Russia's Hack: An Act of War

Biden Needs a Proportionate Response

America is the greatest, mightiest, richest, and most powerful country on earth. It is the world’s only true superpower. Calling nations like Russia “near peer” adversaries is a polite fiction in terms of our capability, wealth, and ability to inflict damage. How then has Russia been able to hit America so hard? The answer is: because America has constantly failed to offer a proportionate response to Vladimir Putin’s repeated attacks of war against the United States.

Let’s list those attacks:

1. Russia Grants Asylum to Edward Snowden after he devastates national security with a hack that scrapes millions of documents from the NSA and the US military.

2. Russia interfered in the United States elections in 2016, starting with the primaries, and continuing right through to election day, using targeted propaganda.

3. Russia hosted Wikileaks attacks on the United States election as well as using the ‘Guccifer 2’ persona.

4. Russia hacked the Republican and Democratic parties.

5. Russia spread misinformation designed to stir up racial unrest in the United States, and spread ideological violence, both online, and in creating clashing rallies.

6. Russia spread anti-vaccination propaganda, causing Americans to die.

7. Russia put malware into American hospitals.

8. Russia attacked the 2018 midterms, and the 2020 election, including the primaries. They spent a large amount of time attacking Kamala Harris, in particular, and Joe Biden.

9. Russia sent spy-red sparrow Maria Butina into the United States to launder money through the NRA, using Alexander Torshin.

10. Russia paid the Taliban money to kill American troops, and at least one of these attacks successfully burned three servicemembers alive in a truck bomb.

11. Russia attacked and stole COVID-19 research. In another attempt to kill Americans, Russia also spread COVID-19 disinformation, and discouraged mask-wearing.

12. Russians seeded the 2020 election with disinformation about “Hunter Biden’s laptop”, Burisma, and the seedy Russian agents working with Rudy Giuliani.

13. Russians performed the Solar Winds attack in 2020 lasting nearly a year, causing devastation, the full extent of which the general public is never likely to know.

And what price have they paid? Little to none. A few individuals sanctioned, Obama closed some facilities, Bill Barr forced certain indictments to be dismissed. So much for America’s power advantadge. Your local Little League team can beat the New York Yankees in a baseball game, if the Yankees refuse to send any batters to home plate, and wilfully throw all their pitches anywhere but the strike zone.

Of course under Donald Trump, but to a lesser extent, also under Barack Obama, we have had twelve years of America offering nothing but the most minor wrist-slaps against Vadimir Putin’s kleptocratic regime. There have been minmal consequences.

The Solar Winds hack is a disaster that has affected most Americans directly. Anyone who has had a valid gmail bounce back at them in the last couple of days has seen directly some of the harm that Russia has done to our infrastructure. There are a million hot takes out there on what exactly happened and why it happened, and who is to blame. But the really important thing here should be to take a step back to first principles and to see - Russia did it.

Russia has, in fact, been piling act of war upon act of war against the United States. This is not because we are incapable of response, deterrence, or punishment. It is because we have chosen not to do so. Nobody likes conflict; nobody likes chest-beating belligerents. But Russia does not care. Taking advantage of our Western civilization and diplomacy, knowing (partly through hacking) that America prefers talking to tanks, summits to strife and buddies to battles, Russia has simply struck again and again, knowing that America isn’t going to punish them. The power disparity between our two nations means absolutely nothing if we are not going to act. What Solar Winds should, finally, show Joe Biden’s incoming administration, is that “resets” don’t work, “diplomacy” doesn’t work, and Fiona Hill’s disastrous advocacy of some kind of ‘Russian Reset Part II” absolutely, categorically, will not work. It requires President-Elect Biden to take a deep breath, look hard at what happened when he was Vice President, and do the most difficult thing a leader can do: say: we were wrong.

To be fair, Congress has tried to do something. In early 2017, a Republican-led Congress did impose sanctions on Russia, the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act” or CAATSA. Section 224 of this in fact mandates the President of the United States, whom Joe Biden will shortly be, to impose a range of sanctions on involved Russian hackers, including institutions, which count as ‘persons’ here.

Trump, we remember, reluctantly signed and then said he had sanctioned quite enough. Throughout Trump’s compliant, complicit, and colluding Administration - and you don’t know half of the story yet - Putin’s Russia did as it pleased. He burned American Marines alive; he attacked our elections; he hacked our institutions; he sent prostitute-spies to the gun lobby; he put malware in our hospitals, he poisoned the minds of millions and caused unknown thousands of Americans to die from COVID-19 through his propaganda.

We hear ‘Russia’ every day, and we have become hardened to the word. It’s time to wake up. Cynicism is deadly. You hear the word every day because the enemy is attacking you, every day. Trying to make you hate each other, harming your hospitals, and attacking your military. A proportionate response is not easy, because United Russia and Putin attack the suffering people of Russia; because there are other madmen worse than Putin out there; and because Russia, a large-ish power crippled with debt and facing inexorable decline, has a number of poorly secured nuclear assets that American national security experts do not want falling into the hands of warlords. But, be that as it may, America’s “Peace in Our Time”, Neville Chamberlain approach, has, quite simply, not worked. Joe Biden may not think of himself as Churchill, but in terms of cyberwar, that’s who he has to be. It will fall to him to either strike back, properly, against the attacker, or let them destroy us inch by inch.

United Russia, Putin’s party, are a bunch of petulant children. They don’t think like Americans. They don’t want to be reasonable. They don’t want to have a fresh start. Instead of trying to mitigiate domestic catastrophe, they prefer to hurt the enemy, namely, us.

President-Elect Biden needs to hear it from his new security team. United Russia will not stop, unless we stop them. A proportionate response need not involve ground troops or nuclear bombs, but it must cause an equal harm to Russia’s government and military as Putin has caused to us. We could start by revealing to the Russian people where Putin* holds the personal wealth that he stole from them, and we could continue by cutting off Russia’s access to SWIFT, perhaps the thing Putin fears most. And even then, we would merely have made a start.

The next piece here (subscribers-only) will examine how Bill Barr has been helping Russia from the beginning - even BEFORE he became AG.

*the linked article has some hints, but the US knows exactly where all of it is.