look like marble. The almost unimaginable
sacrifice of Soviet lives in World War II pro-
duced victory over Hitler, but communism
limited much of the industrial vitality that
survived the war.
Today, Russia’s economy, rich in fossil fuels,
languishes under the tug of low energy
prices. Though the per capita gross national
product is higher than ever before, the aver-
age Russian citizen is still poorer than the
average Lithuanian or Malaysian.
Unable to push back against the West
overtly, the opportunistic, improvisational
Putin has grasped at unconventional, even
unlikely, weapons. Putin annexed Crimea
in 2014, exposing the West’s unwillingness
to stop him. He plunged into the appall-
ing chaos of the Syrian civil war, gambling
correctly that the war-weary United States
would not push him out. He rolled the dice
again in America’s backyard, propping up
the Maduro regime in Venezuela. “These
are very risky moves,” McFaul said, “but
he’s not afraid to pay a price to weaken
the West and remain in power. That’s what
makes him so dangerous.”
A unified United States pursuing a biparti-
san, pro-democracy foreign policy is Putin’s
biggest fear. So, he has taken the risk of
creating an operation specifically to sow dis-
cord through social media. Putin’s computer
hackers look for any internal divisions and
tensions that tend to erode American unity
or discredit American leadership. Though he
clearly favored Trump over Hillary Clinton
in 2016, Putin doesn’t generally favor one
point of view over another; he supports
whichever candidates are most divisive and
amplifies whatever arguments are most bit-
ter. Whoever is freaking out on Facebook or
Twitter is a potential ally in his cause.
R
USSIA SUCCEEDED ONCE before in
turning America on itself. At the
start of the atomic age, the discov-
ery that some Americans with access to
nuclear secrets were Russian spies helped
set off a wild hunt for communists in the
federal government—a fever of mistrust
known as McCarthyism. Then, too, there
were bitter fights over even the most basic
facts. A high-ranking State Department
official, Alger Hiss, was either a traitor or
a martyr, depending on which American
voter you asked.
Given enough time, however, the picture
came into focus. Today, only the most
hardheaded fail to see that Hiss was no
martyr, and that the spies David Greenglass
and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were, to
various degrees, guilty. Likewise, we can
agree that Sen. Joe McCarthy never had
lists of hundreds of communists in the State
The last word^37
Department or the military. So, too, history
will eventually confirm the foundational
fact of Putin’s deliberate hacking of the
West. “The Russian Government interfered
in the 2016 presidential election in sweep-
ing and systematic fashion,” the Mueller
report concluded.
As spelled out in a detailed federal indict-
ment of the Internet Research Agency,
Russian agents employed by a Putin associ-
ate began in 2014 to sow inflammatory
lies and truly fake news on social media
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Their strategy was simple enough: Find
divisive wedge issues and try to hammer
the wedge deeper.the internet age. Trump’s prickly response—
firing the FBI director and boasting about
it to the Russian ambassador—set the
Mueller investigation rolling. And by the
time Robert S. Mueller III reported his find-
ings more than a year later, it was too late
to cool the inflamed constituencies of both
parties. The Ukraine coda, with Trump’s
cockeyed conspiracy theory playing in one
corner and the siren song of impeachment
in the other, suggests that the hack of our
common trust is now on autoplay.
It’s fitting that Putin’s battlefield of choice
is the internet. In geopolitics, as in business,
digital communications have upended the
distribution of power. Putin is a disrupter;
he seeks to break the West’s monopoly.
His approach to weakening the United
States and its alliances could be borrowed
from the young Mark Zuckerberg, whose
motto—in his hoodie-wearing days when
Facebook was open about its disruptive
ambitions—was “Move fast and break
things.” Like Zuckerberg and his fellow
Silicon Valley swashbucklers, Putin under-
stands that freedom has a pirate streak,
while well-ordered institutions can be slow
to defend themselves.
The possibility that Putin might have gained
an advantage on the United States—that
the United States and its allies might be too
slow and too brittle and too rules-based
to take up arms against a fast-moving
vandal—was heavy on the mind of the
aging Mueller when he testified about his
findings to Congress. The decorated Marine
and former U.S. attorney and FBI director
sought to warn the country of this clear and
present danger in what might have been
one of his last public statements. “Over the
course of my career, I’ve seen a number of
challenges to our democracy,” he said. “The
Russian government’s effort to interfere in
our election is among the most serious.”
What’s more, the hack continues. “They’re
doing it as we sit here,” he warned the
House Intelligence Committee.
“This deserves the attention of every
American,” Mueller urged.
One wonders, though: What good is that
attention if the national discourse is already
infected with Putin’s virus? As we launch
fully into the competition over who will
lead the nation for the next four years, we
have to ask ourselves whether we’re going
to resist Putin’s game or play it for him. Will
we believe the worst about one another?
Will we amplify the anger? Will we deepen
the rifts and aggravate the fault lines? Will
we finish Putin’s gambit all by ourselves?A version of this article originally appeared in
The Washington Post. Used with permission.Putin clearly favored Trump in 2016.Russian trolls and computer “bots” spread
phony reports of a Muslim terrorist attack
in Louisiana. They stoked racial ten-
sions after controversial police shootings.
They fanned baseless rumors of Ku Klux
Klansmen loose on a Missouri college cam-
pus. Anything likely to divide Americans
from one another, or divide Americans from
the world, was a candidate for amplifica-
tion. Shake, stir, and repeat.
These efforts would have been toxic even
if Clinton had made a better case to vot-
ers around the Great Lakes and won the
election in 2016. But the fact that Putin’s
hackers went all-in for Trump, who won
the electoral college with just 46 percent of
the vote, turned a Russian win into a rout.
The election itself became a cause of further
division. Russia’s role became a new wedge
issue, the doubt that keeps on festering.
Whether he planned it or just got lucky, the
gambler Putin is on a winning streak. After
the election, it appears that Putin’s pro-
Trump propaganda, mixed with Trump’s
misplaced admiration for Putin, inspired an
institutional overreach by the FBI. That con-
clusion is hard to avoid in light of the report
by Justice Department Inspector General
Michael Horowitz. The FBI investigation, in
turn, created grist for the polarized media of