“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” That, of course, was President Barack Obama’s rather lame joke, delivered during the third presidential debate of 2012. He was ridiculing Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” The former president has received just derision for his quip, but it was the gullibility of his outlook—and, indeed, that of his fellow progressives—that now appears so foolish and damaging.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals who worked for three Russian companies is only the latest reminder. According to the indictment, “from in or around 2014 to the present,” these Russians had been engaged in a campaign to interfere with “U.S. political and electoral processes.” These 13 defendants “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”
The new Cold War, as we wrote three months ago, is subtler and more cryptic than the first one; instead of proxy wars in Asia or Africa, it involves hacking databases and disinformation campaigns and the mendacious use of social media. Last week, accordingly, the Russian government forced the removal of Alexei Navalny’s Instagram posts. Navalny, a presidential candidate and high-profile critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, had posted a video alleging that deputy prime minister Sergei Prikhodko took a bribe from oligarch Oleg Deripaska. That the bribe took place is not hard to imagine; nor is the fact that the Roskomnadzor, the Russian government’s censoring agency, would seek to pressure a U.S. company—Facebook, which owns Instagram—to remove the video from its platform. That the company would comply, however, is appalling—and reminds us that the Russians’ influence over U.S. telecommunications markets is far greater than one might assume.
Then, as if to remind us of Russia’s past, the British Sun newspaper published credible evidence that Jeremy Corbyn, since 2015 leader the Labour Party, passed sensitive information to a Czech spy by the name of Jan Sarkocy, who claims Corbyn delivered the information in exchange for money and with full knowledge of what was happening. Corbyn denies he knew Sarkocy was a spy—but if that’s true, it only means he was stupid rather than a traitor.
Mueller’s latest indictment contains no evidence of collusion on the part of the Trump campaign, and predictably the president spent the weekend lashing out, not at Russia for its attempted sabotage of our elections, but at Democrats and the media. What worries us, though, is that once the investigation winds down, American progressives will revert to their default naïveté about—we can’t help using the phrase—our number one geopolitical foe.
The 1980s called, and it turns out we can keep our foreign policy.
