberg View 02/14/2017. He runs with the Republican line is that the real issue is the leaks about Flynn, not Flynn's dubious dealings with the Russian government.

He even says, "It's not even clear that Flynn lied." He considers Flynn's claim in his resignation letter that he inadvertently gave wrong information in his debriefings with Trump's team to be credible.

A better explanation here is that Flynn was just thrown under the bus. His tenure as national security adviser, the briefest in U.S. history, was rocky from the start. When Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, he was not allowed by the White House to defend himself. Over the weekend, he was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian ambassador.

There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted. It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.

This is shameless echoing of the Trump Family Business Administration's position, in which the leaks about Flynn's misconduct are the only real problem. It's a ridiculous justification.

But it is important to keep in that there aren't some dubious motives at play on the side of the Good Guys, too.

Congressman Adam Schiff, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on MSNBC talking about the Trump-Russia scandal, The Rachel Maddow Show, Transcript 2/14/2017 from the interview in the video.

MADDOW: Let me ask your response to this new reporting from the “New York Times.” I don`t know if you had a chance to review it. The headline is “Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence”. “The New York Times” citing multiple American sources saying that phone records and intercepted calls show members of Trump`s presidential campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign and the year before the election.

I just wanted to get your response to that.

SCHIFF: Well, this is really, I think, the heart of the investigation and that is was there some form of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin? The Kremlin was engaged in illegal activities in the United States designed to influence the outcome of the election. Obviously, their intent was to help Donald Trump and hurt Secretary Clinton, and were Trump campaign surrogates or aides or others affirmatively working with the Russians towards that illegal object?

That`s really one of the central and most important allegations to be investigated. And we have agreement on a bipartisan basis to do that investigation, but there are a lot of big questions about whether we can get that done, and one of them, frankly, is personified by one of the photos you just showed and this is Director Comey, because we`re going to need his cooperation if we`re going to do this investigation.

This makes total sense. And he didn't go beyond the information publicly available in that comment.

Here is the video of the interview, Rep. Adam Schiff: Need James Comey's Cooperation To Investigate Russia Ties:

But just after 5:15 in the video, Schiff says:

Well, this is really the, I think, the heart of the investigation. And that is, was there some form of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin?

And the final point I want to make and you began your program with this tonight, and I`m so glad you did focusing on Putin`s, you know, attempt to discredit and eliminate his political rival or potential political rival, what the stakes are here because, you know, people ask and Sean Spicer wants to suggest what`s the big deal about Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador? Isn`t that sort of ordinary course of events?

The big deal is this. We`re in a global struggle with Russia right now. They are trying to propagate their authoritarian model around the world. [They've ruined democracy, eliminated most democratic institutions in Russia. They're trying to dismantle European institutions in Europe. Liberal democracy is under assault and we are still the last, best hope of democracy around the world. And in that struggle, we cannot afford to be undermined at the very highest levels of the White House. And that's why this is so important.]

(The bracketed sentences are on the video but are missing from the online transcript.)

That framing of US-Russia relations could have been lifted verbatim from innumerable examples from the Cold War. And, at least as much as its antecedents, it's a grandiose, unrealistic, and dogmatic conception. No, the United States' vital interests are not at stake in a competition with Russia over the form of government in Zambia or Grenada. The US and Russia have common interests in some areas, competing interests in others. The US needs to handle those differences realistically, without just giving away concessions so that, for instance, ExxonMobil and the Trump family can increase their fortunes at the expense of US national interests. And without taking careless and reckless actions. It serious enough that we've extended NATO membership and protections to the Baltic states without reorganizing the US military position in Europe to credibly be able to support those guarantees. Treating that commitment is an almost casual way creates a vulnerability that the Russians can easily exploit now.

The Democrats have long since tried to out-hawk the Republicans in their rhetoric. But we need a realistic and practical policy toward Russia in particular, not one based on sweeping, dogmatic and largely empty ideological talk.

Russian political interference: keeping it (too) simple

There should be a real investigation of the Russian hacking story and of possible improper dealings between the Trump campaign and the current Russia government.

And it's obvious that the ideological position and propaganda efforts of the Putin regime are oriented toward encouraging xenophobic, white supremacist and authoritarian parties and movement in other parts of the world, including Europe and the US.

But that doesn't mean Democrats or progressives need to be simple-minded about the whole thing, either.

Unfortunately, Robby Mook seems to be doing exactly that in I ran Clinton's campaign, and I fear Russia is meddling with more than elections Guardian 02/07/2017.

This could be straight out of 1950's anti-Russian propaganda pamphlet, except it's taking an anti-Putinist perspective instead of an anti-Communist one.:

But there’s a deeper dimension to Russia’s actions, which deserves the free world’s urgent attention: its capacity to silently influence domestic legislation and policy-making between elections.

With his success in the US last year, Putin has put opponents on notice that there will be a price to pay for crossing him. Indeed, the complex infrastructure that Russia built to infect public discourse with false or stolen information isn’t going anywhere. It can be unleashed at any time, on any issue, domestic or international.

One wonders which countries Mook considers to be part of the Free World. Obviously, the list wouldn't include Russia.

Mook's pitch strikes me indulging in the same kind of scare-mongering we've become all too familiar in the Global War on Terrorism, or whatever the Trump Family Business Administration is calling it these days.

Is Russia, a petrostate hard hit by the drop in oil prices in recent years, really such a towering threat to US security and to elections in the US and the EU? I realize that even a small country can concentrate resources on particular governmental efforts. But by comparison, the CIA World Factbook as of this writing shows estimated 2016 US GDP in dollars, in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, at $19 trillion, Russia's at $4 trillion. US military spending exceeds that of Russia by astronomical amounts.

But cyber-security and cyberwar capabilities can also give a country new capacities to wage asymmetric conflicts. And that's why the Russian hacking and related issues from 2016 need to be investigated seriously. Along with, you know, enforcing election and espionage laws.

Other than vague references to doing more of something or other to block Russian mischief and referring to filtering measures implmented by Facebook and Twitter, he does mention this: "We must also think about how to manage the presence of government-backed news operations, such as Russia Today (rebranded as the more opaque RT) which can increase their reach through online promotion. The law makes no distinction between the New York Times and outlets like RT or China Daily, which are essentially state-sponsored propaganda."

