2019: Looking back: The Russia connection 7. Putin’s Russia Punching above Its Weight

Published 31 December 2019

In 2014, President Barack Obama said that Russia was a “regional power” capable only of threatening its neighbors “not out of strength but out of weakness.” Yet Russia, with an economy smaller that the economy of Italy, has been able to play a role on the international stage – and in the politics of the United States and more than twenty other countries — out of proportion to its economy and other important metrics.

In 2014, President Barack Obama said that Russia was a “regional power” capable only of threatening its neighbors “not out of strength but out of weakness.” Yet Russia, with an economy smaller that the economy of Italy, has been able to play a role on the international stage – and in the politics of the United States and more than twenty other countries — out of proportion to its economy and other important metrics.

Russian information campaigns, among other things, have been successful in:

·  Helping elect leaders in the United States (Donald Trump), Italy (Matteo Salvini), and Hungary (Viktor Orban) who are sympathetic to Putin’s Russia and are willing to accommodate its interests

·  Increasing the strength of pro-Russian parties and movements (Front National in France; AfD in Germany; Freedom Party in Austria; Sweden Democrats in Sweden) which share the political goal of weakening the institutions (NATO, EU) and arrangements (rule-based international system) created by the United States after the Second World War to contain the Soviet Union and promote democracy and free-market approach

·  Contributing to the weakening of Western institutions (promoting the Brexit campaign to get the U.K. out of the EU, and similar campaigns in other EU countries)

·  Weakening and undermining Western countries (promoting the causes of Scottish independence in the U.K. and Catalonian independence in Spain)

·  Deepening political polarization and intensifying acrimony along ethnic, racial, and religious fault lines in Western democracies

·  Generally working to discredit liberal, pluralistic, democratic systems  

Moreover, as one observer notes, Russia has become a lodestar for autocrats and aspiring autocrats around the world, a pioneer of the media and other tools — known in Russia as “political technologies” — which these leaders now deploy, with or without Moscow’s help, to disrupt a world order once dominated by the United States. These include the propagation of fake or highly misleading news; the masking of simple facts with complicated conspiracy theories; and denunciations of political rivals and the free press as traitors or, in a term President Trump borrowed from Stalin, “enemies of the people.”