Quick takes // By Ben FrankelWill Putin pick the next U.S. president? He just might
Russian government hackers stealing and publicizing politically embarrassing e-mails from the DNC’s computer systems — or stealing analytical voter information and opposition research on Trump from the Clinton campaign’s own computers – is serious enough. As serious as the theft by these Russian hackers of Democratic campaign donors’ personal data from the computer systems of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). But as a recent article in Politico Magazine notes, there is even a more serious, and more disturbing, possibility: “The most extreme danger, of course, is that cyber intruders could hack the voting machinery to pick winners and losers.”
Vladimir Putin could be an electoral force // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
We should not be surprised that Vladimir Putin wants to see Donald Trump win the November presidential election. After all, as Franklin Foer writes in Slate, “If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests — and advance his own — he’d look a lot like Donald Trump” (in the article, titled “Putin’s Puppet,” Foer offers a detailed, and disturbing, account of Trump’s business dealings in Russia – and the business dealings in Russia of individual’s in Trump’s campaign – and of Trump’s decade-long habit of lavishing praise on Putin).
Putin has made no secret of his ambition to weaken the West and have Russia regain the global sway it held when it was still part of the Soviet Union — and he has put his money where his mouth is. He has supported right-wing, ethno-nationalist, populist, and proto-Fascist parties like Front National in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. These parties share not only anti-immigrant policies – but they are also fiercely anti-EU and want to distance their countries from NATO.
In a 27 May 2015 speech at the Brookings Institution, Vice President Joe Biden said that “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.”
Putin has so far focused on Europe, instructing Russian state agencies to meddle in the politics of several European countries. Now he has turned his attention to the United States.
“The destruction of Europe is a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States,” Foer writes. “Until recently, Putin has only focused glancing attention on American elections. Then along came the […] Republican nominee.
“Donald Trump is like the Kremlin’s favored candidates, only more so.”
More and more reports offer details of Russia’s growing involvement in the effort to help Trump win in November. Writing in Politico Magazine (“The Kremlin’s Candidate: In the 2016 election, Putin’s propaganda network is picking sides,” May-June 2016 issue) Michael Crowley describes how Russian propaganda has pulled out all the stops in a campaign of praise for Trump, using its Russia Today apparatus harshly to criticize Hillary Clinton and commend Trump for his “courageous” foreign policy proposals.