What does this actually mean? Blocking broadcasts online in the US from RT and China Daily? What immediately comes to mind is how this kind of restriction might have on Internet functioning and Internet businesses. Surely it must also have crossed the mind of Hillary's campaign manager that a Republican President with a Republican Congress with a Republican-dominated federal court system would be happy to use such a law to declare other state-owned or state-funded channels that makes them unhappy. to be "propaganda." Like the BBC. Or TeleSUR. Or the ARD channel in Germany. Or ORF in Austria. Or Televisión Pública Argentina - even though their main programming under the Macri government is light entertainment. After all, our current President claims that major mainstream channels and news services routinely spread Fake News.

But Mook apparently thinks American brains are easily washed by TV channels using those hyper-sophisticated, occult persuasion techniques available to the Russians. Or something. But he adds another sentence in the last quoted passage, " The law makes no distinction between the New York Times and outlets like RT or China Daily, which are essentially state-sponsored propaganda. Sadly, the unfiltered nature of much social media means many Americans don’t see much of a distinction either." (my italics)

And, I have it on good authority that foreign papers in dangerous places with lots of terrorists like France also carry statements by non-American government. So maybe we need to block French news sites of all kinds. And German and British and Swedish, too. I'm being sarcastic because it's a road I would prefer to see Democratic politicians steer clear of. It will not work out for the best, even if it did cause short-term annoyance to Trumpists not to have RT to spread some of the same news that Infowars, Breitbart News, FOX News and Republican hate radio promote 24/7.

A new questions are now in the news about Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn's dealings with Russia. The Washington Post reports in National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say 02/10/2017 that Flynn had discussions during the Presidential transition period with the Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, about Western sanctions against Russis.

This is embarrassing for Flynn, because he had denied having had such discussions with Kislyak, as had Mike Pence.

But it's not at all clear from the report that there was anything illegal or otherwise improper about that discussion itself. The Post notes:

The nature of Flynn’s pre-inauguration message to Kislyak triggered debate among officials in the Obama administration and intelligence agencies over whether Flynn had violated a law against unauthorized citizens interfering in U.S. disputes with foreign governments, according to officials familiar with that debate. Those officials were already alarmed by what they saw as a Russian assault on the U.S. election.

U.S. officials said that seeking to build such a case against Flynn would be daunting. The law against U.S. citizens interfering in foreign diplomacy, known as the Logan Act, stems from a 1799 statute that has never been prosecuted. As a result, there is no case history to help guide authorities on when to proceed or how to secure a conviction.

Officials also cited political sensitivities. Prominent Americans in and out of government are so frequently in communication with foreign officials that singling out one individual — particularly one poised for a top White House job — would invite charges of political persecution.

Former U.S. officials also said aggressive enforcement would probably discourage appropriate contact. Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that he was in Moscow meeting with officials in the weeks leading up to Obama’s 2008 election win.

“As a former diplomat and U.S. government official, one needs to be able to have contact with foreigners to do one’s job,” McFaul said. McFaul, a Russia scholar, said he was careful never to signal pending policy changes before Obama took office. [my emphasis]

Pragmatic talk about the Russian hacking issue

I saw a couple of items from yesterday that enunciate the real issue with Russian hacking and related issues without going beyond what we know from what's in the public record. One was this Tweetstorm from Paul Krugman:

Judging from my mail, people still seem to have a hard time understanding both what happened in November and what causation means 1/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2017

But Trump won the electoral vote, with margins of <1 percent in PA, MI, WI. So a national 1 percent swing would have changed everything 3/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2017

The answer is, there were multiple things that shouldn't have happened. Maybe HRC should have run a better campaign 5/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2017

while underplaying Trump's cesspool of corruption. And even then she'd have had that 1% if Comey hadn't violated every rule 11 days out 7/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2017

Or make that a perfect Stormfront. And yes, Putin may also have tipped the scale. Nothing in there says that Trump deserves our respect 9/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2017

Then there's this from outgoing UN Ambassador Samantha Power, UN Ambassador Power warns against ‘historical amnesia’ in future Russian relations PBS Newshour 01/172017:

She says in surveying the major issues in US-Russia relations, "All of that plus, of course, the most recent and most egregious example that hits close to home for us, which is interfering in our elections through hacking, through fake news, and with an eye to trying to help one candidate win."

And she talks in a pragmatic vein about both the common interests and the points of difference between the two countries:

I think we do have an interest in combating states that try to cross borders and steal parts of other people’s country. We have an interest in combating tactics in war that are abhorrent and that only fuel terrorism because they incite people on the ground.

And we, as Americans, have an interest in ensuring that the only people who get to vote for our elected leaders are our citizens, and not some foreign people who think that they have an interest in skewing our election in one direction or another.

Look, I think the point that we all agree upon is that we have to engage with Russia. I have spent, you know, as much time with my Russian counterpart as I have probably with anybody else, including close family members, over the course of the last four years. And we have done really important work together.

At the same time we’re at each other on Aleppo, on Ukraine, we’re authorizing peacekeeping missions, putting sanctions in place on North Korea for its nuclear tests. We need to find means for cooperation.

Merkel and Trump

As we are bracing for impact, here's a question for Brave New Trumpworld: Philip Oltermann, 'Europe's fate is in our hands': Angela Merkel's defiant reply to Trump Guardian 01/16/2017

Does this mean if we don't like Merkel now we're Russian dupes? On the other hand, Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics has done more than anything in memory to undermine the EU, spread nationalist hatred between EU countries instead of solidarity, and made it impossible for the EU do develop a common foreign policy. Oh, and Britain left altogether. But I hear that weakening the EU is something that Putin wants to do. So that means she's a Putin supporter, too, right? Except she's criticizing Trump for being pro-Putin, so does that mean Trump is really an anti-Putinist masquerading as a pro-Putinist?

It's going to be hard to adjust to the post-truth that goes with post-democracy.

But if our politicians and pundits can't get a little better at processing the complications in all this, every political position is going to spin off immediately into a exotic conspiracy theory. Herbert Hoover economics is a disaster because it's proven to be so since, oh, 1929 or so. Having a blowhard narcissist as President is also a bad idea, though we don't really have direct US experience with the scale of it we're about to experience. And the Rick Perry Principle still holds: Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

We're all going to be very confused if we go into "we've always been at war with Eastasia" mode everytime Trump broadcasts a brain fart over Twitter.

