Legitimate questions about sources (3 of 3): Russia, Russia, Russia

Nate Sliver writes of the Russian effect on the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2016:

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

In the three critical states for the Democrats that narrowly went to Trump in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, "Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too." (Philip Bump, Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states Washington Post 12/01/2016)

Bump goes on to say, "The 540-vote margin in Florida that swung the 2000 election is still the modern record-holder for close races, but this is a pretty remarkable result. (Especially since the final gap between Al Gore and George W. Bush was only a little over 500,000 votes nationally.)"

I would say that is a bit of a sloppy way to talk about the 2000 election. Because he didn't mention that in the detailed press consortium recount of the Florida votes, Gore actually won the Florida vote and the state's Electoral College votes should have gone to him. The Supreme Court gave that election to Bush Junior in a crassly partisan decision. But the results of the consortium research were announced during the orgy of patriotic fury in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So the press generally reported those results in a sloppy way in 2001: Miranda Spencer, Who Won the Election? Who Cares? FAIR 01/01/2002.

This post is not so much about sources as such as about the frameworks we apply to thinking about US and European relations to Russia.

Russia and the 2016 US Election

Russian interference in the 2016 election outraged a lot of Americans, mostly Democrats it seems, and very justifiably so. It's the duty of the government at all levels to protect the integrity of elections.

But the actual effect of the Russian intervention via social media and their own media outlets like RT is impossible to determine for certain. Because national election results, and most below the national level, too, are overdetermined. Many factors effect them. To take a counterfactual example, if there were a state that was considered competitive in a Presidential election and no Demoratic or Republican advertising or campaign events took place in it, while Russian bots generated huge publicity for the Republican in the race, then it would be more credible to conclude that Russian interference decisively affected the outcome of the race.

This is why campaign laws are so important and spending limits are badly needed. There's a general recognition that how well a campaign is financed does affect outcomes, although spending more money it itself doesn't automatically guarantee a win. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling even cleared the way for donors to be able to spend essentially sums on election campaigns, in some cases without even reporting publicly who donated the money. It is mainly destructive because it gives our own oligarchs excessive power to control elections and politicians. But it also opens vulnerabilites for illicit foreign interference.

In the end, the kinds of measures that protect the integrity of elections in the United States from regular election-stealing mischief are also the kinds of things that would protect against illicit foreign interference. Secure voting machines not connected to the Internet with paper audit trails checked by systematic audits. Limits on campaign donations and effective reporting measures. Automatic voter registration and federally-enforced limits on how states purge voter lists. And social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be required to screen against anoymous accounts that could be fronts for illicit campaign activities, foreign or domestic.

The discussion on the significance of the 2016 Russian election interference was heavily influenced by the Clinton campaign's decision to try to blame the election outcome on it. So for many people, it became the party line that Trump's Electoral College win was mainly due to Russian meddling. And it conveniently deflected criticism from the Demoratic candidate and how both her campaign and the Democratic Party establishment.

It also had the very dubious effect of exaggerating the power of Russia and of Putin's government to influence events.

Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) sometimes sounds like he's arguing that the Russian intervention in the 2016 American election was a stunning feat of international cyber-aggression.

But in the "America" section, he also makes clear that it is actual weaknesses in American democracy that gives Russia or other powers an opening for illicit influence. The current way the Electoral College functions is very heavily undemocratic. That fact needs to be faced realistically. To put in the active voice, the Democratic Party must face it and take action to correct that and other problems. The Republican Party has just as much responsibility to do so. But their basic integrity and commitment to democracy are very much in doubt. And for all too many of them, it's clear that they reject democracy and the rule of law. The Democratic Party since the stalling of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s has avoided any serious consideration of needed Constitutional reforms as though they would be comparable to unleashing an anthrax outbreak. They have to change their mindset.

Russia as a world power

Russia and the United States have most of the nuclear weapons in the world. Russia also spends something like 10% of its GDP on military expenditures. (Though GDP numbers are not an exact measure of economic activity.) Russia's economy is usually taken to be somewhat the size of Italy's. In any case, it's not anywhere near the economic power of the former Soviet Union. And the EU's economy is far larger than Russia's. Germany and France together have a bigger military than Russia. Even excluding US contributions, NATO's military budgets are far greater than Russia's. Although that doesn't mean that they are directly comparable, because that compares a number of country to a single one, Russia.

Russia's nukes are a clear threat to the US and Europe. And Russia and the US have a vital interest in reducing and better regulating their nuclear stockpiles and in strenthening nuclear nonproliferation. We often talk these days about climate change being the biggest threat to humanity. But the single most devestating anthropogenic event affecting climate would be an all-out nuclear war betwee the US and Russia. And sudden, catastropic climate change would be only one of the devastating results.

