To no one’s surprise, Russia is the main suspect in the mysterious attacks on U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba. Since 2016, 26 people at our embassy in Havana have experienced sudden and severe cognitive difficulties, and intelligence officials believe it’s due to attacks engineered by agents of the Russian government. The source is thought to be pulses of microwaves or some similar electromagnetic weapon. A related attack affected one U.S. worker in China. Russian involvement fits with what we know about the quiet malignity of the country’s foreign intelligence activities—notably its use of radiation poisoning to murder Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London and its (mercifully) unsuccessful use of nerve agents against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
We don’t know the full truth yet, but if Moscow was behind this attack, the regime has carried out something an earlier age would have considered an act of war—a vile and unprovoked act of aggression against American diplomats. And so the question arises again: Is Russia our enemy?
The American left and much of this country’s news media have cherished a newfound hatred for Russia since the 2016 election (“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” quipped Barack Obama in 2012 when Mitt Romney suggested Russia was America’s chief foe), but we assume that skepticism will melt back into naïveté when someone other than Trump is president.
Republicans meanwhile are traveling in the other direction, thanks largely to Trump’s hopeless ambivalence on Russian intentions. On the one hand, the president fawns over Vladimir Putin at every opportunity, to the point of congratulating the Russian dictator on a bogus election victory and publicly taking his word over that of U.S. intelligence officials on the matter of election meddling in 2016. On the other, the Trump administration has imposed punishing sanctions on Putin-aligned oligarchs and companies and is selling lethal defensive weaponry to Ukraine, which is resisting Russia-backed insurgents in its eastern territory.
Trump’s contradictions are now manifesting themselves in the Republican party, which once offered salvific clarity on the subject of the Soviet empire’s aims. In a Gallup poll published in July, 40 percent of Republicans said Russia is either an ally or friendly toward the United States. That’s up from 22 percent in 2014. (Democrats changed little in that same period: 28 percent said Russia was a friend four years ago; 25 percent say so now.)
The trouble with this kind of shift in opinion is that some elected officials will chase it, and a posse of Republican lawmakers spent their July 4 holiday in Moscow in an effort to discuss “improving relations” with the Russian regime. The trip was led by Alabama senator Richard Shelby and included Steve Daines of Montana, John Hoeven of North Dakota, Kay Granger of Texas, John Thune of South Dakota, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Jerry Moran of Kansas. “We could have a better relationship between the U.S. and Russia, because there’s some common interests around the world that we could hopefully work together on,” Shelby told Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. “We are competitors, but we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.”
There’s nothing wrong with squishy rhetoric in the service of U.S. interests, but it’s easy to suspect that Trump’s confusion and the left’s sudden Russophobia have tempted weaker-minded Republicans into a gullible optimism about Moscow’s intentions. The United States and Russia are still adversaries—not because we choose bellicosity but because Putin’s government invades neighboring states, murders its opponents with impunity on foreign soil, undermines the elections in Western democracies, perpetrates cyberwarfare against America and its allies, and supports malign governments around the world with both money and expertise.
Republicans should be fully aware that Putin’s aim is to undermine America’s interests and diminish its influence wherever possible. What’s needed from them, as from the White House, is clarity of expression. Diplomatic balderdash aside, there’s no reason to call an enemy a competitor.
