This is the fifth and final installment in my series outlining Obama’s foreign relations with the Russian Federation. So far we’ve covered the end of the USSR and the expansion of a US-led liberal world system in the 1990s; early attempts between the US and Russia at bilateral cooperation; faltering cooperation in Syria; and the ratcheting up of tensions concerning Ukraine in 2014. In turning to the part Russia played in the 2016 election, we are, in essence, viewing the headstone atop the grave of the Russia Reset, the perhaps inevitable result of trying to solve with discreet policy compromises a disagreement that goes right down to the fundamentals.
5.1 Background: Election Interference
Election interference is nothing new. Really, as long as there have been elections, whether nobles choosing a new king of Poland or citizens choosing who they’d like the Electoral College to elevate to the US presidency, who gets to hold powerful office interests people and institutions beyond the immediate electoral environment. Sometimes that interest turns into action as people try to turn events in their favor. This could manifest as domestic interference, e.g., the KKK suppressing votes in the Reconstruction Era southern states. Sometimes that means external attempts to influence the outcome of an election.
Foreign powers have many options when it comes to influencing the behavior of other countries. Hegemons like the United States can engage in anything from a strongly worded diplomatic communique up to an invasion. Lesser great powers like the United Kingdom or France might be able to pressure regional neighbors with diplomacy or limited military force but wouldn’t be able to project that power across the globe. Even for the United States, which has the military option always in its back pocket, other means are usually preferred. This is because force is expensive, controversial, high profile, and risky. As we’ve seen with Iraq, regime change is not an easy path. Working within a target country’s established political institutions, therefore, is a far more common tactic.
Great powers generally turn to election interference when three conditions are present.
The great power believes that its interests are imperiled by a significant candidate/party.
A given election looks like it’s going to be a close race and could thus benefit from an outsider tipping the scales.
There is a domestic actor within the target nation desirous of outside assistance.1
Without the first two conditions, other diplomatic means will likely be pursued, as the expense and risk of election interference aren’t perceived to be necessary. Without the third condition, a great power will usually refrain from interfering in an election, even when it feels threatened by the potential victory of a particular candidate. Without the local expertise of a colluding agent, the probability of success collapses, prompting policymakers to turn to other means.2
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to interfere in an election: overtly and covertly – either the target country and electorate know an outside power is exerting influence or they don’t. Both types of intervention carry risk. Overt operations can blowback if voters in the target country feel they’re being strong-armed, for instance. But because overt operations allow for more extensive electoral manipulation, they often yield a higher chance of success. Covert operations carry lower risk but are also less effective because they need to balance providing sufficient assistance against the need to remain clandestine. This significantly hampers what a covert operation can accomplish. Nevertheless, most interventions are covert in nature (because local politicians don’t want to be seen as the pawns of foreign powers); even a substantial minority of overt operations have covert components.3
There are many ways that a foreign power can interfere in an election. The most common method is campaign funding: about two-thirds of interference operations included giving money to the preferred candidate. Other tactics are listed below. Both the US and USSR/Russia have engaged in all of these tactics at various times, with the exception that the USSR did not engage in campaigning assistance, perhaps owing to their lack of expertise in the electoral politics of liberal democracies.
