Are the divisions that fragment the United States primarily driven by some deep flaw in its political life, or was the United States doing just fine, thank you very much—until Russia came along during the 2016 presidential race and started sowing division and dissension?
Framed that way, the question answers itself. Whatever some state-sanctioned Russian actors may have done to pester the American political process, it is obvious that America’s deep divisions exist for reasons having essentially nothing to do with Russia. They long precede the last election.
Even if Russia’s interventions into American electoral politics turn out to be more significant than they presently appear, this cannot change the more fundamental reality that our confrontational posture, including vis-à-vis Russia, is by no means something external to the United States’ Lockean liberal political concept.
That there is something intrinsically confrontational about that political concept, at least in the sphere of foreign affairs, has been suggested by, among others, Richard Sakwa.[1] For Sakwa, the post-Soviet settlement with Russia was undermined almost from the very start by a monist worldview in both the United States and Brussels that would brook no alternative perspectives. The result has been a de facto monologue between “the West” and post-Soviet Russia rather than a genuine, transformational dialogue.
Similarly, John Mearsheimer calls out ruling elites in the United States for their “liberal intolerance” and their failure to take seriously the possibility that other sovereign states, including Russia, might have a different perspective regarding everything from culture to their own vital interests. This habit of nearly hermetic intellectual self-enclosure on the United States’ part helped precipitate the still-ongoing crisis in Ukraine.[2]
In Russia-gate, this same closed system of confrontation and self-enclosure appears once again in a new form, one rooted in domestic U.S. processes, and with Russia’s relation to the matter being almost wholly instrumental. If there is something novel about Russia-gate, broadly considered, it would appear to be the striking lowering of standards for reasoned argument and proof.
In short, Russia-gate should interest us not for what it can teach us about Russia (almost nothing) but for what it can teach us about ourselves.
The Russia Panic
In December 2016, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government had hacked the Vermont electric power grid. The Post, which broke the story, cited as sources “officials” in the U.S. government. It turned out that what happened was this: a laptop not connected to the Vermont power grid had some malware on it.
In his analysis of this same incident, journalist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald stated that “there is zero evidence that Russian hackers were even responsible for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop. The fact that malware is ‘Russian-made’ does not mean that only Russians can use it; indeed . . . assuming that Russian-made malware must have been used by Russians is as irrational as finding a Russian-made Kalishnikov AKM rifle at a crime scene and assuming the killer must be Russian.”[3]
In March 2018, the British government declared that it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England.[4] The nerve agent (“novichok”) used against them, we were told, was first produced in Russia and therefore only Russia could be responsible for the attack, and only Russia had a motive.
Both of these statements were almost certainly false.
The formula for the novichok chemical compound had at one point been published, and therefore can be assumed to be widely available. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has stated that the Soviet lab where the substance had been produced was located in Uzbekistan, not Russia, and this lab was dismantled by the Americans during his tenure as ambassador to Uzbekistan. What is more, Murray added, “at least two key scientists from the program moved to the United States.”[5]
As for motivation, Russia had much to lose and nothing very obvious to gain from such a scandal on the eve of the World Cup. Why would the Russian government spend billions trying to make a favorable (“soft power”) impression on visitors from all over the world (2.9 million of them during the games, according to TASS) only to shoot itself in the foot just before the start of the games (meanwhile leaving the Skripals, in the end, in apparent good health)? And what is more, Russia has many enemies who might have been motivated to embarrass it in this way. Despite these causes for doubt, U.S. news media typically reported the incident’s Russian government origins as a matter of established fact.
The most recent Russia-related scandal, as of this writing, involves the 29-year-old Russian national and American University student Maria Butina who was arrested a few hours after Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin at the close of their July summit meeting in Helsinki. The charges against Butina are that she conspired to influence American politics on behalf of the Russian government and failed to register as a foreign lobbyist.
