Stephen Kotkin
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time, sending malware hidden in e-mails to 15 accounts associated
with her oce. “It is unclear,” the report notes enigmatically, how they
were able “to identify these email accounts, which were not public.”TRUTHFUL HYPERBOLE
How and when did the United States enter the Twilight Zone o the
Mueller report and the reactions to it? In a sense, it started with two
parallel fantasies o the Cold War era.
The Ãrst was the ¬’s. Even though the U.S. diplomat George Ken-
nan, in his “Long Telegram,” had proposed a policy o containment that
would eventually produce an internal evolution or the implosion o
Soviet communism, not everyone got the memo. The ¬ dreamed o
something else. Many individuals and groups inside and outside the
U.S. government, including the intelligence services, tried to roll back
the Soviet menace, backing armed insurgents who sought to bring down
the Soviet regime and its allies. Those measures usually backÃred.
But then, in 1985, a sorcerer named Mikhail Gorbachev popped up
in Moscow. Nested at the pinnacle o power in a hypercentralized
system, the Soviet leader relaxed censorship to rally support for re-
forms, encouraging Soviet journalists to publish one previously sup-
pressed revelation after another, which profoundly blackened the
regime’s image. Gorbachev introduced legal free-market mechanisms,
unhinging the planned economy, as well as competitive elections, al-
lowing the populace to demonstrate disapproval o the Communist
Party’s monopoly. He also demanded that the Soviet satellite states in
Eastern Europe reform, which destabilized the entire empire. To pro-
tect himsel against a coup, he even sabotaged the central control over
the entire system exercised by the party apparatus, which alone held
the federal state together; in other words, unintentionally, he created
a voluntary federal union o states that could chose to secede. The
general secretary o the Communist Party did what the ¬ had
dreamed about but could never accomplish: he destroyed that system.
The ¶³ also had a dream. During the Cold War, its operatives
fantasized about weakening and maybe even unraveling ¤¬¢£ and
subverting the cohesiveness o the West. Its agents wanted to dilute
the alliances o the United States in East Asia, too, by trying to drive
a wedge between the United States and South Korea or Japan. The
¶³ worked overtime to discredit the U.S. political system, planting
stories to erode Americans’ faith in the impartiality o U.S. courts