On average, intervention efforts increase the vote share of the preferred side by about 3%. This does not sound like much, but it would have been enough to sway the popular vote in seven of the sixteen presidential election held between 1960 and 2020.4
The major exception is Founding Elections, that is to say elections held by newly minted democracies. In founding elections, interventions typically damage the aided side, reducing predicted mean vote share by an average of nearly 7%.5
5.2 Election Interference in the US Context
The 2016 election cycle was often characterized as “unprecedented” because of Russian interference operations,6 but this isn’t the first presidential election to prompt foreign action. In at least five prior presidential elections foreign powers have attempted to meddle in the outcome. Revolutionary France, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union used both covert and overt means to influence events. Nazi Germany tried to prevent FDR from winning a third term in 1940 by leaking Polish documents painting him as a warmonger. During the 1968 presidential election against Nixon, the Soviet Union approached his cash-strapped opponent, Hubert Humphrey, offering money and other assistance; he rejected their offer.7
The United States wasn’t merely the innocent recipient of such actions, either. Given its long history of foreign intervention, whether conquering Indian nations, intervening in the Mexican Revolution, or sending gunboats to South America, it should not surprise us that during the 20th century, US policymakers of both major parties added election interference to their foreign policy toolkit.8
The Cold War average for electoral operations was 1.35 times per year for Democratic presidents and 1.37 for Republicans. Moreover, this tactic was used far more frequently by the United States than its primary adversary during that time. Of the 117 partisan electoral interventions orchestrated by either the US or the USSR/Russia between January 1946, and December 2000, US operatives prosecuted 81 of these (69%), focusing primarily in Asia and Latin America.9
This history should remind us all that foreign governments in general interfere in elections around the world, and the governments of the US and Russia in particular have a long history of election meddling that continues to this day. As Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott wrote, reflecting on the US intervention in Yugoslavia (which included interfering in the Serbian election of 2000):
…the sovereignty of individual states is not absolute; a national government that systematically and massively abuses its own citizens loses its right to govern; it is subject either to being put out of business altogether or having its authority suspended in that area of the country where it is running amok.10
Of course, it was up to US officials to determine when something was “amok,” what counted as a sovereignty-negating “abuse.”
5.3 The Geo-Political Context Leading up to 2016
5.3.1 General Failure of Russia Reset
Bilateral cooperation with regard to things like strategic/deployed nuclear arms, Iran’s nuclear project, and trade could not make up for fundamental disagreements between US and Russia that centered around US hegemony and the desire of Russian elites to break free of that international system. These fundamental differences manifested in various ways: in disagreements over US missile defenses deployed to Europe, over the fate of Assad’s government, over Ukraine’s position in the game of European politics. By 2016, with tensions between the two countries at their highest in decades, Russian leaders were thus primed to view US political developments with keen interest.
5.3.2 Hillary Clinton and Russia
Despite what conservative critics might claim, Hillary Clinton is neither progressive nor pacifistic. She is a liberal in the economic sense, trusting to the Free Market whenever possible, and a liberal hawk when it comes to foreign affairs, that is to say she is determined to defend the unipolar world dominated by neoliberal economic doctrine and US-led institutions, and she is perfectly willing to use force in pursuance of that objective. Hence her support for interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.11
Moreover, she did not like Putin and did not trust the Russian political establishment. She viewed Putin’s Russia as an imperial project that stood in opposition to the US-led world system. As Obama’s first secretary of state, Clinton argued against yielding concession to Russia, even as a good-will measure, arguing instead for quid-pro-quo style negotiations. She lost that debate, and worked diligently to carry out the policy of the chief executive during the remainder of her tenure in the State Department.
Clinton’s professionalism softened the initial skepticism with which she was viewed by Russian officials, but this changed radically after 2011. Recall that Clinton had been a vehement supporter of US intervention in Libya at that time. US diplomatic efforts spearheaded by Clinton ultimately yielded Russian acquiescence to a No-Fly Zone over Libya, with the understanding that regime change was not a policy objective. Qaddafi’s subsequent overthrow and execution startled and enraged the Russians, who felt they’d been misled by the US in general and Clinton in particular. Clinton later boasted:
We Came, We Saw, He Died
This only added fuel to the fire of Russian anger and skepticism.12
As mentioned in the second part of this series, Putin also took umbrage at Obama administration comments concerning the protests surrounding the March 2012 Russian presidential election. Two days after these elections, as the protests swelled over allegations of fraud, Clinton, speaking at a conference in neighboring Lithuania, publicly denounced apparent irregularities in the electoral process. She described the elections as “neither free nor fair” and called for an investigation into allegations of fraud. Russian officials, who had grown fairly comfortable with their direct interaction with US counterparts during the last few years, had not expected such harsh condemnation. Putin himself, who won re-election to the presidency, seems to have come to believe that Clinton may have orchestrated the protests in an effort to overthrow him. He thus blamed her and the US for the protests.13
Clinton also left a sour taste in Russian mouths as she left her post at the State Department. During a speech at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference, Clinton declared that the Eurasian Union, Russia’s proposed alternative to the EU, was little more than an attempt to “re-Sovietize” Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She promised to “figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”14 Coming right after a farewell dinner with the Russian foreign minister, these comments brought ire from Russian officials and did nothing to improve their view of Clinton.