These two tweets refer to another dilemma for the far-right "Nationalist International" of far-right parties that view nationalists like Trump and Putin as models to emulate.

Trump's hostility to European project will be a factor in FR, NL, D, IT elections this year. He's a lot more unpopular in Europe than in US. https://t.co/p1LHafLJQb

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) January 15, 2017

Raises possibility that despite affinity between Trump & Euro-nationalists, his unpopularity might depress their success in this year. https://t.co/zRcD7f16FH

— Strobe Talbott (@strobetalbott) January 15, 2017

Keeping up with the multi-faceted positioning on the Russian hacking issue

The Russia issue right now reminds me all too much of the early years of Cold War 1.0, when militarized and simplistic views of the Soviet Union gained the upper hand. Even George Kennan, the realist credited with the "containment" doctrine, later criticized the actual implementation of the policy as being much too exclusively.

PBS Newshour's Political Wrap segment Friday, Shields and Brooks on Russian intrigue in American politics, Obama’s farewell 01/13/2017, Bobo refers to the far-right parties that ideologically align with Putinism - or should we call it Trumputinism now? - as "Marxism in reverse." Which makes no sense conceptually, but it's an example of how American images of post-Soviet Russia are still heavily shaped by Cold War ideas and experience.

Here are some notable recent analyses of the Russian-interference issue.

Gareth Porter, Mainstream Media’s Russian Bogeymen Consortium News 01/13/2016

Masha Gessen, Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence NYR Daily 01/09/2017

Sophia McClennen looks at the larger context of foreign interference in elections in The new American exceptionalism: How the Russian connection to the 2016 election signals the destruction of our nation’s ideals Salon 01/014/2017. This is an area where we need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. Yes, the US tries to interfere in political processes including elections in other countries. Despite formal diplomatic and legal requirements, it's part of how statecraft is practiced. And part of the game on all sides is to try to have Our Side get away with it while preventing the Other Side from doing it. This context is important, even beyond the US-Russia context. McClennen embeds this tweet:

What's that, America? A foreign gov helped install a puppet leader? Sorry, I can't hear u over the sound of ALL of Latin America laughing.

— Derrick Lemos (@DerrickLemos) December 10, 2016

The Insanity of a New Cold War: A Top Russian Scholar Sounds the Alarm Truthdig 01/13/2017

David Ignatius' interview is worth hearing, What we still don’t know after a week dominated by Russia questions 01/13/2017:

Timothy Snyder speculated in April of 2016 on Putin's likely view of Trump (Trump’s Putin Fantasy NYR Daily 04/19/2016):

Trump correctly says that Putin respects strength. But of course Putin prefers weakness, which is what Trump offers. As Putin understands perfectly well, the president of the United States has standing in Russia, and enjoys far superior power to the president of Russia, only insofar as he or she mobilizes the moral and political resources of a rule-of-law state. It is precisely Trump’s pose of strength that reveals his crucial vulnerability. As anyone familiar with Russian politics understands, an American president who shuns alliances with fellow democracies, praises dictators, and prefers “deals” to the rule of law would be a very easy mark in Moscow. It is unclear how much money Trump has, but it is not enough to matter in Russia. If he keeps up his pose as the tough billionaire, he will be flattered by the Russian media, scorned by those who matter in Russia, and then easily crushed by men far richer and smarter than he. ...

The Russian expectation is that a Trump victory would be ruinous for American power, and that such power as remains will be deployed to support Russian interests. Trump’s fantasy friendship with Putin is one more reason to expect that a Trump victory would also be disastrous for American values and institutions. Putin can be expected, if the two men actually meet as presidents, to flatter Trump’s vanity and urge him onward toward a full assault on the Constitution. Russia is in a downward spiral of its own; what Americans must consider now is a weak presidential candidate who wants to follow Putin’s charm where it leads, which most likely means straight to the bottom.

Jonathan Landay and Arshad Mohammed, Trump adviser had five calls with Russian envoy on day of sanctions - sources Reuters/MSN News 01/13/2017:

Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for national security adviser, held five phone calls with Russia's ambassador to Washington on the day the United States retaliated for Moscow's interference in the U.S. presidential election, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The calls occurred between the time the Russian embassy was told about U.S. sanctions and the announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had decided against reprisals, said the sources. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing internal U.S. government deliberations about the issue.

This claim is far more specific, verifiable and explainable that the Russia-hacks-DLC-gets-documents-toWikileaks-and-thereby-tilts-the-election-to-Trump story. The evidence for the hacking claims that the intelligence community thinks it's safe to put into the public record is limited by the concern of protecting "sources and methods." In the case Flynn's calls to the Russian Embassy, whether he made the calls or not should be easy for the intelligence agencies to verify even from standard phone records. It's a highly questionable thing for a senior official of a new Administration to be doing without coordination with the current US government. It was shady thing to do no matter what the content of the conversation was, and especially at that particular time.

The current politics of Russia-bashing

Max Sawicky writes about the current politics of US-Russian relations, including the election-interference issue, in Russia to Our Right The Baffler 01/11/2017. He focuses in particular on Russia's ideological and other support for rightwing groups in Europe and the US:

It’s tempting but simplistic to see Russian leaders as a fairly narrow species of nationalist interlopers in U.S. domestic politics. More to the point, they are allied with germinating, reactionary forces internationally, if only lately inside the United States.

Right-wing movements in France, Great Britain, Hungary, and elsewhere do not lack domestic political support, and there is no reason to think they would not exist without Russian backing. In the same vein, Trump’s victory here is owed first and foremost to the Republican Party and its sponsors, to all the usual suspects we have been observing with revulsion for decades. In the context of domestic U.S. politics, Putin is not the dog; he’s the tail. ...

The truth of a Russian alliance with rightists does not appear to be controversial, but it suffers from a lack of deserved attention. These movements, need we be reminded, are viciously, violently racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. Similar groups run amok in Russia itself with the apparent indulgence of the authorities. The Trump campaign has brought like-minded creatures out from under the rocks of the U.S. right.

The invaluable Andrew Bacevich reminds us of what the old Cold War was like as a way of cautioning everyone about blundering or charging into a escalating New Cold War (How We Got Here TomDispatch 01/08/2017).