Butina has met over the last few years a great many Americans and, especially, Washingtonians interested in promoting a dialogue with Russia, something she has avidly promoted. I am one of those persons interested in dialogue with Russia who has conversed with Ms. Butina. I found her to be friendly, personable, and apparently convinced that gun rights in Russia are a good way to protect against a return there to the totalitarian excesses of the past. Her political views are conservative and somewhat individualistic—very American, as it happens.
The news media have treated her as a spy, which seems an odd charge, given her quite open manner of promoting U.S.–Russian contacts, and her MO of communicating by Twitter, and by email with her alleged “handler,” the Russian former legislator, and now banking official, Aleksandr Torshin. Reports about Butina in the U.S. media are easy enough to find, and full of salacious details, but I find of greater interest the response of Ivan Timofeyev, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, who asked why Butina wasn’t simply asked to register as a lobbyist. He fears that her arrest has put an end to the 25-year experiment of informal citizen and scholarly interactions between the two sides:
The arrest of Maria Butina . . . razes to the ground Russia–U.S. relations, killing off any good soil, limiting them to the clichéd official narrative. The American initiative is sure to be echoed in Russia, and with great pleasure. . . . This will probably facilitate the job for the intelligence services. . . . The enthusiastic few who are still trying to do something for the Russia–U.S. dialogue, those who have become black sheep against the background of the throngs of Russophobes and Americaphobes . . . and who need to be supported by any and all means, can [now] easily end up behind bars to scare the rest.[6]
* * *
There is a lot more, of course, than these three incidents, and I make no claims to being master of the whole of the Russia scandal since the story first broke. There are the Facebook ads directed at Americans. There is the alleged (or proven, depending on whom you believe) Russian hacking of emails from the DNC’s computers and the distribution of the content of those messages in order to embarrass the Democratic Party for its actions to weaken the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. There is also the famous January 6, 2017, “Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” which includes, out of its 25 pages, a large section focusing on the Russian broadcaster RT.
Amidst the critical commentary on that assessment, perhaps the most substantive, and certainly the best written, was produced for the New York Review of Books by the journalist, LGBT activist, and well-known harsh Putin critic, Masha Gessen. I would strongly urge everyone to read Gessen’s analysis (alongside the original report). It is hard, after doing so, not to come away convinced that, whatever else one may say, the January 6, 2017, report was not produced by the intelligence community’s best thinkers or top experts on Russian politics. To the contrary, one gets the impression that its authors had little understanding at all of Russia and how it formulates policy (it cites, for example, infotainment blather by Vladimir Zhirinovsky during a Moscow talk show as evidence of State policy). The assessment states that the RT show Breaking the Set, led by Abby Martin, played a significant role in influencing the election, even though Breaking the Set went off the air a year and a half before the 2016 election. According to Gessen, so poor is the report’s reasoning that “if the report’s vague assertions were clarified and its circular logic straightened out, nothing would be left.”
Gessen finds it baffling that even the most prominent and “responsible” actors in a democracy evince so little concern about the truth of what they assert. Instead of treating it as a bombshell, honest mass media reporting about the IC report, Gessen adds, would have yielded such headlines as “Intel Report on Russia Reveals Few New Facts,” or “Intelligence Agencies Claim Russian Propaganda TV Influenced Election.” But this is not at all what happened, either then, or since. Instead, the January 7, 2017, IC report has been repeatedly referred to as decisive and convincing. Leading publications such as the New York Times and the New Yorker have made these declarations, Gessen continues, “without examining the arguments” made in the report.
This, to put it plainly, is precisely how propaganda works. It convinces not by force of good reasoning but by force of sheer repetition. It convinces people by creating the perception—which the manipulators ensure is an accurate one—that “this is what everyone is saying.”
As for the Skripal incident, it doesn’t take a PhD in logic to notice the weakness of the proofs that have been mobilized in support of the British government’s narrative. The form of argument here is identical to that used to prove, in defiance of logic, that Russia must have been the source of the “hacking” of a laptop in Vermont, simply because the malware had originally been produced in Russia.