Clinton continued her harsh view of Russia after leaving the Obama administration. We’ve already heard her 2014 comparison of Putin with Hitler, which drew harsh criticism from the Russian president. We should recall that comparisons to Hitler might hit especially hard in Russia. Nationalists like Putin may despise the Soviet Union, but they very much consider Soviet sacrifices made to stop Nazism as part of their own national heritage. She talked frequently about continuing efforts to supplant Russian energy exports with US alternatives. She also promised that, if elected president, she would implement enhanced sanctions against Russia and provide more weapons to Ukraine. By 2016, therefore, Clinton came across to Russian elites as not simply a bad presidential hopeful but probably the worst of the lot. In 2018 Putin even admitted that he preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton one.15
5.4 2016
5.4.1 Initial Considerations
After an unexpected event like the election of Donald Trump in 2016, it’s easy to forget longer historical trends in favor of “unprecedented” and dramatic analysis. We should therefore begin our review of this election with a few mundane observations. One, it’s unusual for the same party to win three presidential elections in a row. Second, the slow economic recovery from the Great Recession had not yielded a huge boost in popularity for Obama or the Democrats, meaning that the electorate (especially the ever-illusive independent voter) was likely to punish the incumbent party. Third, growing partisan polarization meant that there were fewer voters likely to vote against party. All of this combined to yield an election in which Republicans definitely stood a chance. Indeed, it almost didn’t matter who they put forth as a candidate.
Trump, specifically, benefited from three turns of fortune.
A divided Republican leadership that couldn’t agree on policy positions or a presumptive nominee. This left the field open to challengers, especially those willing to voice seemingly heterodox views.
Consistent media coverage. Whether positive or negative, the media constantly covered Trump’s primary adventures. This gave him free advertising, a sense of legitimacy, and a platform from which to spout his rhetoric.
Most importantly, Trump openly appealed to white identity politics, especially as concerned the economy and race.
Let’s delve deeper into white identity politics. Contrary to popular wisdom, most Republican voters are not particularly economically conservative. Large minorities support unions.
Small majorities call for more taxes on the wealthy.
Healthy majorities support funding for Social Security and Medicare.
But this economic liberalism has a racial tinge to it: government programs seen to be disproportionately doled out to the undeserving, like black people who are no longer systematically discriminated against, do not find support among Republican voters. Indeed, this hostility to entitlement programs has gotten to the point where such things are often seen as part of a broader assault on white people. Couple this with fears about illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorists, and you get the racial undercurrent that propelled Trump towards the nomination. Compared to the supporters of other Republican candidates, Trump supporters were more dissatisfied with the economy, less conservative on economic issues, more supportive of tough immigration laws, more Islamophobic, more inclined to attribute the consequences of systemic racism to individual laziness, and identified more strongly as white.16
Initially, only 7% of likely Republican primary voters supported Trump.17 He overcame some of this scorn through his widespread name recognition, unconventional tactics, and heterodox opinions (e.g., more hardcore anti-immigration than most other GOP politicians). This resulted in his lead in GOP primary polls. He proceeded to win a slew of primaries, although he failed to gain an absolute majority of the votes in any primary or caucus state until two-thirds of the way through the state primaries. Coming out of the primary, he thus had an increasingly devoted (soon to be cultish) core of supporters but that was far from a comfortable majority of GOP voters and included practically no party leaders or elites. Lack of support within the existing Republican party infrastructure and donor base would cause Trump’s campaign, which lacked a mature fundraising apparatus, a lot of problems during the general election.