In his introductory note, Tom Engelhardt writes:

It’s easy to forget just how scary the “good times” once were. I’m talking about the 1950s, that Edenic, Father-Knows-Best era that Donald Trump now yearns so deeply to bring back in order to “make America great again.” Compared to the apocalyptic fears of those years, present American ones would seem punk indeed, if it weren’t for the way our 24/7 media blow them out of all proportion. I’m thinking, of course, mainly about terror attacks by various “lone wolves” that tend to dominate the news. You know, the disturbed individuals who pick up a butcher knife or assault rifle and head for the nearest mall or club or college campus, or point a deadly vehicle toward a crowd with mayhem and murder in mind. In 2016, in our increasingly securitized world (and language), such individuals have even gained their own official acronym: homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs. [internal hyperlinks omitted]

Bacevich in this article observes:

American elites might, of course, have assigned a far different, less celebratory meaning to the passing of the Cold War [than the End of History narrative]. They might have seen the outcome as a moment that called for regret, repentance, and making amends.

After all, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, or more broadly between what was then called the Free World and the Communist bloc, had yielded a host of baleful effects. An arms race between two superpowers had created monstrous nuclear arsenals and, on multiple occasions, brought the planet precariously close to Armageddon. Two singularly inglorious wars had claimed the lives of many tens of thousands of American soldiers and literally millions of Asians. One, on the Korean peninsula, had ended in an unsatisfactory draw; the other, in Southeast Asia, in catastrophic defeat. Proxy fights in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East killed so many more and laid waste to whole countries. Cold War obsessions led Washington to overthrow democratic governments, connive in assassination, make common cause with corrupt dictators, and turn a blind eye to genocidal violence. On the home front, hysteria compromised civil liberties and fostered a sprawling, intrusive, and unaccountable national security apparatus. Meanwhile, the military-industrial complex and its beneficiaries conspired to spend vast sums on weapons purchases that somehow never seemed adequate to the putative dangers at hand. [internal hyperlinks omitted]

Russian hacking, Wednesday version

Here are some recent entries into the commentary and analysis of the Russian hacking and closely related issues.

Bob Kuttner writes in Trump, Putin, and the Pacifist Left The American Prospect 01/10/2017 about what he sees as well-established in the story and what deserves continuing skepticism. He also puts it into the context of US foreign policy toward Russia.

Philip Giraldi explains his own skepticism about the report in No Smoking Gun on Russia Hack American Conservative 01/11/2017.

Paul Pillar weighs in on the hacking and its implications in The Anti-Intelligence President-Elect The National Interest 07/06/2017:

Understanding when and how politicization can infect the work of intelligence agencies requires reflection about the mission and raison d’être of such agencies. For a wholly foreign intelligence organization such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency, objectivity is essential to the organization’s existence. If the handling of information were a matter of politically-driven case-building rather than objective analysis, then the task could be left to policy and speech-writing staffs, and we might as well dismiss all the intelligence analysts. Such an agency doesn’t even have another major mission to relate to, as, for example, the FBI does with its traditional role as a domestic law-enforcement organization. Politicization can set in when the policymakers—the bosses and customers of the intelligence officers—have a very strong policy objective driving a need for shaping information into a public case. The most salient example of that in recent times was the George W. Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq War. There is nothing remotely resembling that policy impulse that could be affecting the intelligence community’s current work on the Russian hacking.

Such politicization as is occurring on this issue is coming from Mr. Trump, and from others with a stake in downplaying the idea of Russian interference having affected the result of the U.S. election.

In a separate column, Russia Had Plenty to Work With: The Crisis in American Democracy The National Interest 07/06/2017, he observes why Russia might plausibly think the US is vulnerable to the kind of disinformation campaign the FBI, CIA and NSA has said they ran in 2016:

...this is a nation with a long history and strong tradition of representative democracy. But this tradition is visibly and seriously eroding. The trend is unfavorable. ...

Democracy scholar Thomas Carothers believes, somewhat more optimistically, that “as Trump and his team move to actual policymaking,” their support for democracy and human rights abroad “will prove less consistently negative than their initial signals might indicate.”

Carothers correctly identifies, however, the biggest negative of all: “Various problematic features of U.S. political life in recent years—the institutional gridlock, the ever-rising role of money in politics, and the frequent skirmishing over basic electoral rules and procedures—have already tarnished the United States’ image abroad. But the recent U.S. presidential election process damaged this image much more widely and deeply. Although this damage had many sources, numerous actions that Trump took during the campaign and since the election—from his vows to prosecute his main opponent to his baseless postelection assertions of massive electoral fraud—figure significantly in the dispiriting diminishment of America’s global political brand.” ...

Primary among the likely Russian motives, as suggested in the official government report on the Russian initiative, was “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process”. Sure, what the Russians did is worthy of condemnation, but Americans ought to be most disturbed by the fact that there already were enough reasons to shake such faith that the Russians knew they had a vulnerable target. The recent election, with or without Russian interference, provided still more reasons.

Now we have Mother Jones introducting new questions in Al Vicensjan's The FBI Is Investigating Allegations That Russia Has Compromising Information on Trump 01/10/2017. Philip Giraldi also comments on that story inHow a Former CIA Officer Reads the Trump Dossier: Fact, fiction, or speculation? American Conservative 01/11/2017.

John Feffer, Donald Trump and the Russian Honeypot LobeLog Foreign Policy 01/11/2017:

I don’t think Russia directly tampered with the vote in November. Nor do I think that the revelations connected to the alleged Russian hacking made the difference in the election. Trump won for other reasons; Clinton lost for other reasons too. I’m not even sure that Putin wanted Trump elected. The Russian president probably just wanted to sow some confusion and discord in the U.S. political system.

Nor do I want to see a new Cold War develop between the United States and Russia. I’m not a fan of Vladimir Putin or current Russian policies in Ukraine or Syria. But Moscow and Washington can certainly identify common interests such as reducing nuclear weapons, preserving the landmark agreement with Iran, and negotiating some new agreement with North Korea.

But the honeypot that Russia has used to trap Trump will have much more serious ramifications than a few email accounts hacked or disinformation spread around the Internet.

As he explains in this case honeypot has a different meaning that what we get in spy novels, "But it’s not a conventional version of the scheme in which an attractive woman makes eyes at a lonely intelligence officer. Rather, the 'raven' in this case is Vladimir Putin. And the dupe is Donald Trump."

