Someone has played a rotten trick on the late Scoop Jackson. The legendary senator from the great state of Washington was a committed cold warrior who saw the Soviet Union for the evil empire it was, and until his death in 1983 used all his powers of persuasion to drag the McGovernized Democratic party back to the center, where it had enjoyed its best years as part of the post-World War II bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. And then last week it seemed to have happened—all at once, the Democratic party rose up in unison and declared that Moscow is a threat to vital interests.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are up in arms about the Russians only because agents of Vladimir Putin seem to have targeted the Democratic National Committee. Senior national security officials have concluded that it was almost certainly a Russian intelligence service that hacked a trove of DNC emails showing the party had been heavily invested in Hillary Clinton defeating rival Bernie Sanders. And now some Clinton supporters fear the leak might benefit Donald Trump.
Perhaps it's useful to put the Democrats' response in context. For instance, neither the party's rank and file nor its leaders made much noise when the Russians set up an airstrip on NATO's Turkey border last year—the better to help prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. After the emails leaked last week, some Democratic lawmakers began to express wariness about the Obama administration's policy of cooperation with Moscow on Syria. But there was not a peep a week before when news emerged of a mid-June bombing by Russian jets of a small U.S.-British base in Syria. Leaking former DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz's emails apparently crossed the line.
To put the episode in this light is not to say the matter is to be brushed off, as some Republicans seem to believe. Worse, some appear to be gloating. When a hostile power that 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney correctly identified as America's chief geopolitical foe tampers with our political institutions, the adult response is not schadenfreude. In public, express bipartisan outrage; in private, plot how best to exact revenge. The Russians are not trying to make the DNC alone look vulnerable: In targeting an American political party, they are targeting American power and prestige.
At this point, it can hardly come as a surprise that this year's Republican candidate for president sees the DNC hack simply as material for his self-aggrandizing shtick. "Russia, if you're listening," he said, "I hope you're be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing"—a reference to the supposedly personal emails that were deleted from Hillary Clinton's homebrew server.
Trump could not have been inviting the Russians to engage in further hacking, as much of the media coverage suggested. The private server Hillary Clinton used while still serving in the Obama administration has long since been shut down. Rather, with characteristic off-the-cuff bluster, he was insinuating that if Russian intelligence had penetrated the DNC server, they would have long ago had access as well to Clinton's correspondence as secretary of state, including the emails she deleted because, she explained, they didn't touch on issues of national security. Obviously Trump suspects those emails did touch on matters of vital American interest. He was being sarcastic, explains campaign manager Paul Manafort. Exactly. And to use the security of American citizens as a punch line is hardly evidence of his fitness for the office he seeks.
Nor is Manafort the best spokesman on the issue. He once lobbied on behalf of pro-Putin elements in Ukraine, including former president Viktor Yanukovych. Trump staffers weakened the Republican platform's stance on support for Ukraine. Trump himself, who has expressed admiration for the Russian president, says he might not honor NATO commitments. Clearly, these policies are favorable to Putin. But does this mean, as Clinton supporters argue, that the DNC hack was a Putin vote for Trump, and that Putin must therefore fear facing Hillary on the world stage?
Hardly. Putin, like most strongman leaders, personalizes politics. Even more important, he was trained as a Soviet intelligence officer. He is a student of human nature who assesses the strengths of his targets and most especially their frailties. So who is Hillary Clinton to Vladimir Putin? She's the woman who from 2009-2013 implemented Barack Obama's ideas about the world—like the abject and ingratiating U.S. "reset with Russia," the canceled plans to install antimissile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic to make Russia happy, and a Syria policy that ended up allowing Russia to once again become a key power in the Middle East, gaining leverage and influence in the region that Obama himself was eager not to wield.
Putin would know that Clinton was delegated to carry out such tasks as humiliating an ally, as when Obama instructed her to scream at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This can hardly have engendered respect for her on the part of Putin, a man who has been willing to help kill thousands of people to protect even his most pathetic allies, as he has done in Syria since at least 2012. And what was Clinton's goal in Syria? She has said the point of her diplomacy was to stop the violence and that Russia could help. At times Obama and Clinton carried out policy in the Middle East and elsewhere as if the United States were an NGO and not a nation-state that is supposed to protect and advance its interests.
Clinton took orders from perhaps the second-weakest man Putin has ever seen lead a world power. The Russian president has rescued two counterparts of late, Assad and Obama. Putin tossed Obama a lifesaver when the American president was ambivalent about striking Assad to enforce his red line against the use of chemical weapons. Putin brokered the deal that would ostensibly strip Assad of his unconventional arsenal, except it didn't. Putin knew that didn't matter to Obama, who just wanted to save face and not run the risk of driving Assad's patron Iran from the nuclear negotiating table.
After the deal with Iran was signed a year ago, Putin understood that Washington had given him an opening to escalate his assistance to Assad. By acquiescing in Putin's move, Obama empowered Moscow. Who cared that he thereby undermined America's traditional alliance system—Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.—which had been designed decades ago to contain Soviet ambitions in the region? Where were the Democrats when Obama left American interests and allies in the Middle East vulnerable to Putin?
In owning the balance of power in Syria, Putin presides over the largest crisis of the still-young 21st century. Anyone who has a stake in the conflict—whether that's the Gulf Arab states, or Israel worried about Iranian expansionism, or the European Union concerned with the refugee crisis—will have to address their petitions to Vladimir Putin. It is because of Obama that whoever comes after him, whether it's the startlingly pro-Putin Trump or Hillary Clinton, will have little choice but to work with Putin—just as the Obama administration already is doing.
Last week, as Democrats in Philadelphia were getting worked up into a fury at Moscow, John Kerry was busy in Washington working out the final details of a deal with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. According to the terms of the agreement, the United States will now share intelligence and wage joint military operations with Russia in Syria. Who will they be fighting against? The Obama administration says ISIS, but Russia has never shown any interest in campaigning against the Islamic State. Russian troops are there to defend Assad and are targeting all rebel groups, even those supported by the Pentagon.
To patch over the differences between Moscow and the White House, the main target of the joint operations will be Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Just last week Nusra ostentatiously announced it was splitting from al Qaeda, no doubt aware of the double-barrel shotgun pointing in its direction. There's little chance the White House will reconsider Nusra's status anytime soon, and Russia definitely has Nusra in its crosshairs. First, it's one of the more potent groups fighting Assad. Second, since its fighters are often scattered among other rebel groups, it's also how the Russians will justify to the White House their attacks on any rebel group, which often includes civilians. It looks as if, for all intents and purposes, the administration is signing on to a joint campaign of terror with a Russian regime that has already bombed hospitals and schools and slaughtered thousands of civilians.
The Democrats are right to be worried about Russian actions—they just need to expand what is to date a narrow aperture. The real problem isn't Trump, not yet anyway. It's the man who still has six months left in the Oval Office.