As for the Butina case, its most fundamental message is this: dialogue as such is out of bounds. It is a crime. Nor is it just this one instance. “Contact” with or “influences” from “Russians” are quite sufficient to get you fired or to ruin your career. Allan Bloom’s famous “closing of the American mind” put it too mildly. More like the hermetic sealing of the American mind, its self-enclosure within an exclusively liberal (and “rules-based”) sphere.
The Russia Indictment’s Self-Contradictions
Those who insist that Russia presents the primary threat to American democracy frequently have also insisted on the need to respect the word of the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Those who express doubts about the necessary accuracy of assertions made by the IC have been called disloyal and even traitors.
And yet, the American intelligence community is not a monolith. While the history of the CIA since its founding in 1947 suggests a caveat emptor attitude is advisable toward many of its “assessments,” the fact remains that the CIA produces a variety of reports and has a variety of analysts, some of whom have undoubted expertise and training in the fields on which they report. This raises an interesting question. Assuming, for the moment, that it is necessary to take seriously, indeed very seriously, the analyses offered us by the intelligence community and CIA, to which of their analysts should we pay the most careful and respectful attention? In the case of papers such as the Washington Post—as we saw for example in the case of the Vermont utility story—the right course has been to rely on anonymous intelligence officials who do not present the basis for their reasoning and who, at least in that specific case, presented as fact what turned out later to be demonstrably untrue. Or, should we take seriously the CIA that prepared the January 7, 2017, IC report, even though these same compilers demonstrated a limited understanding of logic, Russian politics, or, indeed, as Masha Gessen noted, English grammar.
It is impossible to believe that a nation with the vast resources and global concerns of the United States is completely cavalier about the basis for its judgments about reality. It must have at its disposal analysts with a proven capacity for logical judgment, and who have a sophisticated understanding of Russia and its politics. And of course it does have such analysts. One of these is George Beebe, the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a former national security aide to VP Dick Cheney. He presented his views on the subject that presently concerns us at an event titled “Russia Influence Efforts inside the U.S.” held this past May at the Center for the National Interest, the institute where Mr. Beebe now works (CNN, May 22, 2018, “Russian Influence Efforts”).
Russia’s undying malevolence has become conventional wisdom in the United States. It is not just former DNI (director of national intelligence) James Clapper who is absolutely certain that Vladimir Putin is intent on undermining the West and destroying American democracy, and similarly certain that Putin’s sufficient motivation for this ambitious task is nothing less than the Russian leader’s instinctive hatred of democracy and of “our whole system.” This same view is shared by almost the entirety of the U.S. political and media establishment. From Beebe’s perspective, the only problem with this thing that everyone knows to be true is that it happens to be false.
Assessing a foreign actor’s intentions is, to be sure, a difficult task. It requires among other things a willingness to view the world from someone else’s perspective, to understand someone else’s history and culture. So how do we go about trying to get an accurate assessment of Russia’s intentions and motivations?
A good place to start is looking at what a range of Russian actors themselves are saying. Toward that end, Beebe cites Oleg Kashin, a liberal Russian journalist and Putin critic who recently described the Russia portrayed over the last year and a half in US media outlets as “total garbage . . . that shocks even the most anti-Putin Russian.” Andranik Migranyan, a senior foreign policy advisor and supporter of Putin, recently wrote that Russia and its diplomats “have no fixation on supporting dictatorship, but on principles” and Russia’s fundamental worry is that regime change leads to chaos and anarchy, as was the case in Libya. Concludes Migranyan: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”[7]
It’s also crucial to look at what the foreign actor actually does. As regards Russia’s Facebook and other social media interventions in the United States, Beebe finds that Russian social media messaging was “all over the map” and not targeted to swing states during the 2016 election. What is more, Russian behavior taken as a whole suggests it has no aversion to democratic states. It was Benjamin Netanyahu who accompanied Putin on his walk during this year’s commemoration of the victory during World War II; indeed, Netanyahu speaks with Putin more than with any other foreign leader. And yet, Israel is a democracy, even a vibrant one, according to Beebe. Russia, furthermore, has a long-standing and robust relationship with India, the largest democracy in the world. Neither Israel’s nor India’s democratic institutions “cause any heartburn in Moscow” nor are they perceived as a threat.