But as the "nuclear Jesuits", the theoreticians of nuclear war, realized even in the 1950s, the actual use of nuclear weapons as a supplement to conventional war is limited in many ways. The American public regarded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as something like a magic power to win in wars. Some fools would still like to think of it that way. But, to take an example, if Russia decided to follow up on Putinist rhetoric on how Ukraine is part of eternal Russia and take it over, dropping a nuclear bomb or two on it would be anything but a magical solution. Assuming they would nuke targets of military significance, it would not only kill a lot of people instantly and destroy infrastructure that the Russians would want to preserve. It would also spread radioactive particles all around Ukraine and into neighboring countries, including Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea.

Another major factor in Russia's geopolitical situation is the stable relationship that Russia currently has with China. A glance at a map of Russia will illustrate why this is significant. Russia has a long border with China. And the current stable relationship between Russia and China are distinctly different from most of the Cold War, when the "Sino-Soviet conflict" was a persistent factor, only belatedly fully recognized by the government and foreign policy establishment in the US. There was even a Sino-Soviet War in 1929, before the Communists took power in China.

Speaking of China, by some measures it is already the world's largest economy. Pretty soon it will be described as such without qualifiers. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in his book Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltordnung des 21.Jahrhunderts (2018) describes the implications of China's rise to being the leading world power from a realist foreign policy perspective. In his view, the US will have to deal with the practical implications of becoming the second-leading power. The European Union and Russia will be among the secondary level of world powers along with the US. Fischer argues from the standard realist viewpoint that the US should manage the transition carefully in cooperation with the EU and Russia. And cooperation between the latter two will be important in protecting EU and Russian interests, all while hopefully avoiding military clashes.

In other words, the US, the EU, and Russia cannot afford to treat each other exclusively as adversaries, much less enemies. And this aspect is something easy to lose sight of in the various polemics around Russian election interference. That doesn't mean that the US and EU should refrain from hard-headed negotiating, particularly not on a unilateral or asymmetrical basis. Just the opposite. Achieving the needed level of stable relationships will require clear-headed and expert negotiations on all sides. It should go without saying that the Orange Clown and his like are incapable of such a thing.

Russia and the European Union

One factor very much at work currently is that the Putin government is more set on breaking up the EU than developing more solid cooperation with it. Brexit serves that purpose. Which of course is not the same as the question of how much Russian influence may have affected the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Russia isn't alone. Trump's America First policy also is hostile to the European Union. While Trump's position is more drastic than those of his predecessors, the Cheney-Bush Administration also sought to divide EU members against each others, especially over the Iraq War. And had notable success in doing so. The Clinton Administration was favorable to the EU. But they wanted a broad but relatively weak EU. Which led them to push for faster expansion than a more sober assessment of how well countries like Hungary and Romania met the basic democratic and rule-of-law critieria of the EU might have produced. The Obama Administration also took a similar position of preferring a united but weak EU. But Putin and Trump share a downright hostility to the EU.

Russia's political meddling in the EU is a more serious threat to European and American interests than anything the Russians are doing to meddle in American politics. That will look like an absurd statement to anyone convinced that Machiavellian Master Vladimir Putin decided the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential election. But not only is that a questionable call, as explained above. It seems far more likely that the Russian goal was to cause enough trouble for Hillary Clinton to politically weaken her Presidency. It's conceivable that they may not even regard the actual election result as a more favorable outcome.

But if nationalistic parties succeed in fragmenting the European Union, that will put Russia in a more powerful position in shaping world politics in the era of Chinese pre-eminence relative to the US and the EU. And Putin currently exerts actual leadership on far-right parties of the Nationalist International, though that designation is still an ironic grouping more than a formal alliance. But alliances among them do exist. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), currently the junior coalition partner in Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz' government, concluded a formal friendship and cooperation agreement with Putin's Russia United Party in 2016. So far, they haven't been caught taking illicit funds from Russia. Marine Le Pen's far-right party in France, currently called the National Rally (RN, Rassemblement national), on the other hand, has taken dubious Russian financing (Gabriel Gatehouse, Marine Le Pen: Who's funding France's far right? BBC News 04/03/2017):

But there is more to the relationship between Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen than ideological convergence. Because of the National Front's racist and anti-Semitic past, French banks have declined to lend the party money.

So Marine Le Pen has been forced to look elsewhere for financing.

In 2014, the National Front took Russian loans worth €11m (£9.4m). One of the loans, for €9m, came from a small bank, First Czech Russian Bank, with links to the Kremlin.