Trump and the Intelligence Community

On the Russian hacking issue and other things closely associated with it at the moment, I've maintained that everyone should try to reminder that it's important to walk and talk at the same time. We can be concerned about Russian interference in the election and also be alert to how outrage over that issue can be instrumentalized for nefarious purposes by the bad operators. We can insist on the need for skeptical evaluation and close reading of government and media claims about the Russian hacks and also recognize that some of the reactions from Trump and his Republican Party are also concerning.

On that latter consideration, Josh Marshall steps back to look at how Trump and his team seem to be viewing the US Intelligence Community more generally (Trump Prepping Ominous Moves to Gut US Intel Capacity TPM 01/04/2017):

There appear to be three separate forces in play here - which is in the ascendent is not clear.

First, Trump wants payback against an agency that he believes is his enemy. Period. He is undoubtedly encouraged in this by his closest advisors. Which brings us to number two ...

Second, Trump's chief foreign policy advisor Michael Flynn wants payback against the people who ended his career. Flynn was a career intelligence officer and one with a very strong reputation - working within specific and defined parameters. People who had worked with him earlier in his career said they couldn't recognize the person he became when he was placed in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was a disastrous manager, was taken in by numerous conspiracy theories and eventually had to be fired. Other generals got crosswise with the civilian appointees in the Obama administration. But they left with their reputations intact. Flynn was different. Flynn's personal beef is clearly the source of his animus against the DNI and the CIA.

Flynn is simply nuts and he wants to get even. This suggests Trump is going let him do just that.

Third, Trump and Flynn are not the first to push the 'CIA is missing the real story' line about the CIA. In fact, this is a debate which goes back some forty years. Trump has surrounded himself with a number of people who are either the intellectual descendants of the people who made this argument in the past or the people themselves.

And he elaborates on the history of the neocon "Team B" approach that eventually gave us the Iraq War.

Dawn Stover also notes in In denial: Trump on both climate and intelligence Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 12/16/2016 that Trump's expressed skepticism on intelligence claims about Russian hacking may be something other than a sign of careful reflection and skeptical thought:

When a president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, and relies instead on his own judgment and that of confidants who lack intelligence expertise—or are compromised by lucrative, personal ties to the Kremlin—he can cause huge problems for both foreign relations and the American people.

The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, for example, might have been avoided if President George W. Bush had paid more attention to an August 2001 presidential briefing warning that Al Qaeda was preparing to strike the United States. Afterward, Bush chose to believe that Saddam Hussein—rather than Osama bin Laden—was behind the attacks, and that the CIA had been fooled, despite protestations from intelligence officials.

In the case of the Russian election hacking, Americans may never know whether it affected the outcome of the election. But we do know that Putin has powerful friends within Trump’s inner circle, and that Trump’s businesses have significant financial connections to Russia. If a President Trump remains unwilling to believe intelligence about Russia, or disinterested in hearing it, that creates a huge blind spot surrounding one of America’s most powerful adversaries. And if one of the unnamed officials quoted in the NBC News report is correct, Putin’s goals were not only to carry out a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton, but also to convince America’s allies that they can no longer depend on the United States “to be a credible global leader.”

Intelligence denial and climate denial are dangerous for the United States’ international standing and ultimately for the security of the whole planet. If Trump doesn’t believe a solid scientific consensus, or a firm assessment by the US intelligence community, what other information will he choose to disbelieve in the future?

Friday's public release on the Russian hacking issue

The US Intelligence Community released a new public statement about the Russian hacking during the 2016 election with the impressively ponderous title, Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution; the link is to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) website.

It will come as no surprise that it's carefully worded and lacking in voluminous backup.

In fact, the report proper consists of only five pages of text in a 25-page document. There are three pages of general introductory material and a two-page summary at the start. Seven pages in an appendix reproduce a 2012 report about RT/Russia Today and a one-page appendix defines some terms.

The fact that it's carefully worded means that it's worth paying attention to what is said, what is not said and what is heavily implied but not said. This "Key Judgments" summary statement, appearing all in bold in the report, is obviously newsworthy:

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

It strikes me that there's a lot of wiggle-room in those two paragraphs. It particularly strikes me that the wording walks right up to saying that Russia tried to help Donald Trump get elected without actually saying so explicitly. That would be one entirely plausible conclusion to draw from those two paragraphs. But they don't say that directly.

On the partisan political point that the Clinton campaign and many of her supporters have been pushing that the Russian intervention threw the Electoral College to Trump, this report provides no such argument. It explicitly avoids the question, "We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion." (p. i)

Yes, I had to suppress a snicker on the last point, too. They are technically not supposed to, of course. But as we saw in the election, the FBI Director didn't seem to be above partisan calculations on how his public statements could influence the outcome of the Presidential vote.

Speaking of which, the report is explicit about representing the views of three intelligence agencies:

This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. It covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion.

The Key Judgments section expands on the activities it covers (emphasis in bold in original:

• We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
• Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the campaign based on Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.
• Further information has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals.

The careful wording that the Russian effort was "to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible" again stops short of saying explicitly that it was the Russian intent to throw the election to Trump, i.e., aiming to help someone's chances in an election is not precisely the same as trying to make sure they win. I'm not trying to split hairs. It's just that we have to presume that every word in such a report was carefully evaluated for the messages it would send to various parties.

The statement, "When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency," also suggests that the Russians involved by no means assumed that Trump was likely to win.

In writing this, I feel like I'm having an argument with an invisible Pollyanna. That's because a great deal of the public discussion over the Russian hacking issue has been amazingly simplistic and lacking in international and historical content. And often discussed as though this was some new outrage out of thin air, as though the US and Russia haven't perceived a major stake in each other's internal politics since at least the First World War.

The above considerations are compatible with an assumption that the Russian leadership including Putin may have preferred a Donald Trump as President because of his business connections in Russia and indications that he might pursue policies on Ukraine and Syria, both current priorities in Russian foreign policy, that would be more amenable to Russian preferences than those Hillary Clinton favored. (See page 1) Unless they had a super-secret and hyper-sophisticated independent polling operation in the US that was accurately predicting a Trump victory - and which has gone as yet undetected by US intelligence - the Russian leaders must have expected that Clinton was the more likely winner. And, of course, she did win the popular vote decisively.

