The Plot to Hack America

To meet his goals for hegemony in the Ukraine and the Baltics, Putin would require a total realignment of the priorities of NATO. It would also be most favorable to Russia if the United States could be convinced that it was not in their interest to respond to Baltic States’ requests for article 5 of the NATO Charter. Article 5, which requires all member states to respond militarily if one nation is attacked, has only been invoked once, by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. How would the Americans ever abandon NATO? They created it. Only a President that shared the same viewpoint or who was in league with Putin’s desires would ever even consider such treachery. Certainly not a nominee from the conservative American Republican party led by Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham; they were the war hawks.

It is widely believed that the issue of the Ukraine is a solid Red line for Moscow. This may explain why he and his surrogates made serious efforts to hire and put in place Americans who could advance their interests. Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb notes that the entirety of the national security elites in the West hold the view that to Putin, Eastern Europe is a Russian sphere of influence or “Russian backyard.”¹⁷ Anna Vassilieva, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey told NBC News that “Ukraine is a big issue… a red line that Putin is not going to compromise.”¹⁸

Hillary Clinton’s own words must have struck fear into Putin’s heart because it encapsulates the Western school of thought on how to deal with him in the future:

I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine… I do think we should do more to help Ukraine defend its borders. New equipment, new training for the Ukrainians. The United States plus NATO have been very reluctant to do that, and I understand it completely because it’s a very sticky, potentially dangerous, situation. But I think the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian civilians who’ve been fighting against the separatists have proven that they’re worthy of some greater support.¹⁹

Such pronouncements would give Putin every impetus to find alternatives to her worldview. And surprisingly, seemingly out of nowhere, Putin managed to find and ally himself with the one man in the United States who believed precisely as himself: Donald J. Trump. Trump himself believed that NATO was obsolete and should be disbanded, that Crimea should be given to Russia, and that America should adopt an isolationist foreign policy. In the interim, NATO member states that didn’t pay their full share of the alliance financial commitments would be ignored if they had a military crisis. Who would have ever thought that Russia could be so lucky to find that a major party nominee in America would align himself so closely with the new Russian worldview? Who could have dreamed that a potential American President would imply that the United States would corrupt NATO’s mission to a protection racket that essentially extorts its members? Forty percent of the American electorate indirectly approved this high-stakes international racketeering.

Trump’s positions on NATO would also meet the strategic political objectives of the Kremlin simply by mainstreaming ideas and concepts that were far afield of hawkish Republican positions since the beginning of the Cold War. To the Republican Party, NATO was the United States. Until the rise of Trump there had never been any discussion as to the viability, militarily or financially, of the United States position in that alliance. It was unthinkable for the potential United States President to actually enunciate a position in which the necessity of the alliance was questioned.

It was bad enough that Trump was essentially giving assurances to Putin that Crimea was off the table, but he also appeared to not be the best surrogate, since he did not seem to understand the timeline of Ukraine’s crisis, either. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos Trump said, “he’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” Stephanopoulos responded, in a reference to Crimea, which Putin took from Ukraine in early 2014.