What actions might Russia have taken, were it hell bent on destroying American democracy? It might, for example—it has the capacity—turn off the lights, mess with trading on the New York Stock Exchange, or take similar actions that would cause real harm. The reasons it did not do so are, on the other hand, quite obvious. They would be perceived in the United States as acts of war and would bring grave repercussions. Russia’s priorities simply do not include destroying American democracy, Beebe concludes, but they do definitely include convincing the United States to “knock it off” as regards democracy promotion inside Russia or on its borders in ways that cause chaos and violence.
The destruction of the United States, moreover, would in any case present far worse problems than it would solve for Russia—it would unravel the global economy, and Russia, after all, is very much a part of that global economy, and depends on it for its own prosperity. If the United States were to politically fragment to the point of collapse, what would this imply for U.S. nuclear weapons? Where would they go? The explosion of disorder that would result from the United States’ collapse would bring precisely what Russia least of all wants.
Beebe concluded his presentation with a quote from British historian Martin Malia, who, in his Russia under Western Eyes, wrote that Westerners have tended to demonize or divinize Russia “less because of her real role in Europe than because of the fears and frustrations, or the hopes and aspirations, generated within European society by its own domestic problems.”[8] This translates directly to the use and abuse of Russia inside the United States today. Precisely because America is undergoing a severe crisis in its democracy, it is projecting its internal problems onto Russia.
* * *
Everything would be very simple if we could neatly divide speakers in modern public fora into those who always tell lies, and mean to do so, and those who always tell (or attempt to tell) what is objectively true. That is not our situation. As the philosopher David C. Schindler has noted in his study of the continuing relevance of Plato’s Republic, what we confront today is not the simple abandonment of reason, but something far worse: reason’s instrumentalization. Our modern liberal condition, precisely because it encourages us to allow power to be our guide, puts us on the side of Thrasymachus in the Republic, in the sense that we do indeed make use of reasoned argument—but only just up to the moment when it is no longer convenient for promoting our own interests. The resulting status of reason, Schindler emphasizes, “represents . . . the most complete ruination of reason precisely because it allows a momentary claim, but always within a willingness to relativize that claim in the next moment, ‘whenever necessary.'”[9]
Beebe’s analysis, at least at first glance, is substantive, well-reasoned, and based on a deep familiarity with the subject matter. Does this therefore make it more convincing than the sorts of unsupported assertions one often hears on the nightly news? And in any case, isn’t the sheer fact of the multiplicity of “perspectives” one hears in the American media itself a good thing, and a sign that our liberal society is on the right track? In actuality, no to both questions. In a misological society, an eminently reasonable argument, such as Beebe’s, is seen as simply one opinion among others. To the extent reasonable argument is presented simply as one option among others in the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ to that same extent reason itself no longer has any claim as reason on us. It becomes just another argumentative style, perhaps no worse, but also no better than, say, an eye roll accompanied by a deep sigh.
Politics as Opposition
A liberal state is confronted by the following paradox. If political order simply is a contest between competing wills, to the extent that an ever-present state of war continuously boils just under the surface of society, how is national unity, how is community to even be conceived, much less maintained over time?
At moments of crisis, this question moves from the realm of theory into the realm of practice. A fascinating case in point can be found in a June 2017 Foreign Affairs article (“The Liberal Order is Rigged”) written by Jeff Colgan, professor of political science and international affairs at Brown University, and Robert Keohane, professor of international affairs at Princeton, and one of the leading voices in American international relations theory.
