Day: November 14, 2018
Trump is a sore loser
President Trump has taken a beating over the past week. The Democrats have won control of the House of Representatives by a wider margin than originally thought. They are now approaching a 40-vote majority. The suburbs, Hispanics, Asians, and white college-educated women abandoned the Republicans in droves. The uptick of one or two Republican seats in the Senate enables Trump to continue getting judges and other high officials approved, but the House will be conducting oversight as never before and initiating budget bills the Administration won’t like.
The Democrats will also pass legislation they know won’t get past the Senate but will lay out their own agenda for 2020. First up will apparently be a bill protecting the right to vote, something the Republicans have been trying hard to suppress, as well as the voting system (from foreign interference). Access to health care and education as well as environmental protection are likely in the queue.
Then last weekend Trump went to Paris for the World War I centennial, where he declined a visit to a cemetery because of rain, refused to join the other allied heads of state in a walk up the Champs Elysees, and got scolded by his erstwhile friend President Macron for his attachment to nativist nationalism. He looked out of sorts and out of place in the events he did attend, except when smiling broadly at President Putin.
Back in the US, Trump failed to make the traditional 3.3 mile trip to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans’ Day. Instead he sulked in the White House and has stayed there since, tweeting criticism of forest management in California while its first responders were risking their lives fighting a giant forest fire and dozens of Californians were dying. To boot: the Federal government controls 98% of the forests in California, so if forest management is really the cause… But it isn’t: Trump said that just to please logging interests. The main cause is climate change, which has made California much drier and windier.
Trump has good reason to be worried. Rumor has it that Special Counsel Mueller is getting ready to charge Don Jr., his eldest son and confidante, with conspiracy against the United States by plotting to gain Russian assistance during the election campaign. That will put Trump in the unenviable position of either throwing his son under the bus or admitting what we all suspect: his son did it with his father’s knowledge and encouragement. Even if that indictment doesn’t happen, the Mueller investigation and oversight hearings in the House threaten to expose financial and other malfeasance in the Trump real estate empire. There is little doubt that Trump was laundering Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten gains.
So Trump fired his racist Attorney General Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russia investigation and failed to prevent Mueller from exploring the financial angle, and replaced him with an “acting” AG who has publicly advocated hogtying the Special Counsel. This Matthew Whitaker was quickly shown to be so blatantly unqualified, and associated with dubious business dealings, that Trump claimed not to know him well.
Anything Whitaker does with respect to the Mueller investigation will no doubt lead to a subpoena to testify in Congress. Mueller, expecting the worst, I trust has prepared a dead man switch in the form of evidence and investigations by US attorneys (Federal prosecutors in the states) as well as state attorneys general. It is hard to turn off the multi-layered US justice system completely. That thought will redouble the President’s concerns.
To compound Trump’s problems, his wife instructed him in public this week to expel the deputy national security adviser from the White House staff. Mira Ricardel had offended the First Lady or her staff in some fashion on her recent trip to Africa. Trump obeyed. You can imagine how that made him feel.
Some will worry that Trump’s ugly mood may make him take military action. He is certainly not above trying to use the military to bolster his own cause, as he did in pointlessly deploying US troops to the Mexican border to counter a dwindling “caravan” of asylum-seekers more than a thousand miles away.
But real military action seems to be something he shies from. The one-off 2017 cruise missile retaliation in response to a Syrian chemical weapons attack seems to be his kind of thing. He has not initiated any sustained military action since coming to office. In the absence of compelling national security issues this Administration would find it hard to convince Congress or the American people it was a good thing to do.
What we’ve got is a president whose surprising good fortune in getting elected along with a Republican Congress has peaked. He is now facing stark political and judicial realities. Some presidents would respond with reassessment and renewed energy. Not this one. Donald Trump, for whom winning is everything, is a sore loser.
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November 12, the Atlantic Council convened a panel to discuss the challenges of hybrid warfare. Russia and other authoritarian powers are wielding cyberattacks and active measures, campaigns of disinformation and propaganda, against the US and its allies. Ambassador Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, Thomas Rid, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies, and General Riho Terras, Commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, gathered to discuss these threats in a conversation moderated by Jonatan Vseviov, Estonia’s Ambassador to the United States.
Cyberattacks and active measures are two different forms of covert action, but both are increasingly common in the digital age. The US and its allies have been slow to understand and adapt. Both often seek to exploit weaknesses arising from division and decentralization. They undermine the sovereignty of states, but there is no clear international framework to neutralize the threat or reprimand the perpetrators.
Even though active measures have a long history predating the internet, technology has drastically changed how they are carried out. As described by Rid, active measures are now more active and less measured than ever before. More active because the speed of communication and analysis allows disinformation campaigns to be fine-tuned while in motion. Less measured, as cyber infiltration techniques have increased ease of exfiltrating massive amounts of information.
According to Rid it is also easier than ever to lead journalists and activists to inadvertently aid hostile foreign initiatives. The 2016 Democratic National Committee hack in the US illustrates these changes: the stolen information was uploaded to Wikileaks in one massive dump, leaving American journalists to sort through and expose the most explosive stories. The strategic challenge for liberal states is to change the cost-benefit analysis for authoritarian states considering these measures. Potential victims must harden themselves and demonstrate a willingness to impose costs on perpetrators.
Nuland outlined reforms which the US ought to implement in anticipation of future influence campaigns. The US needs a framework to bring together its various intelligence agencies, technology experts and business leaders, similar to the coordinated restructuring on counter-terrorism implemented after 9/11. She highlighted tech companies as especially vulnerable due to the incentives against cooperation or sharing of information and design. The US government has an opportunity to build a framework to guarantee intellectual property and encourage tech companies to come together and discuss shared vulnerabilities in design, code, and supply chain that expose them to foreign exploitation.
Internationally there is need for similar coordination, allowing both flexibility and cooperation between countries. Terras noted there is no single public response which would work just as well in Estonia as it does in the US, so NATO members should retain flexibility on how best to counter disinformation and propaganda. At the same time, there is a need for greater cooperation between allied intelligence services in identifying culprits and international solidarity in ascribing blame.
The trickiest issue may be domestic political messaging. The panel discussed the importance of informing the public on hybrid warfare without overstating its effects. Publicly acknowledging and attributing foiled attacks is a key tool for discouraging future attempts. Acknowledging the problem is also a necessary step in educating the public on critical reading and cyber security skills.
At the same time, Rid warned of the risk of over-estimating the effects of foreign interference on domestic politics. In reality the effects of these methods are short-term, serving mostly to exploit existing domestic divides. Nations must maintain a faith in the efficacy of their own institutions and public discourse. The tendency to blame all domestic issues on foreign adversaries is itself characteristic of authoritarian countries.
The issue of appropriate response is more open to debate. States could counter with cyberattacks of their own. Aside from the risks of escalation, the panel discussed the risks inherent to cyber weapons: they are difficult to aim, easily attributed, and easily turned against their makers by adversaries. Other measures like sanctions and attribution of attacks to individual hackers can also deter and demoralize hybrid warfare attempts. No clear decision was reached on the most effective form of deterrence, but the panel agreed that the efforts made by the US and its allies to date have been insufficient.
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