Putin’s Real Plan
Mark R. Anderson, CEO, Strategic News Service
This article was originally published in the Strategic News Service Global Report on February 15th, 2019. Its release on Medium is part of a series of dispatches the SNS team has decided to make accessible to the public due to the importance of the subject material.
Putin’s Real Plan
This week’s discussion began with an Aha! moment in the wake of the British Parliament trying — unsuccessfully — to wrest power from Prime Minister Teresa May, as the country hurls toward the train wreck called “hard Brexit,” without a deal or, most important, the ability to craft one. In other words, members of the British House of Commons themselves cannot agree on what they want — nor have they been able to for the last two years.
Dinner Talk
Soon after this event, I was having a family dinner with editor-in-chief Sally Anderson, and my daughter and son, Berit and Evan. For those who don’t know, Berit is a global expert on Russian Infowar techniques; and Evan, as CEO of INVNT/IP, is a world expert on the Chinese national business model.
I asked what seemed like a simple question:
Was it possible that the simultaneous lack of the ability to govern among leading Western democracies was pure coincidence, or was there a deeper story? Without hesitation, everyone agreed that there was almost certainly a Russian hand involved, tipping the scales toward chaos.
At that point, we began to look deeper.
It’s important, at this point, to discern the difference between this proposal and pieces that are already universally known — that Russia both interfered in the 2016 US elections and played a direct role in influencing the Brexit referendum. We all now also know about IRA (Putin’s Internet Research Agency), the group out of St. Petersburg supposedly responsible for these programs.
It’s also safe to say that everyone knows Putin would like to see NATO thrown into chaos, as he rebuilds the Old Soviet Union into his New Russia.
In today’s discussion, we will just stipulate all of these points as “old news.” What’s new, and much, much more worrying, is the prospect that Putin’s overall goal is not limited to these issues and events, but has expanded.
In the last few weeks, I’ve become convinced that Putin’s real plan is to foment so much divisiveness among the West’s major democracies that they lose the ability to govern themselves.
In order to assess the likelihood of this concept, let’s look at the simultaneous status of these governments and the evidence that has come out to date.
I. The Countries Involved
Let’s start with the obvious and move right along.
A) The United States
No one needs convincing that the US can no longer govern itself; it is the lament of every op-ed piece from every partisan view. But seeing it flow from initial at-home programs like the Koch brothers’ adoption of the Tea Party, with its no-compromise attitudes, and Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge for all elected GOP officials, to today’s complete polarization represents a path that few expected just a few years ago.
What has changed? With the election of Trump as perhaps its first big win, we know that Russia spent time and money, using divisive politics and social engineering as its tools, to increase the level of animosity between sides and sow discord on many issues. (Putin’s) IRA spent nearly equal amounts on a number of such issues, from Black Lives Matter to immigration. In fact, worldwide, it seems that the Russians just can’t get enough of racism and anti-immigrant politics as fertile ground for removing the ability of politicians — and citizens — to talk rationally with one another.
The emergence of a new process — that of removal of powerful leaders based only on allegations — has likely proved a preferred spending target for Russian teams, since there’s often no process needed other than what could be described as cyber-bullying, a bot-driven specialty of Russian agents. Who do you want out of power? In Russia or China, this would be impossible, with no free internet or free speech. But in the West, it’s easy, and not much different on the front end than what politicos call “opposition research.”
If Russia — or anyone, for that matter — wants to get rid of a current leader, all it takes is doing a deep dive into their past, where there is always something (or something that looks like something) to find, waiting only for a Twitter storm to get rolling. The current Virginia government debacle may or may not be an apt example, but it certainly has all of the hallmarks: questionable charges, massive online bullying, instantaneous demands for resignation.
Let’s be careful to say that Russia is not making up these grievances, nor are the grievances in any way trivial or unreal — in fact, the Russian infowars effort seems to do best with real issues that carry deeply ingrained emotional content. Once they emerge, Russia just helps turn them from disagreements into bloody political feuds.
For those paying attention, when it started to seem that the charges might be off, the demanders replaced their reasoning with “You should quit because it will be impossible for you to govern.” Right.
B) Britain
We should start by giving past PM David Cameron full credit for being the worst PM in British history. Who else can claim responsibility for encouraging Scotland to pull out of Britain, Britain to pull out of the EU, and re-dividing the two Irelands — all without meaning to do it? And I’m leaving out the part where he sold out his country — and its infrastructure — to China.
