Ever since the end of World War II, exporting democracy had been a principle of American political warfare. Now it was the polestar. Every president had espoused it, each in his own way, some with less faith or force than others, but always with the hope that America would project its predominant power and prevail across the earth. The means and methods were sometimes ugly. The United States had supported more than a few dictators in its struggle against the Kremlin. But its record on human rights beat the Soviet Union’s by any standard, and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were stronger than the ideas of the Communist Manifesto, when the United States lived up to them. Two decades after a long, dark passage—the retreat and defeat of American forces in Vietnam, the decline and fall of President Nixon in the face of impeachment—America appeared ascendant, trailing clouds of glory, and the world was going its way.
At the start of the new century, it seemed the American flag might be planted almost everywhere. Small green shoots of liberty had sprouted in cracked streets once ruled by security forces in steel-toed jackboots and watched over by pitiless commissars surveilling the citizenry. American pressure had helped create some of the fissures and flowerings. The number of democratic nations around the world had increased, slowly but steadily throughout the cold war, and then rapidly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until, by the summer of 2001, the numbers of autocracies and democracies on earth were roughly equal. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of the world. The arc of justice seemed strong and true and the trend toward freedom irreversible. It was not so.
Five years later, democracy had fallen into a long global recession. It has not recovered since. The rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and free and independent voices in the media flatlined and declined all over the world. As American political warfare gave way to the war on terror, the image of the United States as a force for truth and justice began to dim, and the polarities of global power began to shift away from American dominion.
“Much depends on health and vigor of our own society,” George Kennan had cabled in the Long Telegram of 1946. “The greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” The awful truth was that American democracy began to face that danger in the new century. A disputed presidential election was decided by a politically governed 5-to-4 decision in the Supreme Court. Civil liberties and political rights eroded and the scope of government surveillance grew after 9/11. Economic inequality expanded; the richest 1 percent now owned more wealth than all of the middle class. Public trust in American government plummeted to 17 percent, a historic low. And as America embarked on a military crusade to impose democracy upon the Islamic world, it subjected captured enemies to medieval tortures in secret dungeons. The voice of America turned into an angry rasp, a command barked at gunpoint; the face of America was no longer the kind soldier handing out candy, but the leering prison guard at Abu Ghraib. The squandering of America’s power and principles was the enduring legacy of our field marshal in the march of folly, the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush.
In June 2001, Bush set off for his first transatlantic trip since his election, a chance to show the world that he had a semblance of the strategic skills his father had possessed. In Warsaw, he said that NATO should admit the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as soon as possible. The Soviet Union had violently seized those nations during the dark days of the devil’s bargain between Stalin and Hitler. Every Western nation deemed the Kremlin’s annexation and occupation of the Baltic states illegal; none had ever seen it as anything but armed conquest. Bush went on to say that NATO now should be open to “new democracies from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” a front line for American influence stretching fourteen hundred miles across the entirety of Russia’s western frontier. “NATO’s promise,” he proclaimed, “now leads eastward and southward, northward and onward,” encompassing former Soviet republics from Estonia down to Georgia and Ukraine.
The next day, Bush met Putin for the first time, at a five-hundred-year-old mansion in Slovenia. The president of the United States said, famously: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Putin passed no such judgment on what he had seen in Bush, or how he sized up the leader of the free world and the commander in chief of the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization. He did have a few choice words on the subject of NATO. “‘Look, this is a military organization,” he said. “It’s moving towards our border. Yes, it’s moving towards our border. Why?”
