We, the citizens of these United States, are so well-protected by our armed forces that we rarely give it a thought. We spend more on our military than the next seven countries combined, and we have vast numbers of tanks, planes and ships. We have 1.3 million military personnel on active duty, and we have nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and super-advanced satellites scanning Earth from space. Small wonder, then, it has been a long time since any enemy country seriously considered attacking us.
Or until last year, that is – when a hostile state decided to intervene directly in our political system from afar. Russian hackers stole and disseminated documents targeting politicians, spread fake news stories targeting millions of voters, and even, as we have learned more recently, infiltrated voting systems and electoral databases in up to 39 states. (In that latter case, at least, they don’t seem to have been very successful in actually changing vote tallies — though that hardly absolves them of responsibility.)
If the Russians had done these things in the old-fashioned way, with real people lurking about, and if we’d caught dozens of their agents red-handed, riffling through sensitive papers or trying to steal ballots, we’d have probably treated it all as something close to an act of war. But because the operation was waged remotely, in the murky realms of the Internet, we continue to refer to it, halfheartedly, as a “hacking” — a word more often used when discussing stolen credit-card numbers, identity theft or even relatively harmless online pranks.
Yet this was, in fact, an attack — a large-scale, multidimensional, coordinated attack on the foundations of our democratic system. And even if you’re a Republican who shares President Trump’s repeated assertions that we can’t be sure who was behind it, surely this is something you’d want to get to the bottom of. You’d be pressing for a thorough review of what happened, and above all you’d be planning new defenses to prevent it from happening again.
If an enemy air raid had revealed that our antiaircraft systems were out-of-date, we’d want to replace them. If enemy submarines had made a mockery of our coastal defenses, we’d be discussing how to reorganize the entire system.
But that, of course, assumes that you actually regard this enemy as a foe — rather than someone you’re welcoming in.
Today, in August 2017, we receive confirmation that the Trump administration has done exactly zero to bolster our defenses against hostile information operations. Last year, Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) co-authored a law aimed at providing the State Department with the resources to start pushing back. Even though Trump signed the bill into law, his administration has done nothing to act on its provisions. This week a report in Politico revealed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has made zero effort to use the $80 million provided for the purpose by Congress.
So why didn’t he? The Politico article offers several theories why the State Department still hasn’t managed to spend the money, ranging from bureaucratic “paranoia and inertia” to a reluctance to offend the Russians. The article notes that the Global Engagement Center, the current anti-disinformation body at the State Department, is still being denied access to $19.8 million allocated to combating propaganda from ISIS and other terrorist groups — despite the administration’s tough rhetorical line against terrorism. Even so, the failure to respond to Moscow is particularly striking, especially since Russia is the only state to launch such a blatant attack on the very heart of our democratic system. (Tillerson’s defenders say he doesn’t want to put the money into a system that hasn’t already shown verifiable results, and will spend the funds once he has been able to push through his plans for reorganizing the department.)
This all comes as Tillerson is considering eliminating the State Department’s cyber-coordinator, a crucial position in shaping our efforts to fight back against the growing power of lies.
“It’s the biggest issue going on in our politics right now, and there’s nothing,” says Clint Watts, an information warfare expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. When I ask him what the Trump administration has been doing to fight back against foreign influence campaigns, he groans. “No action. No plans, no execution, no willingness to do it.”
And that’s not just in the State Department — it’s government-wide. This should be priority No. 1. Yet there is only silence from the White House. What explains this startling apathy in the face of a clear threat?
Watts, a former Army officer and former FBI agent, has an interesting theory on this score. It used to be, he says, that we had a pretty clear message we could deploy against hostile propagandists. We used to talk proudly of our democratic values, our rights, our freedoms. But now, Watt says, the Trump administration is keen to de-emphasize what we once stood for — as demonstrated by Tillerson’s recent push to remove anything evoking democracy from the State Department’s job description. “The sad part,” says Watts, “is that the Trump message is pretty similar to the Russian message: anti-NATO, anti-E.U., anti-immigration, nationalist but not globalist.” He pauses. “That’s where we’re having the problem. You can’t counter what you agree with.”
And especially if the people you’re supposed to be countering helped you to get where you are today.
