Tigers and Bears

As a kid, I remember being intrigued by the Tamil Tigers. I knew nothing about the Sri Lankan rebel group. But as a sports fan who was developing an interest in politics, I liked the idea that national movements, like sports teams, could have names. Since the Tamils (along with Detroit) had claimed Tigers, I tried to think of a good moniker for my favorite insurgency, The African National Congress.

Evidently someone close to Vladimir Putin had a similar idea. Because last week, vast swaths of US government and industry were hacked by a Russian intelligence unit nicknamed “Cozy Bear.” For a unit that just carried out “the most consequential cyberespionage campaign in history,” the name seems insufficiently ferocious. Then again, “Celtics” didn’t adequately convey the ferocity of a unit that during my childhood lay waste to the NBA.

Donald Trump seems uninterested in the hack, except to the extent that it could corroborate his theory that someone stole the election. But the hackers appear to have spent nine months roaming undetected through the computer systems of much of the US government—including the agencies that control nuclear weapons—and of America’s largest companies. Joe Biden, declares The New York Times, “will inherit a government so laced with electronic tunnels bored by Russian intelligence that it may be months, years even, before he can trust the systems that run much of Washington.” Happy 2021!

Biden is vowing to retaliate, which is understandable. But I doubt that will work, at least not by itself. After all, it’s not like the US hasn’t retaliated before. In recent years, according to the Congressional Research Service, “The United States has imposed sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, election interference, other malicious cyber activities, human rights abuses, use of a chemical weapon, weapons proliferation, illicit trade with North Korea, and support to Syria and Venezuela.” The effect of all these sanctions on Russian behavior? I hesitate to use the word bupkis. (Actually, I don’t hesitate at all: I’ve been looking an excuse to use the Yiddish word for goat dung since I began this newsletter in October. Thank you Vladimir!). But according to the Council on Foreign Relations, “There doesn’t appear to have been much immediate effect.” In other words, gornisht! All this retaliation hasn’t worked.

Which brings me to my friend Robert Wright, one of the best non-Yiddish speaking foreign policy analysts around. (Check out his newsletter). In a recent Washington Post essay, Wright argues that US foreign policymakers in both parties lack “cognitive empathy.” He quotes the great international relations theorist (and possible Yiddish speaker) Hans Morgenthau, who wrote that a good strategist “must put himself into the other man’s shoes, look at the world and judge it as that man does.”

I suspect Vladimir Putin’s shoes are nicer than mine given that he may be the richest man in the world. For that, and many other reasons, including his apparent penchant for poisoning rivals, he’s not an easy guy to feel cognitive empathy for. But as the political scientists Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry have pointed out, “Russians across the political spectrum” (which presumably includes those who aren’t poison-prone billionaires) think the US has been taking advantage of their country since the Soviet Union fell. So let’s practice our cognitive-empathy skills on them.

In 1991, the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact, the alliance through which Russia had subjugated its Eastern European neighbors and given itself a buffer zone against the kind of Western invasion it suffered during World War II (a war in which Russia lost 27 million people compared to America’s 400,000). In return, US Secretary of State James Baker allegedly told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.” What Baker actually said is a matter of historical debate. But when NATO moved into East Germany, then Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and then into the Baltics, which were former Soviet soil, many Russians felt betrayed. NATO expansion had its virtues: Given their grizzly history, it’s not hard to understand why Poles, Lithuanians and others wanted in. But the alliance’s eastward expansion, warned George Kennan, the legendary father of containment, “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” And that’s exactly what has happened.

The Clinton administration also meddled pretty massively in Russia’s 1996 election to get Boris Yeltsin reelected. Back then, Russia’s economy was in free fall. Life expectancy among Russian men had dropped by an astonishing six years between 1990 and 1994. Yeltsin began his reelection campaign with a lower approval rating than Stalin. But political consultants with close ties to Clinton went to work for Yeltsin, the US got the IMF to flood Russia with cash, which Yeltsin distributed liberally, and American officials declared that the voting was fair, which it probably wasn’t.

The result: America’s guy won. And to a lot of Russians, it looked like the US had kept a drunken bozo in power so it could keep exploiting Russian weakness. (When I say “drunken bozo,” I’m not exaggerating: During a 1994 visit to the White House, Yeltsin got hammered, walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear and tried to order pizza).

Then, in 2013, after Putin pressured Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych to pull out of a deal with the European Union, Ukrainians poured into Kyev’s central square, The Maidan, in protest and the US helped them replace Yanukovych with a pro-Western leader. Now Russia faced the prospect of NATO moving even closer to its border. As Obama’s close aide Ben Rhodes has put it, Putin “went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off, in a way. To Putin, Ukraine was such a part of Russia that he took it as an assault on him.”

None of this justifies the fact that Russia, according to US intelligence, in 2016 broke into the Democratic Party’s computers and disseminated the information, nor its more recent cyber-hack of the US government. But “cognitive empathy” does offer some useful context for how America might respond. Instead of just retaliating against Russian aggression, the Biden administration could help allay Russian fears about US aggression. It could promise that Ukraine won’t enter NATO (which it almost certainly won’t anyway given that Russian proxies control the eastern part of the country). The Biden folks could try to craft a compact that the US and Russia won’t meddle in each other’s elections. And they could try to create some joint mechanism—perhaps including other nations as well—to limit cyberspying. (An activity, by the way, which the US practices too. According to Jack Goldsmith, who served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, “the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day.”)

None of this is ideal. In an ideal world, Ukraine could join NATO and the US could work to topple Putin­, a man who certainly deserves toppling. But the world is not ideal and foreign policy requires choosing your priorities. When it comes to Russia, America’s top priority should be protecting our government, our economy and our democracy from attack, and it seems unlikely that retaliation alone will do that. I worry that the fear of being accused of appeasement or moral relativism will prevent the Biden administration from even exploring a negotiated response. In Washington, practicing cognitive empathy can make you look like a wimp.

But when you’ve gotten your clock cleaned by a team whose name includes the word “cozy,” maybe it’s time to stop worrying about that.

Things to look out for:

This week’s Jewish Currents article is actually a webinar. Sign up for this excellent panel on December 23 about Jeremy Corbyn and the future of the British Left featuring Daniel Levy, Rachel Shabi, Emily Hilton and Josh Leifer. (And subscribe to Currents. It will make you look cool in front of your lefty kids)    

This Friday, December 25 I’ll be hosting the last Zoom call of the year for paid subscribers. It’s the same link every week. But we’ll send it out on Wednesday anyway.

I won’t be sending out a newsletter on Monday, December 28, and there won’t a Zoom call on Friday, January 1. You’ll receive the next newsletter on January 4.

Random other stuff:

Newly elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville—the guy who said the US fought World War to defeat socialism—is suggesting he may contest the election results when Congress has to ratify them in January.

A historian describes the parallels between the way the two parties interacted in the 1850s and the way they’re interacting now. She doesn’t explain whether, this time, the good guys can win without a civil war.

A smart piece by a talented young writer, Blaise Malley, on why Biden has moved left on domestic but not foreign policy.

White House aide Dan Scavino has been tweeting creepy photos of Donald Trump surrounded by photos and portraits of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, which could be a sign that Trump is planning to declare martial law. Or merely that he’s surrounded by absurd sycophants. Or both! We should find out soon.

Hope to see you on Friday,

Peter