Bush spent the month of August chopping brush at his ranch in Texas, and he paid scant attention to his CIA director’s reports that something terrible might be about to happen, in great part because no one could say with an iota of confidence when or where the attack might strike. It came out of a clear blue sky in September. A systemic breakdown of American government from the CIA to the customs, immigration, and aviation agencies contributed to the success of the attacks. The fatal errors of American intelligence, whose highest calling had been to prevent another Pearl Harbor, were compounded by breakdowns at the National Security Council and in the Oval Office of the White House, all cascading into a catastrophic failure of vision. America had been flying blind. As the World Trade Center crumbled and the Pentagon burned, the American century, which had started in August 1917 when the United States went to war to make the world safe for democracy, came to an end. The hinge of history swung wide, and the world was once again in arms. America has spent more than a trillion dollars on intelligence since that bright September day, now a generation gone. The CIA and the FBI and the NSA threw everything they had at their command into fighting the real and perceived threats of terrorism. But as they wielded those powers with a single-minded focus, they became half-blind to what was happening in the rest of the world. American intelligence became an instrument of the war on terror, so much so that the nation’s capacity to conduct espionage, analyze information, and coordinate political warfare to confront the Kremlin and project its power in the wider world was compromised.
Osama bin Laden was hiding in a cave in Afghanistan and facing a crushing assault from the United States Air Force and the CIA’s commandos in December 2001. The Taliban had vanished. Bush had declared victory. And then bin Laden escaped, the Taliban came down from the mountains to fight, the war went on and on, and a black hole lay at the end of the tunnel. Eighteen years later, more than 2,300 Americans were dead and 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan; the toll among Afghan civilians ran far higher. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, the three-star Army general who was the Afghan war czar in the Bush and Obama administrations, reflected at a lessons-learned session at the Pentagon in 2015. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had turned away from Afghanistan to make war against Iraq. Starting in January 2002, their deputies met in utmost secrecy to plan that attack, and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had no plan for what would happen after Baghdad fell and no strategy for their wider war around the world. American intelligence knew little about Iraq, and much of what it knew was wrong. The CIA didn’t begin to imagine that Saddam could be overthrown and then operate from underground, nor did it foresee the insurgency that followed, and the ripple effect of that fighting, inspiring jihadists across the Middle East and North Africa. The consequences of that ignorance have been immense. Roughly half a million people have died, including fifteen thousand American combatants and contractors, in the name of the war on terror. Estimates of the financial toll run from $3 trillion to $6 trillion; in today’s dollars, World War II cost about $4 trillion. And in Iraq, the only winners of the war have been Iran, whose military commanders gained political power and prestige in Baghdad while working with jihadists to kill American troops, and Russia, which has forged a regional alliance of convenience with the Iranians.
By March 2003, as the war was imminent, Putin called it a political blunder that could destabilize the world. He warned of the dangers of American warmongering, and he called on the Russian military to be ready to defend the nation. As America bombed Baghdad, the Russians reacted less with shock and awe than with fear and loathing, but that soon turned to reflections on a key aspect of the attack. They saw that the blows against Saddam had been inflicted not only by cruise missiles and tanks but with information warfare. Not only had the White House bludgeoned the world into thinking the war was justified, American aircraft and ships had bombarded Iraqi military and civilian leaders with broadcasts, emails, faxes, and cell phone calls. They were dropping leaflets, running psyops, deceiving computer networks—influencing the enemy, getting inside his head. Information could shape a battlefield of thought, perception, consciousness, and decision-making.
On May 1, 2003, Bush stood under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and announced that America was going to bring the blessings of democracy and peace to Iraq and the Middle East. That ambition was news to his generals and spies. Rumsfeld and his top aides at the Pentagon looked up at CNN and returned their focus to their chosen mission: they were creating a military internet for the wars of the future and preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build it. Their World War Web would weaponize information and intelligence in ways few had imagined. They sought a moving picture of all foreign enemies and all the threats on earth, a God’s-eye view of the global battlefield. They wanted to know “everything of interest to us, all the time,” said Steve Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “What we are really talking about,” said Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation, “is a new theory of war.” That theory exponentially expanded the idea of information warfare. In the late twentieth century, information warfare meant an attack on the computers supporting an enemy’s communications networks and power grids. By the early twenty-first century, the concept was evolving into a broadly defined form of political warfare targeting an enemy’s government, military, and civilians: the battle space of the mind. In the new theory of war, it was an essential element of establishing American dominion over the earth.