The election of Donald Trump, Keohane and Colgan note, has exposed deep divisions within American society, divisions that can no longer be ignored without endangering the nation. The principle cause of these deep divisions in the United States today, whose symptom and expression is the unexpected election of Donald Trump, is the differential impact of liberal globalization, and the failure of American elites to properly and equitably manage those impacts. The United States has become divided between a minority who gain from globalization and the large majority of ordinary workers who have not. In the absence of an adequate “safety net,” millions of ordinary Americans have looked on helplessly as their life chances got shattered.
What is most of interest, in the present context, is how the authors conceive of restoring America’s unity first and foremost in terms of opposition to something. They begin with a look, so to speak, at the “good old days” of the first Cold War:
the perceived Soviet threat generated a strong shared sense of attachment not only to Washington’s allies but also to multilateral institutions. Social psychologists have demonstrated the crucial importance of “othering” in identity formation, for individuals and nations alike: a clear sense of who is not on your team makes you feel closer to those who are. The fall of the Soviet Union removed the main “other” from the American political imagination and thereby reduced social cohesion in the United States.[10]
Their argument doesn’t end there. To recover a semblance of community in the United States, enemies must be chosen, and widely advertised, with an eye toward reinforcing who we are. But who exactly are we? For Keohane and Colgan, the answer to that question is, of course, that “we are liberals.” Therefore, America needs to develop “a national narrative, broadly backed by elites across the ideological spectrum, about ‘who we are’—one built around opposition to authoritarianism and illiberalism” (emphasis mine).
Keohane and his co-author do not call on the United States to oppose “illiberal” states because they directly present to us a dire threat, or, indeed, any threat at all. The threat flagged is that of the United States’ internal fragmentation. To be sure, for Keohane as a neo-realist, some level of threat from other great powers is always implicit, given the anarchic structure of the international system, as he himself would put it. All the same, his article makes clear that, at least in this case, the “enemy” has an instrumental value, and it is a secondary matter precisely which “illiberal” or “authoritarian” enemy is chosen to help create unity and a healthy “national narrative.” In doing so, aren’t Keohane and Colgan making precisely the move against which George Beebe and Martin Malia had warned?
The Problem with Liberalism
Let’s review the patterns that have emerged from the preceding to see what they can tell us about our Lockean liberal set-up.
First, there is its need for enemies, as argued by Colgan and Keohane. Beebe and Malia lamented the widespread instrumentalization of Russia as “useful enemy.” Anyone who has not been asleep these past fifty years can easily observe how America’s political establishment eagerly uncovers enemies over and over again. And whenever the United States’ enemies are not big and evil enough, we are fortunate to have our 24/7 cable news channels standing at the ready to take up the slack.
Also observable from the above is a kind of self-enclosure that takes on a specific form, in defiance of the United States’ self-image as “an open society.” Most American politicians and pundits are reluctant, to say the least, to make the effort to see the world from a different perspective, especially from the perspective of a nation previously labeled as competitor or adversary. George Beebe’s insights about Russia stem mainly from his ability to make this leap—and they are also what make him the odd man out. Self-enclosure has recently taken on an even more extreme form in the virtual criminalization of conversing with Russians, the demonization of dialogue, such as we have seen in the case of Butina. We find it also in the weird panic in the IC report over RT broadcasts, as if the ideal case is a world where the United States is perfectly safe from the influences of anything different from itself.
Finally, the above review of the Russia panic suggests a fundamental undermining of reason itself. Instrumentalized reason merges with political struggle, the ethos that anything goes if it “works” to advance one’s cause or interests, as long as you can get away with it. But this is no longer reason at all: it is simply the will to power.
