Opinion

In Trump, Putin saw and seized the chance to undermine U.S. democracy

Putin thinks he is smarter than we are. He takes calculated political risks and creates situations that are detrimental to his opponents regardless of outcomes. He is also far more dangerous than most Americans realize. Here, the Russian leader addresses the Victory Day Parade in 2012. less Putin thinks he is smarter than we are. He takes calculated political risks and creates situations that are detrimental to his opponents regardless of outcomes. He is also far more dangerous than most Americans ... more Photo: Associated Press File Photo Photo: Associated Press File Photo Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close In Trump, Putin saw and seized the chance to undermine U.S. democracy 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

As Americans watch the Trump-Russia collusion unfold amid new revealing details, about 73 percent of Republicans think the president has done nothing wrong in his dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The majority of Democrats and independents, however, believe that Donald Trump’s actions are either illegal or unethical.

In reality, Putin’s interference in our election is a bipartisan matter — something that all Americans should be concerned about regardless of how they feel about Trump.

Putin’s Russia does not perceive our country as its friend, and it does not differentiate between Republicans and Democrats. From 2013 to 2017, Americans were listed as the most hostile nation toward Russia, according to Russian polls. For Putin and his propaganda machine, the Cold War never ended, even after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In fact, the collapse of the communist regime became, in his own words, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 was the first serious sign that Putin intended to challenge the status quo. Five years later, he interfered in Ukraine’s domestic politics, annexed a large chunk of its territory, and left the rest of the divided nation to deal with a devastating civil war. And as Putin choked democracies and encouraged autocracies in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the U.S. government — outside of sanctions — failed to identify efficient strategies to contain him.

Then we closed our eyes when Putin openly backed Iran’s nuclear program, when he blocked international attempts to stabilize the political situation in Syria and when he sent his troops to bolster the regime of Bashar Assad.

While a good number of Americans were chanting “Build the wall!” in an attempt to revive medieval methods of border protection in a modern age, Putin’s online army violated our cyber frontiers and attacked our most trusted, sacred political institution — the electoral system.

When the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an independent agency that effectively integrates foreign, military and domestic intelligence in the U.S., concluded that Putin personally ordered an “influence campaign to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” Americans did not take it seriously.

As U.S. sanctions continued to undermine Putin’s political future, he saw an incredible opportunity to derail the course of American history by helping to install Trump into power.

He also understood the growing influence of social media in the U.S. As studies show, 38 percent of adult Americans get their news online. In many authoritarian states social media websites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) are either banned or closely monitored by government agencies to persecute free speech. In the U.S., social media is uncensored — as it should be in any truly democratic state. Lack of online policing, however, comes with a toll: Anyone with a large online clout can dominate and win the political discourse.

As Trump started his political campaign with almost no one taking him seriously, Russia hired internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters on the internet. These fake accounts were boosting Trump’s outreach and harassing his most outspoken online critics. It was a type of information warfare that Putin, a former KGB agent, knew well: innuendos, rumors and conspiracy theories repeated over and over again — and shared — eventually become truth.

Thus, Putin weaponized the internet against Americans by sowing discord, feeding our worst fears, and betting on Trump’s political inexperience and naiveté.

At the same time, Putin decided to enlist the assistance of hackers from Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear — two powerful Russian hacking teams with links to Russian intelligence services. Their target: Hillary Clinton and corruption that soaked Washington.

On Oct. 7, the U.S. intelligence community reported that Russian intelligence services stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and forwarded the contents to Wikileaks. It was the same organization that Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, named high-tech terrorists back in 2010. Now these “terrorists” were serving his party.

Finally, Putin made his best move when his operatives reached out to Trump’s campaign via the candidate’s son and offered compromising information against Clinton. The email — the accuracy of which was confirmed by Trump Jr. — states that “this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Nevertheless, there is a catch in this story. If Putin’s agents wanted to contact Trump’s team without leaving a trail, they would have done so without any problems; Russians — who inherited the KGB’s legacy — are not novices in the intelligence tradecraft. On the contrary, it seems as if just enough evidence was left to compromise Trump’s presidency, undermine its legitimacy and provoke political chaos in the U.S.

The more politically corrupt we look, the more credible Putin’s description of America becomes.

As a result of these systematic and coordinated efforts to subvert our democracy and demoralize our citizens, we have a country where a record-high 77 percent of Americans perceive their nation as divided, where integrity is a fluid concept, and where truth has nothing to do with facts because everybody lies, including our elected officials.

For Trump and Republicans, this is a Pyrrhic victory — considerable damage from Putin’s interference in our democracy outweighs any political gains. Collectively, we are all at a loss here.

Putin thinks he is smarter than we are. To an extent, he is right: He takes calculated political risks and creates situations that are detrimental to his opponents regardless of outcomes. He is also far more dangerous than most Americans think. Revivalism of Russia’s glory is the quintessence of Putin’s politics; he has cast himself as the political messiah who promises to make Russia great again. Although, thus far, he has only made himself great and rich.

Putin is not and will not be our friend. We need to unite our ranks as a nation, overcome our political fault lines, learn from our mistakes, drain the political swamp, and reform our electoral system. If we fail to guard our democracy, there will be no protection from Putin and his dark, authoritarian vision for the future of the world.

Geysar Gurbanov is a Rotary International Peace Fellow and graduated with a master’s degree in East European and Russian Studies from the University of North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter @geysar.