Moscow’s military and intelligence officers had been watching, listening, taking notes, and thinking hard. As one who rose to become chief of the Russian General Staff wrote: “For the first time in the history of warfare, relying on information as the fundamental element in the conduct of armed conflict, the collective West managed to imbed … the idea that the United States had the exclusive right to world governance.” The military theorist Vladimir Slipchenko put it more succinctly: “Information has become a destructive weapon just like a bayonet, bullet or projectile.” The president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, Makhmut Gareyev, a retired general who had served in the Red Army from 1941 to 1992, was highly attuned to the power of disinformation as an instrument of war: “The systematic broadcasting of … partially truthful and false items” could create “mass psychosis, despair and feelings of doom, and undermine trust in the government … creating a fruitful soil for actions of the enemy.”
Russian political analysts who longed for Putin to revive their old empire enlarged mightily on this kind of thinking. Igor Panarin, a KGB veteran who became dean of international relations at the diplomatic academy of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, was among the most influential. Regarded by many as a visionary, and by some as half-mad, he became the father of information warfare doctrine in Russia. Panarin presaged a new American attack on the Kremlin, a sequel to the cold war, and proposed that Moscow needed new swords and shields. He argued that Andropov’s mind-altering measures of media manipulation needed to be harnessed to mass media and multiplied a millionfold. From 2003 onward, he pushed to revive “the mechanism of foreign political propaganda which was completely destroyed in the 1990s” and to magnify its force with a satellite television network to broadcast Moscow’s messages around the world. These ideas engendered and empowered RT, Putin’s television news and propaganda service, established in 2005. Within a decade, RT was reaching hundreds of millions of households with its blend of infotainment and disinformation, garnering tens of millions of Facebook followers, driving traffic to its platforms with a clever mix of clickbait and conspiracy theories.
Panarin called for Putin to establish “the Information KGB,” a secret government center to train intelligence cadets and civilian computer wizards in the dark arts: manipulating facts to create falsehoods, turning misinformation into disinformation, using fabricated realities for everything from political lobbying to blackmail, spearheading secret operations to manipulate the media, shaping public opinion, influencing the behavior of political leaders, ultimately exerting a tidal pull on the course of human events. Those ideas would come to full flower during the American presidential election of 2016.
The idea of the Information KGB was more than a brainstorm; it was a way of seeing Putin’s Russia, and a key to understanding Putin’s thinking about political warfare, beyond the observation that his practice of judo informed his geopolitical conduct. The Information KGB could create a factory of facts that were not facts. It could make Russian politicians, plutocrats, soldiers, spies, think tanks, journalists, judges, scholars, and students in varying walks of life sing in harmony to music played by Putin’s orchestra. The idea made perfect sense if you listened to Panarin’s argument—and he argued at great length, with great force, as an article of faith, in the paranoid tradition of conspiracy theorists in general and Russian intelligence officers in particular—that American information warfare led by the CIA had caused the rise of Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union. He had identified the six leading “directors of the information war against the USSR: A. Dulles, G. Kennan, D. Rockefeller, H. Kissinger, Z. Brzezinski, R. Reagan.”
V. Putin strongly suspected Russia was still in America’s crosshairs, and he wanted a battle plan for a new generation of political warfare. He began to urge his people to join in a great patriotic struggle. He gave his military, intelligence, and political aides a multifaceted task: research, develop, and test weaponry for twenty-first-century battles—beginning with information warfare. Instead of grand strategies, he had grand ambitions. He wanted his nation to be seen as a global power, as it had been at the height of the cold war. He wished to reestablish his influence in the nations of the old Soviet Union, to make that influence felt around the world, and to contain and constrain the power of the United States. He needed a new kind of bomb.
The containment of America and the West was the ultimate goal as the doctrines of twenty-first-century Russian political warfare developed. Putin saw his strongest counterforce as information warfare, which the Russian defense ministry defined as the power to “undermine political, economic, and social systems; carry out mass psychological campaigns against the population of a state in order to destabilize society and the government; and force a state to make decisions in the interest of their opponents.” He sought to master and marshal that force. He wanted to make Russia great again.
