Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Hack America

Leon Arron, writing in Foreign Affairs , believes that the Putin Doctrine is to reestablish the Soviet state with modern Russian norms instead of communist doctrine. 5Aron believes that the Russian state after Putin’s election in 2000 has accepted the overarching goal of remaining a global superpower that will harness all aspects of military, political, and economic power to maintain hegemony and dominance in Eastern Europe.

Every six years Russia creates a strategy document to assess and guide its strategic policy. At the end of 2015 they submitted the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2020. This document is multidimensional in that it reflects not only the risks Russia faces in defense, foreign affairs, and geopolitical challenges but also internal security, cultural, and economic risks. The first major takeaway was that above all, Russia views the United States and NATO as a threat to their global position. 6

The security of Putin’s Russia is not just a matter of military prowess, it reflects on Putin himself and the position he sought to carve out in the post-Soviet world. Putin views Russia as a nation that must acquire and maintain a newfound respect from its opponents. National prestige and deep pride in the new Russian nation has been a consistent theme since he became President. Anything that challenges this is a security threat, be it loss of economic status, the impression that its defenses are weak, or that Russia is not in control of its own destiny.

If one watches how Putin has ruled since 2000, almost every move has been to gain international status and to impress Russia’s rising dominance upon the world. Anything that can be done to bolster that prestige is quickly adopted. Putin sought aggressiveness in foreign policy, economic negotiations, and military affairs, particularly if it helped the Russian public see Putin as steering the ship of state to its destined greatness.

When Russia flies relatively obsolete Tu-22m BACKFIRE jet bombers from its military base at Engels in Southern Russia to drop unguided gravity bombs indiscriminately on Aleppo, it meets the strategic goals of impressing its allies, adversaries, and the Russian people. Even if militarily such a strike mission has little to no effect on the war effort except killing innocent civilians, it looks good on Russia Television.

The nationalistic Russia-goes-it-alone fever wasn’t always a cornerstone of their defense policy. Until the invasion of Georgia in 2004, Russia was integrating its national defense goals into NATO via various sub-organizations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established in April 1949, is a military alliance between twenty-eight states to create a system of collective defense for member nations. -125Russia leaned towards the alliance when it joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991, and the Partnership for Peace program in 1994. This culminated in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, providing a formal basis for relations. In 2002, the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) emerged as consultation on security issues, leading to more direct cooperation. Formal NRC meetings and cooperation in a few areas were suspended because of Russia’s military action in Georgia in August 2008. -132Talk show host Charlie Rose summed it up this way:

I think Vladimir Putin, because of all of his experiences, has a real fear about being—about NATO being on his borders. He’s always had that. They had that with respect to Georgia and with respect to Ukraine. I think he probably worries that if a government in Ukraine was… leaning to the West—it might one more time entertain the idea of NATO membership, which he really, really—that’s probably the thing that he dislikes the most. 7

Anna Vassilieva noted that Russia under Putin was fundamentally changing. “Russians feel that they have the right to an equivalent of the Monroe doctrine and the right of foreign political noninterference in their domestic politics.” 8At the St. Petersburg international Economic Forum in 2015, Putin blamed NATO for the crisis in Crimea, and by extension Georgia and Ukraine, due to its insistence on expanding into territory he views as his domain. Putin said,

Why is there a crisis in Ukraine? I was quite confident after the bipolar system went into oblivion and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, certain Western partners of ours, particularly the United States, were in a kind of euphoria, and instead of trying to create a new situation, good neighborly partner relations, they started to explore new free geopolitical spaces—well, free in their view. And that is why we are witnessing the expansion of NATO eastwards. 9

Senator Lindsey Graham and John McCain were some of the loudest Republican voices opposed to Russia’s aggressive dominance of territories. All cooperation, military and civilian, under the NRC was suspended in April 2014 following the Russia-Ukraine conflict. NATO’s stance: “The Allies continue to call on Russia to reverse its recognition of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.” 10

In September 2014 at the Wales Summit in September 2014, NATO leaders condemned Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine, demanding that the nation comply with international law and end its illegal ‘annexation’ of Crimea. Russia effectively ignored President Barack Obama’s warnings, invaded Crimea, and annexed it within thirty days under armed occupation. Under Putin, Russia also backed separatist groups. -130NATO was keeping a close eye on Russia’s increasing military activities along NATO’s borders, realizing that the new aggressive growls by the bear would threaten Euro-Atlantic security and stability.

Following Russia’s seizure of Crimea, President Obama announced economic sanctions on Russia and Crimea in March and December 2014. According to the BBC, the President said “The executive order is intended to provide clarity to US corporations doing business in the region and reaffirm that the United States will not accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea.” 11The European Union soon followed suit. 12In response to the various sanctions Russia called the actions “meaningless, shameful, and disgusting.” Russia imposed its own sanctions by halting the export of agricultural products to North America, Norway, Australia, and the European Union. In July 2015 he extended the sanctions.

Trump was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, if the policy affected Russia, and was implemented by President Obama—or any President since 1947 for that matter—then he wanted to be rid of it. Trump gave the New York Times a wide-ranging interview in which he remarked that he saw a major change for the seventy-year old NATO alliance. He said that if Russia attacked any NATO nation, he would first consult and determine if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their aid. 13Trump set forth a policy of extortion never before heard or seen in American politics:

If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth…Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.” 14