5.4.2 Russia and the Trump Campaign
Despite the fact that the general race should have been, given historical trends, a close one, Trump had several potentially fatal weaknesses. These were well understood at the time and caused most informed observers (even among Trump campaigners) to favor Clinton.
Before Trump, no person had been elected as president of the United States without having significant political or military experience.
The polls consistently showed that Trump was a longshot in the general election. His high unfavorability rating (55% in June 2016), was the worst in the history of recorded polling.
Trump was unable to unify much of the GOP establishment behind his candidacy. Just because GOP leaders failed to stop Trump’s nomination did not mean they had no power, especially in the realm of fundraising.
Critically, Trump’s campaign was tapped out – and money gets more important with each passing election cycle. Indeed, at the start of the general election, Clinton had nearly 40 times the funds that Trump did.18 Instead of developing his own fundraising abilities, Trump had relied upon his own money (and free media coverage) to get through the primary season. This would not suffice in the general election.
These weaknesses could have prompted the Trump campaign to seek out less conventional means of achieving victory. Beyond being the weaker candidate, Trump was also a businessman and a narcissist, willing to do anything to win, or at least to be perceived as having won. That he would accept foreign assistance in such a prestigious contest is not outside the realm of possibility.
But why Russia specifically? As we’ve already established, the Russian government had strong reasons for opposing Clinton, so the Trump team would not have had to twist any Russian arms to get assistance. In addition, the Trump team had some notable ties with various Russians and Russian organizations. Three of the most important were:
Carter Page, one of the campaign’s foreign policy advisors. He worked for several years in Russia and openly described himself on multiple occasions as an informal advisor to the Kremlin.
Michael Flynn, a senior campaign advisor and surrogate who’d been on Trump’s shortlist for VP. In December 2015, already informally attached to the Trump campaign, Flynn spoke at a Russia Today (RT) ceremony, for which the Russian government secretly paid him $45,000.
Most important was Paul Manafort, for a time Trump’s chief strategist and campaign manager, who remained an informal campaign advisor even after leaving his post. For years he’d worked for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, himself very closely tied to the Kremlin. Manafort had also been the campaign manager and senior advisor to former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych, who as we saw in the last video had been Putin’s favored candidate in both 2004 and 2010.
Based on Trump’s unpopularity, his poor fundraising capabilities, his lack of institutional GOP support, his narcissistic character, Russia’s fear of Clinton, and the existing ties of Trump campaign officials to Russia, it seems quite plausible that the Trump campaign cooperated with Russian operatives in their shared goal of defeating Clinton. We should note, however, that this evidence is not conclusive, as the Mueller Report makes clear. But while the Mueller Report legally exonerated Trump and his team as regards active conspiracy with Russian agents, that does not mean that the evidence doesn’t exist or that it isn’t empirically substantial. It simply means that the investigators considered the evidence insufficient for a conviction in a criminal trial. This is not surprising, since conclusive (rather than suggestive) evidence for covert election interference often takes decades to surface. Researchers are still unable to obtain some classified documents from the US government regarding its role in the Chilean election of 1964, for instance!19
Moreover, given the practically universal existence of domestic allies that work with and benefit from foreign election interference operations, it would be against the historical grain for the Trump team to be innocent in this regard. Hopefully Time reveals more answers one way or the other.
5.4.3 What the Russians Actually Did
Russia attempted to interfere principally through three operations.