Putin told the Russian people that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century, greater than the two world wars, greater than the deaths of millions in Hitler’s concentration camps and Stalin’s gulags. He believed that American political warfare intended to undermine the Soviet Union had been far bigger, bolder, and more powerful than it really was; he was equally convinced that it never ceased after the cold war ended. (He has said with a straight face that the internet was a “CIA project” aimed at subverting Russia.) He saw the Yeltsin years as a grinding humiliation, the Bill-and-Boris act as a Punch-and-Judy show in which America constantly clobbered the Kremlin and Russia continually capitulated, as American consultants drafted the new Russian constitution, and the White House dictated the way of the world and the Kremlin’s place in it. “At all turns,” wrote Fiona Hill, America’s most astute Kremlinologist after Kennan, “Putin saw U.S. and European institutions as actively fomenting dissent” against him and his country: first in Poland, where American political warfare had achieved a singular success; then in East Germany, where he had seen it with his own eyes; then throughout Eastern Europe, in the Baltic states, and cascading into the Soviet Union itself. He thought that “Russia was clearly in their sights. The United States and its allies had openly discussed their intent to transform the Russian political system since the 1990s.”
Putin believed that the CIA, the State Department, NATO, the European Union, the Western media, international nongovernmental organizations, and the Open Society Institute, financed by the Hungarian American billionaire George Soros, all were conspiring to wreck his plans to rebuild Russia’s influence and power. He himself had sleeper agents sent by Russian intelligence who were living in the United States, trying to burrow their way into American think tanks and NGOs. So naturally he thought the same stratagems were arrayed against him. He saw the hidden hand of the United States at work in the popular revolutions that overthrew his allies and installed new leaders with democratic aspirations in Georgia and Ukraine.
In Georgia, President Eduard Shevardnadze, the aging and increasingly autocratic ruler who once had been Gorbachev’s foreign minister, had rigged the November 2003 parliamentary election. The opposition, led by the thirty-six-year-old reformer Mikheil Saakashvili, a Columbia Law School graduate with connections in the State Department, rose up to demand an honest vote. Georgia’s independent TV station gave voice to the rebellion. So did Soros’s backing for pro-democracy groups and young activists clamoring for change. When Shevardnadze tried to seat the fraudulently elected parliament on November 22, Saakashvili and his supporters burst into the legislature, bearing roses in their hands, demanding that he step down. Shevardnadze’s bodyguards hustled him away, and he resigned the next day. Saakashvili won a presidential election in January 2004, and his followers gained control of parliament in March.
So went the Rose Revolution, which the world saw as a democratic leader toppling a corrupt regime tied to the Kremlin, and which Putin regarded as a political nightmare, a replay of the 1989 uprisings in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. His anger deepened days later when Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO in a formal ceremony at the Treasury Department in Washington, the biggest expansion of the alliance into the post-Soviet realm. The European Union soon incorporated seventy-three million people in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, and four other nations, another affront in Putin’s eyes. The West was inexorably marching east to Russia’s borders.
In Ukraine, the Orange Revolution soon followed. President Leonid Kuchma, a crooked old Communist Party chief, had picked his successor, the thuggish Viktor Yanukovych, a former coal trucking director twice convicted of assault in his youth. Their strategies and tactics had included propaganda spewed by government broadcast networks, covert support from the Kremlin, elaborate electoral fraud, the jailing of opponents, and the killing of a muckraking journalist; three high-ranking intelligence officers eventually were convicted of that murder. Their opponent was the popular former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, whom Kuchma had fired to forestall his rise to power. Orange was the new rose, the signifying color of his campaign. Russian media, widely broadcast in Ukraine, portrayed him as a crypto-fascist, a creature of the United States, and a puppet controlled by his American wife, who once had worked at the Pentagon.
