Why America First Policy Requires US to Push Back Against Russia

My article published on Daily Mail 24:

https://en.dailymail24.com/2017/10/29/why-america-1st-policy/

The US may very well be perfectly fine with living and letting live. It may very well be entirely happy to let someone take play world policeman for a change and focus on providing for its own citizens and protecting its borders. It might be for the best if other countries sorted out their issues among themselves. But it's all a pipe dream.

Russia is not going to let the United States to live and let live. It's not about Putin's stay in power or pursuit of dominance in the Middle East, or the restoration of the Russian Empire.

It's about the simple fact that we are under our attack within our own borders, and Russia will not stop until it brings the US to ruin.

How would that scenario look? Alarmingly, the picture emerging is not too far from where we are now: a nation, lost in confusion, unable to tell propaganda and fake news from reality, its political leadership torn apart by endless scandals and investigations, with its citizens trusting foreign leaders more than they trust their own.

Russia has proven to be a danger, playing both parties against each other, sowing chaos, confusion, and aggressively attacking US interests internally and externally. Its Kaspersky software has been used as an espionage tool across various government agencies, endangering our information. Hacking into voting machines and attacks on various political entities was a crude attempt to compromise the integrity of our democratic election problems, and to cause months of finger-pointing and social divisioins.

Over the years preceding this election, Russia continued aggressive active measures, which ranged from bribery of nuclear trucking companies, to espionage through highly placed officials in an attempt to get to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to aggressive hacking and propaganda measures which intensified through election. Under the Obama administration, Russia sent its "diplomats" on fishing expeditions around our sensitive infrastructure, even in such unusual vacation destinations as Kansas.

Additionally, Russia has presented a direct threat to our interests and security abroad. Russian intelligence aggressively targeted US diplomats in Moscow and Eastern Europe, which included such unprofessional and belligerent actions, as physical attacks, including one that left a diplomat badly beaten outside the Embassy, and having to be evacuated, poisonings, severe destruction of property, and harassment that went far beyond the expected annoyances from the old Soviet KGB playbook expected in that part of the world.

Strategically, Russia continues to present a threat wherever it goes, directly interfering with US interests in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In Syria, Russia constructed a base, while supporting Iranian militias, adversarial to US interests, attacking US-backed groups, and presenting a threat to the Straight of Hormuz, a strategically important trade rout for US and her allies. At numerous points throughout its presence in Syria, US and Russia neared a point of direct conflict, while Russia continued provocative actions, involving airplanes and submarines. In Afghanistan, Russia supplies Taliban with fuel and even weapons, despite the fact that NATO, including the US, is actively fighting against Taliban. Thanks to Russia's assistance, the Taliban has made significant territorial gains, even as the US surged its own forces inside the country.

Additionally, Russia continues to supply Iran with weapons, now also selling S-400s to Turkey, a country that also presents a significant challenge to US interests in Syria. And Russian government oil company is moving in on the oil fields taken over by the Iraqi forces, IRGC, and Iran-backed militias from the Kurds in Kirkuk, which endangers vested US business interests. Russia's attacks on Ukraine, including cybersecurity attacks, are widely viewed as potential dry runs for similar attacks on US infrastructure, including the electric grid.

And that's not including the aggressive lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, the cruel adoption ban that forbids dangerously ill Russian children from being taken in by American families, the non-stop brainwashing of the Russian citizenry against Americans, the troll farms, which makes old school Soviet propaganda seem like child's play, and the authoritarian actions against foreign NGOs, as well as government-linked hostile takeovers of US hedge funds and other financial institutions in Russia, well documented by Bill Browder and others.

All of that paints a rather dreary picture of the US-Russia relationship, with only one side systematically pursuing hostility and instilling hatred against not only the government of the other, but against all of it institutions, the fabric of society, and way of life. Russia is not acting like a potential partner, even on a strictly limited and professional level. It's looking to undermine every goal and pursuit of the United States, and to cause an internal collapse. The appeal of hardcore Communism is no longer quite as potent, though to be sure, the Soviet Union's fellow travelers took strong root in the academia, governments, the media, and think tank world.  But non-ideological confusion of values and internal social and political divisions are just as destructive, and have met with a deplorable level of success. Intersectionality, radical movements, and fake pseudoright=wing and pseudo-left wing organized groups and violent events all have the classic Soviety-style footprint on them, and a number of articles have come out to show how Russia had duped unwitting Black Lives Matter activists into organizing events that ended up benefiting Russia.