Through the general dissemination of divisive news and information into the US infosphere. This was done primarily through the news outlet Russia Today (RT), which by 2012 had become a real presence in the US news landscape. Its coverage of the 2012 presidential election made much of how little the mainline parties represented US voters, how corrupt the system was, etc. Much like the USSR highlighting legitimate human rights abuses committed by the US during the Cold War, this was an attempt to undermine an adversary.20
The Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out a social media campaign that favored Trump and disparaged Clinton. By the end of the 2016 US election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of US citizens through various social media accounts. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million people through its Facebook accounts. Twitter was awash with more than 3,800 IRA-controlled accounts (masquerading as BLM protestors, state-level GOP accounts, and everything in between). Some of these accounts had large followings and even had their content retweeted by sitting US politicians.21
The Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign, subsequently releasing whatever material they managed to collect.22
5.4.4 Basic Timeline of Interference23
Starting in 2015, Russians made initial contact with members of the Trump Organization.
February 2016: IRA operatives began actively supporting Trump and disparaging Clinton
March 2016: The GRU began hacking the email accounts of Clinton Campaign volunteers and employees, including campaign chairman John Podesta.
April 2016: The GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from these compromised email accounts and networks.
May 2016: Members of the Trump team got word that they could benefit from Russians anonymously releasing anti-Clinton info.
June 2016: The Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer network. At this time, GRU began disseminating stolen materials through the fictitious online personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0." The GRU later released additional materials through WikiLeaks.
October 7, 2016: WikiLeaks began releasing Podesta' s stolen emails less than one hour after a US media outlet had released the Access Hollywood Tape.
November 8, 2016: Trump beat Clinton in a victory that upset mainstream prediction and elite expectation.
5.4.5 The US Response
The Obama administration was aware of Russian cyber capabilities as early as 2014. During the course of 2016, officials grew increasingly alert to Russian meddling in domestic US politics, going so far as to formally accuse the Russians of hacking in October 2016. Despite this knowledge, they shied away from any direct confrontation or sustained effort to curb Russia’s efforts. Why?
Critics of the administration contend that between the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the 2016 election, when it became clear that Russia was engaging in a global disinformation, misinformation, propaganda campaign, the Obama administration seemed to do nothing substantive to combat the threat. Critics alleged that this inaction was owing to a “lack of interest, courage, and follow-through.”24
Other possibilities seem more likely. First, while information warfare as a concept was nothing new (analysts consistently point to Cold War era precedents perpetrated by both US and Soviet intelligence agencies), this kind of cyberwarfare – hacking, trolling, twitter bots, etc. – was outside the wheelhouse of the US Intelligence Community. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that, after US intelligence became convinced of direct Russian interference in the election process starting with disparaging propaganda about Hillary Clinton in 2015: “…we didn’t have any mechanism to counter [Russian efforts].”25
At the same time, it wasn’t at all clear if or how effective Russian disinformation might be. After all, it seemed clear that Russian propaganda had, from the perspective of the US government, backfired when applied to Ukraine in 2014, as few believed the Kremlin’s assertions about the creation of legitimate people’s republics in the Donbas. Russian efforts there just made them seem inept and conniving. Perhaps their interference in US politics would be a similar failure.
Add to this possibility the fact that cyberspace is still a grey zone when it comes to geopolitics. At what point does a cyberattack become a breach of sovereignty or even an act of war? Were uncharitable RT stories about US corruption worth ratcheting up international tensions? What about leaking Clinton’s emails? Hacking the DNC? Wherever the line was, the Obama administration was hampered by the novelty of the threat and the lack of agreement among relevant experts as to how to respond appropriately and effectively.26
Partisan politics played a role as well, notably in the delays that characterized the Obama administration’s public announcement of and response to Russian interference. During the initial wave of election interference, Clapper says that the US government,
…didn’t have a viable, credible path to reveal to the electorate how Russian intelligence and propaganda were attempting to manipulate them.