When Putin’s favorite son, Yanukovych, couldn’t steal enough votes to win on the first ballot, he and his allies went to Washington for help. They hired a famously amoral American political consultant whose long client list had included an array of pro-American dictators, notably General Mobutu. Their man in Washington was Paul Manafort, the future Trump campaign chairman, and his role, the American embassy in Kyiv reported, was to perform an extreme makeover of Yanukovych and his allies, trying to change their image from a mafia family into a legitimate political party. That was a tall order: a month before a court-ordered runoff election set for the end of December 2004, Yushchenko suddenly became horribly ill, his body wracked with pain, his face disfigured with lesions and half-paralyzed. Someone, likely a Russian intelligence officer, had used a huge dose of dioxin, a hard-to-detect cancer-causing compound, to poison his food.
The old regime tried to steal the runoff election. Yushchenko had called on his supporters to rally at the Maidan in Kyiv (maidan means “town square,” but the word quickly came to signify independence itself). Soon several hundred thousand people were there around the clock, shivering through the long nights in a tent city. The vocal backers of their democracy movement had included a multitude of nongovernmental groups, the American embassy, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. More subtle American and European political and financial support had been flowing to the cause. A widely read online news outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, which had first exposed the old regime’s corruption, survived through foreign financial support. So did the hope for a free and fair election. The ideas and technology for defeating election fraud—exit polls, ballot tabulations, vote monitors—were financed by Americans. It made a difference, if only in the margins; counting votes was not the same as voting. At the end of the struggle, the people spoke, and they defeated the Kremlin’s candidate.
To the West, the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine looked like rays of hope. To Putin, they were part of a pattern of subversion and sabotage conducted by American intelligence against Russia, camouflaged as support for democracy. The United States, he said on December 4, 2004, was pursuing a “dictatorship of international affairs … wrapped up in a beautiful package of pseudo-democratic phraseology.”
The victory of the Orange Revolution came a few hours before Bush ascended the steps of the Capitol to deliver his second inaugural address on January 20, 2005. The audience included his aged father, Presidents Carter and Clinton, and the American citizenry. He set forth a new goal for American political warfare: the Freedom Agenda. “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” Bush proclaimed. “Because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this Nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power. It burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”
The president’s speech had a messianic tinge. He invoked God, “the Maker of Heaven and earth,” as the true creator of his policy to engender democracies and destroy tyranny: “History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.… Renewed in our strength, tested but not weary, we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”
He was upending the foundations of American foreign policy since World War II in favor of a crusade. America would spread freedom everywhere on earth as an existential struggle. The survival of liberty in the United States, Bush said, depended in great part on the expansion of democracy throughout the world. This was a foolish idea. James Madison had warned in 1787 that “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Perhaps history was not a line ascending to enlightenment but a wheel turning back to brutality.
The great global democratic recession began in full as Bush put forth his Freedom Agenda, and it gathered and deepened thereafter. Perhaps it started with the revelations of the tortures in the CIA’s secret prisons, the worst of which had taken place in Poland, or with the NSA’s illegal surveillance of American citizens and its Orwellian overtones. Possibly Bush had gotten it precisely backward, and the expansion of democracy in the world depended on the resilience of liberty in the United States. Probably it was the ways in which Bush expanded American military and intelligence alliances with dictators in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Maybe it was when, in the first free and fair parliamentary election ever held by the Palestinian people, the militant Hamas party won and the United States refused to recognize the results. Surely it was the way the war in Iraq was going; the crusade to inject democracy into the Islamic world at gunpoint had gone haywire. His resplendent rhetoric aside, a truer expression of the way Bush saw the world came in the recounting of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who had been the top American commander in Iraq. As the war descended into chaos in the spring of 2004, the general wrote, Bush had shouted: “Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!”
Bush kept trying to will his vision into existence. In June 2005, he sent the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to the American University in Cairo, where she vowed: “The day is coming when the promise of a fully free and democratic world, once thought impossible, will also seem inevitable.” His administration spent billions through the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, countless consultants, and numberless nongovernmental organizations, all of them trying to package and export American democracy in the Arab world. They were pounding sand. The head of the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, a deputy assistant secretary of state named J. Scott Carpenter, told the Washington Post reporter David Finkel at the end of 2005: “We don’t know yet how best to promote democracy in the Arab Middle East. I mean we just don’t know.”
