Brett Bruen was director of global engagement in the Obama White House and an American diplomat. He is president of the crisis communications firm Global Situation Room, Inc. and teaches crisis management at Georgetown University. The opinions in this article belong to the author.

(CNN) Disinformation did not disappear after the 2016 US election.

So, why are those responsible for responding acting like the threat dissipated? Facebook dismantled its "War Room" towards the end of last year. The US government still hasn't bothered to put anyone in charge of tackling the issue. Much of the media coverage diminished. In this inaction, there are eerie echoes of the errors made in 2014.

After America's elections in 2016, we spent months trying to get our heads around the scope, scale, and sophistication of what Russia had done. Congress held hearings. Law enforcement investigated. The media churned out countless stories. Social media companies denied, then tried to diminish the severity of the problem, euphemistically labeling it "inauthentic activity."

The 2018 elections were largely a study in style over substance. Social media companies did a lot of superficial stuff by finding a few fake accounts, which provided the appearance of doing something, and gave teams cool names like the "War Room."

We won't know the extent of foreign influence operations in the last elections for some time. Only now, under the intense scrutiny of the Mueller investigation, are Russia's multi-tiered, pernicious probes into the Trump campaign being revealed.

Read More