When it subsequently became clear during the course of 2016 primary season that the Russians were not merely disparaging Clinton but actively favoring Trump as the GOP nominee, Clapper says:
I continued to stay away from any involvement in the ongoing election shenanigans. I figured at the time that the last thing our country needed was any appearance that the Intelligence Community was involved in partisan politics.27
Jeh Johnson, the former secretary of homeland security, corroborated this thorny dilemma. He testified to Congress that the Obama administration feared that acknowledging Russian meddling in the 2016 election would not only reveal US intelligence gathering methodology but risked being interpreted as “taking sides” in the race. After all, Trump often prophesied that the election would be “rigged” against him; any action by the sitting president to “interfere” with the election process could easily have been seen as cover for skewing events in favor of Clinton.28
With these limitations in mind, the Obama administration reacted first in private, then officially but rhetorically, and finally, after the election, took more concrete steps. Top US intelligence officials — including CIA Director John Brennan — privately warned their Russian counterparts not to persist with their active measures. Obama himself told Putin during an in-person meeting to desist. Obviously, these private warnings failed to make an impression.
Obama then tried to get around the issue of partisanship by going to Congress. He sought Congressional cooperation in issuing a joint statement on Russian election interference. While Democrats in both houses agreed to participate, Senate Republicans refused to cooperate (not wanting to make their candidate look bad) and the effort collapsed.
After Election Day, Obama ordered the US intelligence community to issue a public report about the Russian scheme. Once it had — and concluded Russia's attack was aimed at helping Trump and hurting Clinton — the United States imposed a slate of punitive measures against Moscow. In addition to imposing new sanctions, Washington also expelled a number of Russian diplomats and closed two Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York.
5.4.6 The Effect of Russian Efforts upon the Outcome of the Election
After her defeat, Hillary Clinton reportedly blamed three acronyms for her defeat: the KKK, the FBI, and the KGB. In other words, the white identity politics of the Trump campaign, the ongoing scandal and FBI investigation surrounding her private email server, and Russian interference in the election.
Leaving aside the veracity of the first two, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that Russian efforts had a material impact on the election.
The operation had been a covert one, and covert operations are usually less effective.
The Russian operation had been outed to the public. Such an operational failure could very well have backfired on the Russians.
The release of Clinton’s emails in late July and in October did not clearly affect her favorability, perceptions of her honesty, or her lead over Trump.
Russian operatives spent far less on ads and disinformation than either presidential campaign and there’s debate as to how well those Russian efforts were targeted and whether they were drowned out by the constant flood of digital content.
It’s debatable what impact Russian content had on those who did view it, many of whom might have already been die-hard conservatives that would never have voted for Clinton in any case
The 2016 campaign was already full of domestically-sourced rageful rhetoric and disinformation – did Russian stories really have an impact?29
However, the 2016 election was very close. Trump won the Electoral College decisively, but his actual voter margin was a mere 77,744 votes in the three states (PA, WI, MI) that could have delivered the College to Clinton.30 The popular vote was close as well, with Clinton winning by 2.1% (far less than is typical for a presidential election).31 In such a close race, even a botched electoral intervention could have mattered.
One in-depth analysis found that Russian interference could have cost Clinton 75 College votes, those of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida. Just these four states were enough to make or break Clinton’s victory. This analysis also reviewed pre-election survey data focusing on people’s perceptions of various Russian-linked leaks; the result hints at a real and negative impact for the Clinton campaign. Finally, this analysis looked at contemporaneous Google searches for terms related to the leaked info and found a strong correlation between the timing of the leaks and popularity of terms like “Clinton emails.” This denotes, at the very least, that Russian efforts did help steer the US conversation. This analysis concluded by suggesting that without Russian interference, Clinton could have doubled her popular vote victory margin (4.13%). Accounting for state-level differences in the additional votes brought Clinton’s margin of victory in the Electoral College to 352-186.32
The 2016 election was close and analysis of it is complicated by the bizarre dual track system by which the US selects its chief executive. Some domestic facts should not be forgotten:
The popular vote does not determine electoral victory.
Republican voter suppression efforts had been underway since 2008.
Clinton was not a popular candidate.