Bush had no strategy for the Iraq War once his army of liberation became an army of occupation. “We didn’t know anything about Iraq,” said Eric Edelman, his undersecretary of defense for policy. “Not only was the strategy not working, but we couldn’t explain to anybody what it was we were trying to do,” said Condoleeza Rice, his secretary of state. By March 2006, Bush was “bordering on despair” about the war, said John Negroponte, his director of national intelligence. Instead of facing reality, Bush burrowed deeper into the bunker of his ideology, increasingly disconnected from the realities of the world he was creating, the captain of a sinking ship. Iraq was in a state of civil war, its cities had become killing fields, 1.6 million of its people were internal refugees, 1.8 million had fled the country, and the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s death squads were driving around Baghdad murdering people. Yet that month Bush extolled the triumphs of his Freedom Agenda in a formal National Security Strategy statement, claiming to have established democracy in Iraq and applauding the rise of political freedoms and civil liberties throughout the Middle East. Right after that litany, Bush listed the victories of the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine as his own. He asserted that they had brought hope for liberty and justice across all of Eurasia, the continent bordered by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, the greatest part of which was Russian soil. He cautioned Putin “to move forward, not backward, along freedom’s path.”
The soaring language of the Freedom Agenda asserted that America was “leading a growing community of democracies” while in fact their number was shrinking all over the world. Many newly emerging democracies had been born into harsh terrain, and some failed to thrive. Nations that had spent a thousand years under tyrants did not transform into free republics overnight because the United States wished them to do so. Elections alone did not a democracy make; they could bring strongmen to power and keep them there. Democracy, as it developed, could not be easily exported; it was not a commodity like soybeans or sneakers but an ideal that lived in the mind. Bush and Cheney spoke of democracy on the march, crushing dictatorships, but they displayed an authoritarian streak in their actions. As the president gazed upon the nations of the world, mouthing platitudes about freedom in televised addresses, it was as if a chyron with the words of Larry Devlin’s cable from the Congo were running underneath his face: “If we to be realistic, must be satisfied with democratic façade.”
Putin had dropped that façade. He saw Bush failing in his role as the leader of the free world. He was rebuilding the Russian intelligence services to secure his power at home and strike back against America abroad. He had once told his former colleagues at the FSB, the KGB’s main successor: “A group of FSB operatives, dispatched undercover to work in the government of the Russian federation, is successfully fulfilling its task.” This was no joke. He had often said that there was no such thing as a former Chekist. He had installed Russian intelligence officers throughout the Kremlin, its key ministries, the media, the oil and gas industries that drove the economy, banking and finance companies, universities, and television stations. His siloviki—something between “security officers” and “power brokers”—were running Russia now. And beyond its borders, they sought to subvert and sabotage its enemies. They were creating a smash-and-grab world owing much to the political philosophy of Stalin and the czars and the business principles of the Mafia but above all to the traditions of the KGB.
Russia’s intelligence and security services, television stations, hackers, and trolls were learning how to weaponize the powers of the internet and the vocabularies of social media to disrupt foreign governments and discredit democratic institutions. Putin started spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating and running government-funded think tanks, foundations, and thinly disguised nongovernmental organizations, establishing branch offices for information warfare throughout Europe, seeking to shape public opinion and to co-opt Western experts, academics, and politicians. The Kremlin began cultivating relationships with right-wing political activists in Austria, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and across the Atlantic in America. It would support the far right and the far left simultaneously, so long as they were fighting one another or attacking a common enemy. To divide and conquer was a glorious goal—but to divide would do.
Putin had fabricated a new intelligence state out of the rubble of the Soviet Union, and he was readying it for a re-inauguration of political warfare. He offered the new Russia—his corrupt and authoritarian nation—as the alternative to liberal democracy and a bulwark against political disorder and moral decay. After years of patient planning, he took vengeance on those who had opposed the power of the Kremlin, and launched the first of an escalating series of attacks against democracy in twenty-seven nations over the course of the next decade. And soon he would set his sights on the United States itself.