How Trump is leaving the US exposed to foreign interference
In 1933, when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, he told Joseph Stalin that the Kremlin would first have to knock off its subversive activities inside the United States.
Likewise, when President Ronald Reagan wanted to ease Cold War tensions, his Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, made it clear to Mikhail Gorbachev that Soviet spooks must stop spreading lies about AIDS being caused by US bioweapons research.
President Donald Trump seems to want to follow his predecessors in improving relations with the Russians. But instead of demanding that the Kremlin curtail its skullduggery, his administration is unilaterally disarming – offering a quid with no quo.
Read more in the column by Jill Kastner of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and William Wohlforth, Professor of Government at Dartmouth College – Quid with no quo: what lies behind Trump’s strategy toward Russia.
The authors emphasise that since returning to office, he has gutted agencies that serve as bulwarks against foreign meddling.
For example, at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, at least 17 employees tasked with protecting electoral integrity and combating disinformation have been sacked under the guise of returning the agency to its original focus on critical infrastructure (never mind that electoral systems fall into that category).
Similar cuts have taken place at the CIA and the NSA: the director and deputy director of the latter were fired apparently on the advice of the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. And on top of it all, Trump recently signed an executive order cutting funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which supports, among other things, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America.
"All these cuts leave America vulnerable to foreign subversion. Gutting the FBI weakens its ability to investigate foreign meddling," warn Jill Kastner and William Wohlforth.
They argue that the arbitrary firings at intelligence agencies create a cohort of financially precarious, potentially disgruntled current and former employees who will be targeted by foreign intelligence services; efforts by Russia and China to hire former employees are already ramping up, aided by recruitment agencies that may or may not reveal their clients’ identity.
"Having just written a book about the history of subversion, A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, we can speak to how odd this behavior is. In all our case studies of subversive activity and how to counter it, from the ancient world to the present day, we haven't seen a single example in which a target unilaterally disarmed. What’s going on?"
Is the Trump administration engaged in elaborate dealmaking behind the scenes, perhaps encouraging the Russians to back off in a mutual de-escalation? If not, what we are witnessing is unprecedented.
They see no strategic sense for the US to stop playing hardball with enemies who are continuing to subvert it. Unilaterally removing the guardrails that protect against disinformation, election meddling, and similar hostile activities is obviously dangerous.
"If Trump truly cares about America’s sovereignty, he should make a persuasive effort to reassure the public that the country’s defenses are not being compromised," the scholars conclude.