Media coverage of Clinton during the general election was not very positive.
The Clinton campaign made several major mistakes, like underestimating Trump’s chances or misallocating campaign resources.
Since the 1990s, partisanship has been on the rise in US politics, a trend that has sharply accelerated since 2008.
Recovery from the Great Recession had been slow and patchy.
Obama’s tenure was a mixed legacy, with his popularity on the rise as he left office but very little accomplished on the Hope and Change front.
Trump adeptly played into the racially inflected economic fears of white-identified voters
We thus had a US political landscape increasingly bitter, increasingly divided, increasingly unresponsive to popular pressures, and dominated by unpopular candidates. This political reality interacted with an economy that continued to siphon the labor of the Many into the coffers of the Few. Politics and economics mingled with the legacy of racism, prompting important sections of white voters to color their economic anxieties through the lens of racial resentment towards the “undeserving.” All of this produced an increasing number of voters who were skeptical of the Status Quo and thus susceptible to messaging, both true and false, foreign and domestic, that highlighted “problems” with the System.
In sum, there are a few things we know with high confidence. Election interference is a common foreign policy tool. Russian leaders preferred Trump to Clinton. Trump himself, despite historical trends indicating that the 2016 election would be a close race, was a relatively weak candidate, even against a mediocrity like Hillary Clinton. Russian institutions tried to influence the outcome of the presidential election in their favor. There are other things we may not know for some time, particularly if (or to what extent) the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian interference. And given the cacophony of variables at play, we may never know much Russian operations decided the winner of that bizarre contest.
Concluding Remarks Concerning Obama’s Russia Reset
There are many ways to assess the success or failure of a given presidential policy. One way is to ask if it met the goals set by those carrying it out. At base, every president seeks to maintain the position of the United States atop the global economic and military hierarchy. This is a morally dubious project, to be sure, but whether a president succeeds or fails in this regard can at least tell us how mainstream analysts should treat the legacy of a given chief executive, regardless of partisanship. If, for instance, Jimmy Carter actually contributed to the collapse of the USSR, then any conservative who continues to lambast him is either ignorant or selling something. Ditto holier-than-thou liberals denouncing Nixon as the Anti-Christ.
Recall that Obama’s immediate aim with the Russia Reset was not to replicate the Special Relationship shared between the United States and the United Kingdom; rather, it was to find specific points of shared interest and strive to cooperate with Russia in those areas. The implied long-term objective of this collaboration was a consistent easing of tension, perhaps with the ultimate aim of bringing Russia fully into the US-led international order. In the near-term, Obama’s policies met with real, if sometimes partial, success. But the fundamental nature of US-RF relations remained unchanged even eight years after secretary Clinton pressed the big red button.
During Obama’s first term, his administration scored some notable diplomatic achievements. These included Russian help in supplying US forces in Afghanistan, Russia’s UN delegation acquiescing to western intervention in Libya, and Russian cooperation in sanctioning Iran. Russia also signed the New START treaty, which over the next decade drastically reduced the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads. These episodes fostered a brief softening between the two countries, which allowed Obama to push forward with his own brand of Europe-based missile defense and prompted a degree of normalization in US-RF trade relations.
Despite these successes, tensions never entirely evaporated because fundamentally, Russia’s elites could not accommodate themselves to being treated like a second-rate power. They saw their country as one of the great powers of the world, a nation that had made spectacular contributions to human civilization – 25 million Soviets died cleansing the world of Hitler, Russians are quick to remind ignorant westerners. This is not unique to Putin, but he harnessed the legacy and identity of the Third Rome for his own political purposes, invigorating a long-extant sense of Russian Exceptionalism. This clashed with US Exceptionalism, which cannot countenance a co-emperor atop the liberal empire it has led for decades. Obama’s reset with Russia ultimately failed in the face of his primary foreign policy duty: maintaining US preeminence.