But how did Britain go from a Russian-influenced Brexit vote to the complete breakdown in internal Conservative Party negotiations, and then between both parties, and then between Britain and the EU? No one, after all, expected this result — that the Conservatives, given two years, would not form a consensus on what they wanted.
It is possible that Teresa May is just trying to outdo Cameron for the Neville Chamberlain prize, but it also seems as though the greatest constitutional crisis in a hundred years likely had some additional help from the hatemongers and chaos experts in Moscow.
It’s not hard to argue that Britain has moved from a Brexit posture to becoming a nation no longer able to govern itself. And it’s not hard to believe that the rekindling of Irish difficulties (with a car bomb just going off this week), tied to the further tearing-apart of the EU, didn’t make for a high-five in the Kremlin.
C) France
The French are interesting, because they were smarter than almost everyone else on Russian interference. After all, they: a) caught Putin trying to lend millions of euros to Marine LePen during the last election, and stopped it; and b) subsequently passed laws forbidding, and making it more difficult for, other nations to meddle in French elections.
But then we fast-forward to today, now moving toward a dozen consecutive weekends of the “yellow vests” movement trashing Paris and other cities, burning cars, fighting police, etc. While the numbers have declined, the surprising thing is the yellow vests show no sign of going away, and have considerable public support.
As in Virginia, one of the key indicators that Russia may be involved: the original complaints (in this case, the removal of Macron, because, well, they don’t like him) have changed to a general upset over how things are today.
Why are tens of thousands still showing up each weekend, a la ’68? Well, yes, because they are French. But perhaps also because they are being encouraged, if not assisted.
France, too, has entered that hazy territory of appearing to be ungovernable.
D) Germany
When Angela Merkel — long revered as the top leader in the EU, in Europe, in Germany, in her party, and, perhaps, in the world — stumbled on the immigration issue … Well, the rest is history.
Those who were watching the neo-Nazi anti-immigration violence of street protests in Chemnitz, Dresden, and other parts of (ex-Soviet) eastern Germany could probably not help but wonder whether there were not agents-provocateurs also involved.
And here, a note of balance is in order. When Georgia had its Orange Revolution, and the Ukraine had its version of the same, in both cases we had (pro-Russian) democratically elected leaders thrown out by pro-Western, pro-NATO mobs. Could Putin have been paying attention? We know that Xi Jinping of China was, which partly explains his further crackdown on human rights.
If Russia was enhancing disenchantment with the Merkel government, it certainly worked: Angela was forced to bow out of further elections, her party got smashed in the last election, the country was without a government for something like five months while the sides failed to compromise, and today the power-sharing coalition seems fragile at best.
E) Spain
Spain is currently so screwed up it’s hard to keep up with the scorecard, but it’s easy to identify the sides: Catalonia vs. Madrid. While the predictable street protests have led to hate, anger, and violence, someone (the Catalonians? The Russians?) managed to turn one of the great country economic-rebound stories into a real tragedy.
Instead of having fun, making money, and becoming a world leader in technology and commerce — with Barcelona as its shining light — Spain now sees businesses and banks fleeing to anywhere but there.
As of Wednesday this week, the year-old government had been unable to achieve a budget, and appeared to be headed toward new elections or collapse.
Well-played, someone.
F) Hungary and Eastern Europe
If you’ve been watching story of Hungary PM Viktor Orban as he moves from a democracy to a dictatorship, with a concomitant sacrifice in judicial separation from the executive, you’ll have noticed a rather obvious hate campaign against George Soros, one of the country’s historic freedom advocates. Framed partly as anti-Semitism, partly as anti-Western meddling, the result has been increased hate and anger, decreased human rights, the departure of the Soros Foundation and its university, and a turning of the country toward Russia and away from the EU.
The same pattern, using different issues (except for the shared antiimmigration issue), seems to be erupting in most of Eastern Europe, generally focused on racism and immigration, with an apparent effort to pull NATO — and with it, the EU — apart.
G) Italy
Never well-known for self-governance, Italy has been a pushover: it took the brunt of the immigration wave out of Africa, got little help from the EU, and then elected an anti-immigration government openly disdainful of belonging to the EU.
H) Greece
Greece just barely avoided having no working government a few weeks ago, in the midst of its own election crisis, as Alexis Tsipras prevailed over a censure motion by a single vote.
In addition to the same immigration election responses, China has jumped in with loans in lieu of all the help already provided by the EU — as this has faded, Greece turned to China (or vice versa). The result: the first blocking vote in the EU by Greece, a few months ago. Since EU votes generally need to be unanimous, China and Russia can now use Greece to keep the EU from self government. Let’s call this a “two-fer” for their instability teams.