The general nationalist, Islamophobic, Christianist stance that Putin has taken in his current Presidency is attractive to the far-right parties in Europe, though some of them like the FPÖ have a more secular cast. There's no question that Putin's authoritarian practice and nationalist ideology have real political attraction for political groups in Europe, and not exclusively for those who would be considered part of the Nationalist International group. (E.g., Babyface Kurz' "turquoise" faction of the Christian Democratic People's Party in Austria.)

Here's where an interesting question arises than I can only touch on here. To what extent is the current relationship of the Russian government and ruling party like the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and other Communist parties in the world? I don't doubt that Russian officials are drawing on their country's previous experience. I'll mention two relevant factors here. One is that the Communist political program was internationalist, however much the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, and other Communist countries may have applied their official ideology for nationalist purposes. The explicit nationalist and racist ideologies attractive to the Straches and Salvinis of Europe are much more difficult to package as internationalist. As one example, the Austrian FPÖ's plans to give dual citizenship to native-born Italians in the South Tyrol area of northern Italy, endorsed by Babyface's current Austrian government, are adamantly opposed by Italy's Salvini-dominated, more-or-less neofascist Italian government.

The second consideration is that, for all the differences, the basic problems involved in parties taking inspiration from foreign models is similar today to what the case for the USSR and affiliated Communist Parties was. There's nothing inherently wrong in a party looking to foreign examples for good ideas. In fact, its a completely commonplace thing. Lord knows the United States has never been shy about holding itself up as a model to the entire world.

On the other hand, there are national secrets to be guarded and national interests to be defended. Voters need to be confident that their leaders are committed to those things. The US Constitution specifies that the President must be a native-born American citizen. While it sounds dated today - it is really unnecessary today - it was designed to prevent a member of a European dynasty being installed as the American President. If a party owes some kind of allegiance to the ruling party of a foreign power, how can they be trusted to lead a national government?

Making such distinctions is not as hard as it may sound in the abstract. The US and EU countries have laws regulating what kinds of interactions with foreign governments are permitted and which not. And for the stealing of national secrets, people professing admiration for a foreign government that wants to steal the secrets aren't the most obvious candidates for that task. On the other hand, it's not in the least unusual for Democrats and Republicans in the United States to point to foreign examples and experiences to support their own proposals and priorities. The current court judgments against Trump allies like his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are a reminder that laws defining what makes someone a foreign agent are fairly specific and capable of being enforced. (It's not illegal for an American citizen to act as a foreign agent for another government as long as the purpose is legal and the relationship is reported according to law.)

Evaluating Foreign Threats

Underestimating foreign threats has sometimes been a problem for the United States in the post-World War II era. The most obvious example being the Cheney-Bush Administration's reckless and irresponsible neglect of the very well known terrorist threat from Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda group in the first months of their rule.

But overestimating threats, aka, threat inflation, has caused far more problems for the US in that period. Jeffrey Record provides an excellent discussion of this problem in his The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Most of the material is included in the paper, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Strategic Studies Institute; Aug 2005). Inflating threats led to some of the worst disasters of post-WWII US foreign policy, the most spectacular being the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. The sorry hisory of "Team B" is a major cautionary tale. (See: Khurram Husain, Neocons: The men behind the curtain Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov-Dec 2003)

The American government, political parties, and voters need to keep those lessons in mind as we're moving into the era of China as the world's leading power. Take real threats seriously, including Russian interference in American elections. But don't lose our minds about it. And remember that there are very real factions, some business lobbies and some political ideologues, who have no compunction about wildly exaggerating international dangers for cynical purposes that are not at all identiical to American interests or the cause of peace.

Concluding Thoughts

Yes, Virginia, countries try to influence political outcomes in other countries. And all countries have to deal with it. It's nothing new. In fact, the phenomenon considerably preceded the establishment of nation-states as we know them today.

Noting the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election, Mark Weisbrot writes (“Fort Trump” in Poland Is Another Dangerous, Delusional Idea CEPR 12/20/2018):

Americans are understandably upset about any foreign interference in our elections. As are Hondurans, Chileans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Italians, Iranians, or citizens of scores of other countries where the United States has intervened much more heavily ― sometimes with military coups to reverse results ― in elections. This includes Russia itself, where Americans organized and spent heavily to reelect their ally, Boris Yeltsin, in 1996.

Legitimate and illegitimate means of exercising such influence are defined in national and international law. And, yes, the US, Russia, and other countries will continue to break those rules in the pursuit of their national interests. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it effective or constructive, a fact the US really needs to keep more in mind in our own interventions. But it's a fact of international relations, and getting crazy about it isn't really helpful to any country's legitimate national interest.

And, yes, Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And he and his associates should be investigated and prosecuted for violations of the law, including those involving some kind of illegal collution with the Russian government.

[12/28/2018: The spelling of the name of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been corrected.]