Page 1 of the report also uses cagey wording:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

The report describes a variety of actions aimed at influencing the election in some way: the infamous hacking; reporting and editorial claims via RT and Sputnik News; passive cyber-spying on state and local election systems (though "DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying. [emphasis in original]"; public statements by Putin contrasting Clinton's policies to Trump in a manner favorable to the latter; "pro-Kremlin" bloggers; trolls on social media like Twitter; statements in the Russian press and public comments by other senior Russian officials.

This bit from page 1 strikes me initially as a bit of a head-scratcher, "Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder." The puzzling part is why the report calls out Berlusconi and Schröder by name. (And, BTW, doesn't the DNI's office have word-processing software with the o-umlaut "ö" on it?)

I haven't been into the weeds of this story enough to know if there is any new informational twists in the public disclosures in this passage: "We assess with high confidence that the [Russian military intelligence] GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." (my emphasis in bold this time)

The Podesta e-mails, which were supposedly the object of a different hack than the DLC ones, are not explictly addressed.

The report lays great weight on RT's general role:

RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.

If the policies of the upcoming Trump Family Business Administration weren't so unpredictable at this point, I would read the emphasis on RT in this report as a possible buildup for significant news restrictions on Americans' access to RT reporting.

This is also an interesting and somewhat puzzling tidbit:

Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 US presidential election represented a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at US elections. We assess the 2016 influence campaign reflected the Kremlin’s recognition of the worldwide effects that mass disclosures of US Government and other private data — such as those conducted by WikiLeaks and others—have achieved in recent years, and their understanding of the value of orchestrating such disclosures to maximize the impact of compromising information.

Are we meant to make a distinction here between post-Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia? If so, aren't the FBI, CIA and NSA telling us that the leak of DNC documents to Wikileaks was a greater intervention in US politics than anything that occurred during the existence of the Soviet Union?

This definition is also notable: "Russia’s state-run propaganda machine [is] comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls."

The sensational element that has received by far the most attention was the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and of some individual Democratic leaders. And, despite how satisfying it might be from a partisan viewpoint to mock Trump as having been elected by Russian interference, that argument depends on assuming this sequence of events: (1) Russian hacking leads to (2) a leak to Wikileaks which (3) causes enough public dismay in four Rust Belt states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) to flip the Electoral College vote to Trump.

The first step, the Russian hacking, has been probably as well established in the public record as any such obscure operations are likely to be in the relatively short run. Like most people, I assume that as a given, though far from fully explained in the public record. The second step, the Russians providing key documents to Wikileaks, seems plausible and even likely, though not as well established in the public record as the first.

The third step, that the Wikileaks revelations were decisive in the election outcome in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has not been proved and, so far as I can see, virtually impossible to prove or even argue that it's plausible, despite some energetic efforts by Hillary partisans to do so.

All of this argues for several obvious things: better US cyber-security; more, better and more critical reporting by the US corporate (and other) press on this complex of issues on an ongoing basis; and, taking full account of this issue complex in the larger field of US-Russia relations.

Hopefully, everyone can agree on the first and presumably this will be an ongoing, evolving effort indefinitely. The third will hopefully take place; it's hard to imagine that an un-provable claim of Russian throwing the election to Trump would lead to total non-cooperation on all other issues, nor would it be desirable - even setting aside the improbability of a Trump Family Business Administration wanting to do so.

The possibility of the US corporate press drastically improving its critical coverage of these issues will probably occur just after the Second Coming of Christ.

Russian hacking., the US and regime change

Owen Jones provides some useful, brief real-world history of American regime-change operations in Americans can spot election meddling because they’ve been doing it for years Guardian 01/05/2017:

... while Americans feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process, they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them.

For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.

Indeed, one cannot understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohen puts it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.

And this is a particular dilemma for members of the public trying realistically to understand the situation when the allegations involve intelligence detection of computer hacks for which the information has not been made public so that independent analysts can sufficiently examine them.

Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel keeps on trying, though. In Russia Hacked the DNC, But What, Specifically, Did GRU Do? 01/04/2016, her analysis provides a good example of why this doesn't easily boil down to a simple slogan:

One thing a lot of people don’t realize about the Russian hack attribution is there’s some slippage in the argument.

There are two groups in question: APT 29, which has been publicly associated with FSB, and APT 28, which has been publicly associated with GRU. As I laid out here, those two groups must be kept separate, because the story is that these two groups did different things: FSB hung around DNC’s servers for months and stole a lot of information, but never leaked it. That’s the kind of stuff intelligence services do all the time, including our own. Our government has no reason to make a case against that — which is unwanted but nevertheless normal espionage — because they do it too, such as when, in 2012, they stole communications between then Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and his closest allies.

GRU, by contrast, was believed to have been in DNC’s servers briefly — and John Podesta’s Gmail account even more briefly — but to have, in that time, stolen the documents that ultimately made their way to Wikileaks. That’s the action that was deemed newly beyond the pale (even if the US has probably had documents leaked to Wikileaks itself).

In a sense, then, only the APT 28 attribution matters, because that’s the entity that is believed to have been involved in hacking and leaking; that’s the entity believed to have done things that might have affected the outcome of the election.

But people have long either intentionally or unknowingly conflated the two, claiming that “Russia” hacked the DNC. If FSB hacked the DNC, the claim is true, but that doesn’t prove that Russia is behind the tampering in the election, because unless you prove that GRU is APT 28, then the stuff you’re bugged about hasn’t been properly attributed.

I’ve come to distrust the claims of anyone who has paid close attention to this that doesn’t assiduously maintain the distinction between the APT 29 and APT 28 hacks.

She concluydes this particular post, "None of this is definitive. None of it changes my inclination that Russia probably is behind the APT 28 hack of the DNC (and, even more convincingly, behind the hack of John Podesta). But these are some details that deserve more attention amid the claims that all the case against GRU (as distinct from Russia) is rock solid."

Caution can be a virtue: Russian hacking and Trump foreign policy edition

Paul Pillar calls attention to the fact that we really have surprisingly little to go on in anticipating what the actual foreign policy of the Trump Family Business Administration is likely to be (Winning May Be the Only Thing for Trump, But Not For the U.S. The National Interest 01/03/2017):

Despite the earnest and usually sincere efforts by many commentators to discern pattern, direction, and purpose amid Donald Trump’s tweets and other utterances, the dominant picture is still one of inconsistencies, contradictions, slogans, and lack of a record. We are, late in the transition period, still mostly flying blind regarding the actual future foreign policy of this new presidency. We have little idea of what Trump really cares about in the substance of U.S. foreign policy, as distinct from rhetoric that has worked in a campaign and that helps in his effort to portray himself as a populist.

