Breaking news: The Russians, Chinese and who knows who else are moving heaven and Earth to influence the U.S. presidential elections. The Justice Department has moved to indict several groups as paid Russian agents set on helping to elect one or the other candidate for president or to disrupt and confuse the political process.
Need proof? Did not Russian President Vladimir Putin call Kamala Harris’s laugh “infectious” as a clear sign of support, despite all the allegations of Russian control of Donald Trump?
And do not dismiss Chinese involvement. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) former deputy chief of staff, Linda Sun, was arrested for acting as a paid Chinese agent. Explaining how she and her husband could have owned multimillion-dollar homes on Long Island and in Hawaii on their modest incomes led to evidence of massive payoffs with Chinese origins.
Foreign interference in America’s elections is as old as the Republic. The Soviet Union began such efforts a century ago. Indeed, in those days, the Communist Party of the USA existed with its own newspaper, The Daily Worker. Soviet propaganda was ubiquitous. And it comes as no surprise that the U.S. had a long and rich history of subverting elections in other states.
At the beginning of the 20th century, America was hard at work south of the border. After World War II, the U.S. intervened in Greece, Italy and Iran. In Vietnam, the U.S. went out of its way to ensure that its preferred presidential candidate received landslide numbers. And through Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the U.S. sought to influence those living on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
It is easy to regard these election-influencing activities as nearly comical “spy versus spy” interactions. But that would be a huge political and strategic blunder. America’s adversaries are out to exploit, widen and if successful, destroy political coherence and unity through what Clausewitz termed “other means.”
This is what happened in Britain nearly a decade ago over the Brexit vote. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, discovered that about 1 million British voters were unaffiliated as Conservatives or Labor. Cummings focused on this cohort using misinformation and outright falsehoods to influence voting to leave.
Few realize that Russia was also waging a campaign to secure a “leave vote,” since Brexit would weaken European cohesion and the spillover would affect NATO. Hence, it was in Russia’s interest for the UK to leave.
From the perspective of America’s Russian adversary, the U.S. is irreversibly and almost equally divided over politics with about 45 to 46 percent supporting the Democratic and Republican parties.
With the presidency likely to be determined by as few as 100,000-150,000 votes in a handful of key states, as in 2020, the election results would be rejected and almost certainly contested in the courts. So the strategy would be to exacerbate these conditions.
As in Brexit, Russia is using influence campaigns to plant the seeds of electoral gridlock. Congress and many states have set up guard rails to prevent a recurrence of 2020 and challenges to the validity of the vote. Some argue that Putin prefers Trump as president, given the Russian leader’s past interactions and Trump’s seeming deference to him.
China has taken a different approach. It is employing an intelligence vacuum cleaner strategy to gather information on the U.S. that it can exploit. China is also recruiting fellow travelers with either financial incentives or on a more idealistic basis of improving U.S.-Sino relations.
Iran and North Korea are employing elements of Russia’s influence campaign and China’s information and intelligence-gathering operations. The advantages these adversaries have rest on the very open basis of American society and its Constitution’s Bill of Rights pushing both to the limits. The explosion of social media makes exploiting this openness far easier.
The U.S. response has been principally through law enforcement. But, as long as both political parties use their own misinformation and disinformation campaigns, largely fact and truth-free, law enforcement is insufficient to limit foreign intrusions. And that is a brutal recognition of today’s reality.
Harlan Ullman, Ph.D., is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” military doctrine. His 12th book, “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large,” is available on Amazon.