All these elements taken together form a determinate pattern—the pattern of political liberalism. Discussion of this philosophical doctrine is made more difficult in the United States by the term’s frequent careless use. Often what is known in the United States as “liberalism” is simply a slur that American economic liberals like to hurl at American social liberals, or, more rarely, at those who are off the liberal reservation altogether. I am referring, however, to that liberal conception of politics that virtually all sides in America share, certainly most Democrats and Republicans, the liberalism bequeathed to us by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke & Co. A detailed analysis of this liberalism as a political theory goes beyond the scope of the present essay (though I do take up this task in a forthcoming essay based on the work of Pierre Manent, David C. Schindler, and John Milbank). For our present purposes, it must suffice to note that liberalism as a political concept takes freedom and rights, in their essence, as being a matter of autonomy and power. It is precisely this founding ethos of liberalism that ensures that it inserts fragmentation and opposition into everything it touches.
Parenthetically, let me respond to a question that may, at this point, be bothering the careful reader. “Why is it, then, that the United States is becoming increasingly fragmented and confrontational—after all, hasn’t it been liberal since its founding?” And to be sure it has. It would be easy, if misleading, to respond by saying, “well, the meaning of liberalism has changed over time.” It is very true that the meaning of ideas often changes over time, but in the present case, it was our friends Machiavelli, Locke, and Hobbes who first fundamentally changed the meaning of freedom and right, and then supplied us with those defective meanings with which we still operate. It’s just that the transformative impact of those new meanings is not given instantaneously, but instead unfolds in its full implications only gradually.[11]
So, where does all this leave us? Say what you will, the Russia panic serves as an excellent case study. As a logical body of evidence concerning all the terrible stuff Russia has done to us, it fails badly. As a mirror of who we presently are—self-enclosed, violent, out of contact with reality, in dire need of enemies lest we tear each other apart—it is quite the thing though.
Paul Grenier, an essayist and translator who writes regularly on political philosophy, urbanism, and foreign affairs, is co-founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy (simoneweilcenter.org). He can be reached at simoneweilcenter@gmail.com.
Notes
1. Richard Sakwa made reference to this liberal monism in his recent presentation at the Telos Conference in Ragusa, Italy, September 2, 2018. See also Sakwa’s “Europe and the Political: From Axiological Monism to Pluralistic Dialogism,” East European Politics 33, no. 3 (2017): 406–25; and Sakwa, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018), pp. 2–6.
2. For John Mearsheimer, see in particular The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2018), pp. 110, 158, and, for the Ukraine crisis specifically, 171–79.
3. Glenn Greenwald, “Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid,” The Intercept, December 31, 2016.
4. Robert Mackey, “Former Spy Was Poisoned With ‘Military-Grade Nerve Agent Developed by Russia,’ U.K. Says,” The Intercept, March 12, 2018.
5. Craig Murray, “The Holes in the Official Skripal Story,” CraigMurray.org, July 12, 2018. UK government and media assertions that the nerve agent novichok had to be Russian-made is contradicted, Murray says, by the evidence even of Britain’s own chemical weapon’s lab, Porton Down:
“Porton Down said they could not tell where it [novichok—PRG] was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the ‘novichok’ class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.
“Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.”
6. Ivan Timofeev, “Amerikantsy posylaiut signal,” Kommersant, July 18, 2018.
7. Migranyan as quoted by Beebe during this same presentation: “Russian Influence Efforts,” CNN, May 22, 2018.
8. Beebe is quoting here from Malia’s book, Russia Under Western Eyes. Aside from the book itself, this quote can be found in Ambassador Jack Matlock Jr.’s review of Malia’s Russia Under Western Eyes (“The Poor Neighbor,” New York Times, April 11, 1999).
9. D.C. Schindler, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic (Washington, DC : Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2008).
10. Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, “The Liberal Order is Rigged: Fix It Now or Watch It Wither,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017, p. 40.
11. For an insightful and relevant illustration of this thesis, see former Swarthmore college president James Kurth’s “The Protestant Deformation,” American Interest, December 1, 2005, which explains how, over the course of centuries, liberalism gradually transformed American Protestantism into American nationalism—the very same that has helped generate the Russia panic.