I) Sweden
What was once perhaps the most stable government in Europe went through its own mini-crisis this year, going without a government for over four months as the anti-immigration party grew and the current government was unable to create a coalition without including them.
If you include other government leaders who have been caught up in sex, race, immigration, and other self-defining “scandals,” and ask yourself whether any of the internet mob techniques were driven or aided by bots from Russia, the world gets even more interesting — and unstable, and ungovernable. But do we really know that Russia, and specifically Putin, are behind these problems? Until recently, only some were obvious, as noted. But then we had a couple of recent breaks in this story — -
II. The Sputnik Reporters
Until January, most SNS members probably thought that the main effort by Putin to interfere with Western democracies was the often-cited IRA (see above). But the story broke last month that, in fact, Putin’s own reporters — those working for statecontrolled Sputnik — were deeply involved in creating fake-news websites, populated with plenty of content from the Sputnik desk on other matters, then seasoned with the specific propaganda intended to inflame their target markets.
There were at least hundreds of these Putin-controlled sites.
The idea was that other news groups would pick up the stories and amplify their credibility and effect around the net.
From a piece published January 17 on thenewsrep.com (covered widely):
Early Thursday, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity Policy, announced the social media giant removed hundreds of fake pages and profiles on both Facebook and Instagram that misrepresented themselves as independent new outlets and individuals. Many of these fake news outlet pages were linked directly back to Russia’s state-owned news agency, Sputnik.
“Today we removed multiple Pages, Groups, and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram. The two operations we found originated in Russia, and one was active in a variety of countries, while the other was specific to Ukraine,” Gleicher wrote….
“The Page administrators and account owners primarily represented themselves as independent news Pages or general interest Pages on topics like weather, travel, sports, economics, or politicians,” the Facebook statement reads. “Despite their misrepresentations of their identities, we found that these Pages and accounts were linked to employees of Sputnik, a news agency based in Moscow; and that some of the Pages frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anticorruption.”
One of the indications that a people are being psychologically manipulated is a combination of frustration and extreme anger, without an accompanying rationale for their feelings. A recent quote from a piece in The American Interest on France’s “yellow vest” movement:
Something about life in modern democracies really bothers people. Let’s call it the Problem that Has No Name. There are many theories about what the problem really is. The most popular involve wage stagnation, inequality, globalization, capitalism, the digitalization of the economy, social media, immigration, the disappearance of traditional venues for social life, the transformation of gender roles, the decline of religion. Some combination of these things infuriates people.
Whatever the problem really is, obviously it is complex. But the world around, voters have recoiled from the idea that their problems are complex. In one democracy after another, voters have decided the best person to solve these problems would be a brutish authoritarian.
Whatever the problem really is, it is either caused by, or the cause of, a blackout of rational thinking. The Gilets Jaunes embody this.
The General Narrative
No one formally speaks for the Gilets Jaunes, but a narrative about what’s bothering them has emerged. Their pouvoir d’achat — their purchasing power — has declined. Their taxes are too high and they receive too little money from the government. They resent a reduction in the speed limit. The word they use again and again is colère: rage. They can’t stand Emmanuel Macron. They say he’s the President of the rich. They want him to resign. They want direct democracy, the ability to vote for specific referenda, rather than a political candidate who represents them.
Many of these claims ring strange on closer inspection.
And, from London’s The Express, we have this:
– Oh, great; just what Ireland needs.
So we know that Putin has put the IRA, Sputnik, and some money into skewing elections, but we also know he was often putting that money — and influence operations — into both sides of a political fight. Why bother, if your only goal is to turn the election your direction? Has instability been the long-term goal all this time, despite our focus on election outcomes?
More important: is the funding behind Putin’s IRA enough to support the massive level of interference needed to explain all of the efforts described above?
Nah.
III. The New Secret Agency
Last week we began to see hints at an as-yet-unnamed secret agency in the Kremlin, running under a multibillion-dollar budget, whose primary task appears to be destabilization of Western democracies. This is separate from the Internet Research Agency, located in St. Petersburg, and would seem to be directly under Putin’s control.
If any SNS members have additional knowledge of this agency, we would like to hear more details, and would be happy, with your permission, to share them with our other members.
Suffice it to say that, named or not, Russia is spending much more time, money, and energy on sowing chaos and leading democracies down the divisive path of becoming incapable of governing themselves.
How countries with free speech and citizens free to vote can not only resist, but also fight, this new form of hybrid warfare is a question that we can no longer delay answering. If democracies, by their nature, have become ungovernable, we all know what comes next.