Thus, while Russia was happy to engage with the United States as a peer-partner in nuclear negotiations, in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, in fighting terrorism, its pride could not agree to missile defense installations being placed near its borders without high-level input from Russian officials. It could not tolerate its closest Middle East ally, Assad, falling to western meddling. And it could not see Ukraine, which had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire and an industrial hub of the Soviet Union, orient westwards. Moreover, US policymakers, if they understood the Russian position at all, saw no way to accommodate that point of view. Unlike with China, another aspirant to great-power status but one that the US has more or less been able to accommodate, US leaders cannot help but view Russia as at best a has-been, and an annoyingly meddlesome one at that.
This fundamental mismatch of perspective should be of critical concern to us all. Although New START succeeded in drastically reducing the number of nuclear arms within both countries, the persistent and deepening tensions between Washington and Moscow have pushed them both to modernize their existing nuclear arsenals. No good can come from this.
Levin, Dov, “Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions,” Chap 1
Ibid.
Ibid., Chap 2
Statista, “Winning margins in the electoral and popular votes in United States presidential elections from 1789 to 2020,” https://tinyurl.com/bddt6uf8
Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 6
E.g., The New York Times: Yourish, Buchanan, and Watkins, “A Timeline Showing the Full Scale of Russia’s Unprecedented Interference in the 2016 Election, and Its Aftermath,” https://tinyurl.com/mssh9x2a; or CBS News, Gazis, Olivia, “Russia targeted 2016 state elections with ‘unprecedented level of activity,’ Senate Intel report says,” https://tinyurl.com/jzstefey
Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 1
Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies, “Military Intervention Project (MIP),” https://sites.tufts.edu/css/mip-research/
Ibid., Chap 5
Norris, John, “Collision Course: Nato, Russia, and Kosovo,” Forward by Strobe Talbott
Zenko, Micah, “Hillary the Hawk: A History,” https://tinyurl.com/2vuyzubb; Carpenter, Ted Galen, “Hillary’s Hawkishness Began When She Was First Lady,” https://tinyurl.com/4xfrp4j4
Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 6
Ibid.
Klapper, Bradley, “Clinton fears efforts to ‘re-Sovietize’ in Europe,” https://tinyurl.com/7mjr6rzw
Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 6
Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, Chap 5; University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation, “Large Majorities of Republicans and Democrats Agree on Steps to Drastically Reduce Social Security Shortfall,” https://tinyurl.com/5dkc5vu7; Pew Research Center, “In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp Divides in Porth Partisan Coalitions,” https://tinyurl.com/3nyjbezc; “Majorities of Americans say unions have a positive effect on U.S. and that decline in union membership is bad,” https://tinyurl.com/2p9765bb
Ibid.
Clinton began the general election with $42 million on hand. Trump, in contrast, began the general elections with only $1.3 million on hand. Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 8
Ibid.
Clapper, James, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence,” Chap 11
Mueller, Robert S., “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Vol 1 (aka Mueller Report), 12, 22, 30
Ibid., 12, 44
Ibid., 13-15
Schindler, John R, “Obama Fails to Fight Putin’s Propaganda Machine,” https://tinyurl.com/55dhb2hb
Clapper, “Facts and Fears,” Chap 11
Jens David Ohlin and Duncan B. Hollis, “Defending Democracies: Combating Foreign Election Interference in a Digital Age,” 163-175
Clapper, “Facts and Fears,” Chap 11
Huetteman, Emmarie, “Obama White House Knew of Russian Election Hacking, but Delayed Telling,” https://tinyurl.com/459jpw7r
Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, “Identity Crisis,” Chap 3, Chap 8
Kilgore, Ed. “The Final, Final, Final Results for the Presidential Popular Vote Are In,” https://tinyurl.com/y8zx6att
Statista, “Winning margins in the electoral and popular votes in United States presidential elections from 1789 to 2020,” https://tinyurl.com/bddt6uf8
Levin, “Meddling in the Ballot Box,” Chap 8