Perspective: Foreign interferenceDepoliticizing Foreign Interference

With just a year left before the next presidential election, U.S. leaders are still grappling with foreign interference in the last one. Postmortems of the 2016 campaign—in testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—have brought renewed attention to the ongoing risks, which have been made more difficult by new actors and new technologies.

Jessica Brandt writes in Lawfare that

as the threat has grown, the political polarization that surrounds election interference has deepened. Many still view the challenge through the prism of debates over President Trump’s legitimacy, and the launch of an impeachment inquiry into, among other things, the question of whether the president solicited campaign assistance from a foreign government ahead of the 2020 election has only exacerbated this dynamic. In Washington, the result has been a lot of talk and little walk: a churn of hearings and the introduction of bipartisan legislation without meaningful policy change. Although some lawmakers have risen to the challenge, others have mischaracterized those efforts as political ploys rather than national security necessities.

She adds:

Despite this bleak picture, progress is possible. It will require lawmakers to choose their battles, strategically focusing their efforts where bipartisan cooperation is most likely. Fortunately, in at least five policy domains, members of both parties in both houses of Congress have indicated that they are prepared to act. In the short term, Democrats and Republicans alike should prioritize those domains: responding to interference from Beijing, imposing additional sanctions on malign actors, closing financial loopholes, raising standards for technology companies and improving election security. This collection of steps is the beginning, not the end, of defending U.S. democracy; long-term goals must be more wide ranging, and executive branch and civil society involvement is also necessary. But the current moment demands swift action.

Trump invited Russia and China to interfere in the election on his behalf – and tried to extort Ukraine to do the same by withholding urgently needed U.S. military aid from to the under-Russian-attack country. Brandt believes that, in the end, the values which are rooted in the country’s founding, values which are supported across the political spectrum even in this polarized age, will withstand the current assault on them:

Freedom from foreign interference is not a Democratic or Republican value; it is deeply American, rooted in the country’s founding. In 1788, Alexander Hamilton warned that “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant” in the United States was “one of the most deadly adversaries of republican government.” The same is true today. As the 2020 campaign gets underway, foreign interference conversations must not fall victim to punditry. It is important to be clear-eyed about the fact that bipartisanship will not be possible in every instance. But on the right set of common objectives, Congress has a path forward. The substance of the legislative measures outlined above is crucial, but so is the message of unity their passage would send. Unequivocal commitment from elected leaders—of all political persuasions and at all levels—is essential, not only to raise public awareness about the pressing threat to American democracy but also to heal the divisions that foreign adversaries seek to exploit.