Citing this piece by Mark Katz, Can Putin and Trump Succeed at Improving Russian-American Relations? LobeLog Foreign Policy 12/31/2016, Pillar does describe a basic dilemma for Trump in dealing with Russia. On the one had, the two countries have common interests and there are good, practical reasons to cooperate on them. But Trump has also relied so heavily on his pro-wrestling tough guy image that he takes a risk being seeing as too compliant to Putin: "He has to be seen instead as having wrung concessions from Putin, and preferably as having gotten the better of him. Katz emphasizes that Trump especially must be seen doing so in the eyes of a domestic audience that includes hawkish, anti-Russian Congressional Republicans. Trump has the added baggage of the Russian hacking and interference in the U.S. election; any favorable move he makes toward Putin risks being interpreted as payback for election favors."

Pillar goes on to explain the risks of Trump approaching international negotiations as a win-loss zero-sum game in dealing with China and Iran.

And he makes a useful observation about not assuming that skills from the business world transfer easily to the Presidency:

Notwithstanding Trump’s trumpeting of his skills as a deal-maker, and notwithstanding all that has been said and written about the “transactional” approach this businessman is likely to take toward foreign policy, a man with his mindset is not about to operate in his new job the way he did in his old one. As head of a privately-owned business, profits and losses could be kept private—and with his refusal to make his tax returns public, they are largely staying that way. The public side of the business could be limited to his promotion of himself and his brand, with bragging about having the most luxurious buildings or the best golf courses. Now the game has changed for him. The public perception of gains and losses is different. If Trump really were to approach foreign relations in a pragmatic, businesslike way, that in general would be good for U.S. interests. But probably his need to be seen to “win” will get in the way. When winning is the only thing for the chief executive, that is not so good for the country.

Katz states the dilemma posed by the Russian hacking issue this way:

Since not just the outgoing Obama Administration, but also the U.S. Intelligence Community leadership, has declared that Russia intervened in the 2016 American presidential elections in order to hurt Clinton and help him, any concession by Trump to Putin risks being seen as payback to Russia for this help. Trump can rail all he likes that the Russians did not interfere in the elections, that he wasn’t aware of it, or that it somehow doesn’t matter anyway, but doing so will only increase concerns about his relationship to Moscow.

I'm glad to see him discussing this in terms of the narrative that has been established rather than the supposed certainty of the claims.

Because caution and careful reading of the hacking claims is still very much in order. Marcy Wheeler is continuing her able work at doing just that, as for instance in A Deep Dive on the Obama Response to Russian DNC Hack (and Theft and Harassment) Emptywheel 01/01/2017.

Democrats and journalists would also do well be hold back on dismissing any skepticism about the Russian hacking story as the result of someone being a Russian dupe.

The Nation presents a couple of recent article advising caution. One is James Carden's Is Skepticism Treason? 01/03/2017. Another is by Stephen Cohen, who writes:

Today’s hysteria, suffused with not a little neo-McCarthyism and a witch-hunt- like search for “Putin’s friends” in the US political establishment (first and foremost Trump himself and his nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson), are making any rational, fact-based discourse nearly impossible. Public discussion is urgently needed on NATO’s buildup on Russia’s western borders and on the civil/proxy wars in Ukraine and Syria, and more generally whether or not a new, less confrontational US policy toward Russia is needed. With the New York Times and Washington Post, and their echo chambers on cable TV networks, labeling anyone who rethinks US-Russia policy a “Trump apologist” and “Putin apologist,” civil discourse so vital to democratic resolutions, and to US national security, has become nearly impossible.

One has to wonder how long it will be before the Trump Family Business Administration will be making intelligence claims to justify some reckless foreign policy move and the Democrats will justify their inaction or support this time around by saying we can't dare impugn the omniscience of our Intelligence Agencies.

Still, the Russian hacking narrative will be a factor in US-Russia relations, as Katz observes in his conclusion:

Yet even if Putin is willing to make concessions, Trump cannot make a deal with him just on his own. Other governments (especially those whose countries are the subject of any Russian-American negotiation), the U.S. Congress, and Western public opinion will all seek to constrain Trump from conceding too much and to point out any instance when they see him allowing Putin to concede too little. In short: Russian interference in the recent presidential elections, and Trump’s effort to dismiss concerns about it, will only serve to increase the already considerable obstacles to improving Russian-American relations.

Realism and US-Russia policy

Gilbert Doctorow of the American Committee for East West Accord looks at Henry Kissinger's views on Russian foreign policy in Trump and Revenge of the ‘Realists’ Consortium News 12/31/2016. He argues that despite his reputation as a scholar-statesman - and war criminal - Kissinger's basic view of Russian policy assumption in some ways is surprisingly simplistic:

... Kissinger’s thinking about Russian history is so clear one might imagine he knows what he is talking about. The question is of key importance because the Realist School is built upon the assumption that one can accurately appraise the strengths of all players and that one has a solid knowledge of the history and traditions of the players. In this it distinguishes itself from idealism, with its focus on universal values and disinterest in regional knowledge.

From Kissinger’s own academic career in studying European diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century, Russia should have been on his plate, given that the country was one of the three decisive players in the first half of the century (Holy Alliance) and one of the five or six decisive players in the second half of the century. However, that was manifestly not the case.

Kissinger is widely reputed to be a voracious reader. Yet, it is obvious that Russia has never and does not now figure among the topics he reads. In Diplomacy, for his analysis of Russia, he relied on the very dated Nineteenth Century classics of Russian history like Vasily Klyuchevsky that he read in translation during his graduate student days at Harvard.

Klyuchevsky is unquestionably a good starting point for students of Russian history. He was the father of the historiography that came down to Kissinger in the person of Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies at Harvard. But his notion of Russia’s manifest destiny of borders moving out across the Eurasian land mass was part of a Liberal and anti-tsarist historiography. By today’s standards, reading Klyuchevsky has mainly curiosity value. To put the issue in terms closer to an American reader, it is as if Kissinger were using de Tocqueville as the key source for writing about contemporary America.

