Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russians last week for meddling in the 2016 election has incited hysterical threat inflation among many pundits and foreign policy experts. For Washington Post columnist Max Boot, the unfolding Russiagate story is “the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades,” after 9/11. “The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy,” he wrote on Sunday. He accused Trump of ignoring the threat, concluding that “we are at war without a commander in chief.”

Peter Baker made a similar argument in the New York Times, claiming the indictment “underscored the broader conclusion by the American government that Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda, a conclusion shared by the president’s own senior advisers and intelligence chiefs. But it is a war being fought on the American side without a commander in chief.” Interviewed by Politico, Ash Carter, who served as secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, called for a new “Cold War containment” policy to deal with Russia.

But Russia’s interference in the election, at least what’s known thus far, is hardly enough to justify a global struggle comparable to the Cold War or the war on terror. These earlier conflicts consumed trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. The details in the Mueller indictment are troubling, but not an existential threat worth losing a single life over. New Yorker reporter Adrien Chen, who has been following Russian troll accounts for years, tweeted that the election interference waged on social-media was “90 people with a shaky grasp of English and a rudimentary understanding of U.S. politics shitposting on Facebook.” He elaborated on MSNBC:

OMG, a sober/informed Russia take on MSNBC! @AdrianChen , who profiled indicted Russian troll farm in 2015, tells @chrislhayes that what other MSNBC guests have compared to Pearl Harbor "is essentially a social media marketing campaign" and maybe not worthy of a national freakout pic.twitter.com/UkUaK2XRPe — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 20, 2018

The new Cold Warriors start from the premise that election meddling story should be seen in the framework of foreign policy: The Russian government infringed upon American sovereignty, and Donald Trump didn’t respond with sufficient hawkishness. But Trump, of course, is part of the story himself. To the extent that Russian interference shifted votes, Trump was the beneficiary—and intentionally so, according to Mueller’s indictment. And although collusion hasn’t been proven, there’s strong evidence of shady contacts between high-level Trump campaign officials and Russian political operatives. In other words, this isn’t just a foreign policy story, but also a domestic one.



The problem is not that American democracy was hacked, but that it is hackable—that there was enough fragility in American democracy for a few crude memes to have an outsized influence.