Doctorow also discusses the mixed nature of on Kissinger's positions on Russia. On the one hand, he places Kissinger "squarely among those responsible for getting us into the confrontation with Russia that reached its climax under Barack Obama." And, "beginning in the 1990s, Henry Kissinger modified his message of realism to accommodate the then-dominant American school of idealism, or values-based foreign policy."

But he also gives Kissinger credit for a more pragmatic, realistic view of Russia than that shared by neoconservatives and liberal hawks: "he is correctly perceived as a champion of the art of diplomacy, which is another word for compromise and deal-making. It is precisely diplomacy that has been sorely lacking in the U.S. government in recent decades. Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, ideology has held sway at the State Department and in the White House."

Doctorow also calls attention to this Spiegel interview, 'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?' 11/13/2014, in which the former Secretary of State says:

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about a concrete example: How should the West react to the Russian annexation of Crimea? Do you fear this might mean that borders in the future are no longer incontrovertible?

Kissinger: Crimea is a symptom, not a cause. Furthermore, Crimea is a special case. Ukraine was part of Russia for a long time. You can't accept the principle that any country can just change the borders and take a province of another country. But if the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.

SPIEGEL: What was it then?

Kissinger: One has to ask one's self this question: Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask one's self why did it happen?

SPIEGEL: What you're saying is that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?

Kissinger: Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine's economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with Russia. This does not mean the Russian response was appropriate.

SPIEGEL: It seems you have a lot of understanding for Putin. But isn't he doing exactly what you are warning of -- creating chaos in eastern Ukraine and threatening sovereignty?

Kissinger: Certainly. But Ukraine has always had a special significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.

SPIEGEL: Relations between the West and Russia are tenser now than they have been in decades. Should we be concerned about the prospects of a new Cold War?

Kissinger: There clearly is this danger, and we must not ignore it. I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

SPIEGEL: But didn't the annexation of Crimea by Russia force the EU and US to react by imposing sanctions?

Kissinger: One, the West could not accept the annexation; some countermeasures were necessary. But nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over eastern Ukraine. That's a fact of life. So one could say we don't have to accept it, and we do not treat Crimea as a Russian territory under international law -- just as we continued to treat the Baltic states as independent throughout Soviet rule. [my emphasis in italics]

Doctorow also observes of Kissinger's 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?:

In his specific remarks on how America should conduct its foreign policy towards Russia, he urged moderation, continued readiness to assist the country with its transition to democracy and free markets, and attentiveness to Russia’s voice in international forums.

Note especially his comment on prospective NATO expansion into the Baltic States, which Kissinger believed in 2001 would be provocative, saying it would put NATO forces within 30 miles of St Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest population centers. He correctly foresaw that “Advancing the NATO integrated command this close to key centers of Russia might mortgage the possibilities of relating Russia to the emerging world order as a constructive member.”

Doctorow also describes what he calls "the soft underbelly of Realpolitik: realism can be only as useful as the expertise and judgment of its practitioner." Although that broad characterization could be made of any foreign policy approach, it's useful here in calling attention to the fact that the pragmatic calculations that the Realist school of foreign policy offers to provide can be highly misleading and even dysfunctional if the key information and assumptions are insufficiently grounded.

Eric Levitz takes a look at some of the anti-Russian hawkish sentiments among some foreign policy figures associated with the President-elect's incoming administration, Trump Allies Argue That Obama’s Sanctions on Russia Are Too Weak New York 12/30/2016:

The Heritage Foundation — which has played a central role in staffing Trump’s White House — argues that Obama’s sanctions are “too little, too late.” Is this the conservative think tank’s sly attempt to pressure Trump into adopting an even more hard-line stance against Russia?

Meanwhile, the man who was one mustache away from becoming Trump’s deputy secretary of State offered similar talking points on Fox News.

“I don’t think they will have much impact at all,” John Bolton said of the Obama administration’s sanctions on Friday. “The Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years. It’s really been a pathetic performance. So what this last burst of activity has to do is hard to say. I do think it’s intended to try and box the Trump administration in. I think it will fail. This is simply an executive order. If President Trump decides to reverse it, it’s easy enough to do.”

Bolton went on to accuse the Obama administration of having “politicized” the process of intelligence gathering — a claim that’s belied by the president’s decision not to impose sanctions or release detailed intelligence reports until after Election Day. Nonetheless, Bolton suggested that Trump was correct to treat public intelligence reports with some skepticism.

Of course, it remains to be seen which of the major foreign policy factions in the incoming administration (neocons, America Firsters, Islamophobes) becomes the most significant.

International relations scholarship uses a term that doesn't seem to have become very common in the public discussions of Russian policy with neighboring states, "de facto states," to describe situations like South Ossetia in Georgia. Sergey Markedonov writes in De facto statehood in Eurasia: a political and security phenomenon Caucasus Survey 3:3 (2015):

... new internationally recognized states are not the only result of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Another major consequence was the appearance of new formations also declaring their sovereignty. Known variously as “unrecognized states”, “quasi/pseudo-states” or “breakaway republics”, they play a significant role in geopolitical rivalries, conflict resolution processes and post-Soviet nation-building development despite a lack of formal-juridical recognition. In this article, we use the academically and politically neutral term “de facto states” to describe them.

De facto statehood is not, however, a phenomenon or product exclusively associated with the Soviet (or, to include the former Yugoslavia, socialist) disintegrations. Entities emerging as a result of revolutions, various practices of national self-determination (which was post-factum called liberation), or foreign policy games, but which did not gain broad or even limited recognition, had existed long before 1991. Even some European countries, such as France (after the French Revolution), the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland, were not recognized for some period of time in the past. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the USSR existed for some time without international recognition (e.g. the USA recognized the “new realities in Eurasia” only in 1933). The People’s Republic of China had no representation in the United Nations (UN) from 1949 to 1971. China’s interests were represented by the Republic of China (Taiwan). The situation changed only after the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2758 (“Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations”) on 25 October 1971.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s disintegration produced an impressive list of entities that exist in reality but lack recognition by UN member countries. At present, there are six such entities: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic and the two alleged People’s Republics of Donbass (in south-eastern Ukraine). Two of these, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have received limited recognition by individual countries. [my emphasis]

Crimea does not count as a "de facto state" in the same sense as those entities, because Crimea has been integrated into the nation of Russia itself, despite the widespread lack of international recognition of that annexation.