For that reason, placing America First, and American interests first, requires a strong, unequivocal, coordinated, and systematic response to Russia by President Trump, who needs to start enforcing Congressional sanctions he signed into law this summer immediately, members of both parties in Congress, who need to put aside political differences and focus on the common goal of defending US national security and political integrity, our media, who needs to focus on exposing Russian connections wherever they are, and not just to the benefit of one party over another, our institutions, including think tanks, who need to be more alert to the foreign money, lobbyists, and other pro-Russia influences, and finally, US citizens, who need to start learning to spot propaganda that benefits the foreign state, and stop giving in to the divisiveness being sown by bots, trolls, and Russian agents of influence at every opportunity.

We need to keep America great, not make Russia great again.

"Mutually Assured Disruption: Framing Cybersecurity in Nuclear Terms"

The National Committee on American Foreign Policy hosted a discussion featuring David Mussington (Director of the Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise, at University of Maryland), Michael Sulmayer (Director of the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard U.),  Andrew Futter (Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, focusing on emerging strategic technologies and global nuclear order),  and Rafal Rohozinski (CEO, The SecDev Group).

Much of the discussion was focused on figuring out the extent to which cyber and nuclear issues interact.  Part of the problem is that to a large extent they do not, and the specialists in these areas do not understand each other's disciplines, nor do they interact with each other. That said, cyber and nuclear are also not necessarily automatically similar or connected on every level. Another issue muddling the general discussion is that cyber threats greatly vary among themselves, and one of the easiest ways to get to nuclear technologies is through social engineering which facilitates implementation of cyber threats - or may have nothing to do with cyber at all. One of the conflicts with respect to any technology, whether it's cyber, or nuclear is tension between functionality and security. If something is upgraded to a digital version, it may be faster and better, but is also hackable.

With nuclear technology, there is the additional tension of having them ready to be used at a moment's notice, while also being kept safe from both unauthorized access of any kind and incidental deployment.  Nuclear modernization digitized much of its function, but also made it less secure. And of course, the access by humans, and errors in judgment remains a factor. Additionally, there is the problem of the full spectrum missile defense capabilities, which would utilize cyber functions, but may also have nuclear components. That makes them more effective, but have more ways in which they can be sabotaged.

Other issues of concern are the lack of civilian oversight over devices, the fact that the government security is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link - civilian devices, such as PCs and cell phones - are pervasive.  Additionally, there is a tension between whether vulnerability to cyberattacks is largely an individual and domestic problem or something greater. The argument that it's not limited to educating the society on how to be more aware is that much of the contemporary technology is comprised of internationally made hardware and software, and there are backdoors built into cell phones and so forth, so being simply on guard is not enough.

Added to the complication is the fact that large corporations such as Equifax are not held accountable for poor internal habits, and as a result the regular people suffer and pay the price. The Silicon Valley has a culture of resistance to getting involved in politics, and additionally of being strongly opposed to government oversight, to the point that Facebook was denying any manipulation of data by the Russians, up until the point where it could not engage in any more denials. The strategy may be shifting in Congress to impose greater demands of tech companies and social media companies into taking action to safeguard themselves from external interference.

The one issue that was not mentioned is the impact of data compartmentalization, including the effect of eroding barriers on nuclear susceptibility to attacks. At issue is to what extent can an attack on an unrelated industry or device affect digital functions of nuclear technology, and to what extent is it even functionally possible to keep various types of information separate enough that the damages from serious cyberattacks can be mitigated. In the national security arena, the erasure of compartmentalization as a best practice has had a noticeably negative effect in a variety of areas, but some issues may be just as due to the simple inability to keep track of the vast quantities of data being collected or utilized as to poor agency culture.

Who Controls The Past Controls The Future

Today would have been Boris Nemtsov's 58th Birthday.

Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that the last few cultural endeavors in which I have engaged all had to do with the purpose of his life, and what led to his untimely death in the hands of Kremlin-hired assassins: the search for truth.

The first in that series was Bill Browder's must-read real-life thriller "Red Notice", which provides an appropriate backdrop to the Fusion GPS-related hearings, featuring Browder's testimony and the drama of the Russian Probe, which took place this summer. Bill Browder was a businessman who started a hedge fund in Russia. Upon uncovering massive corruption that was detrimental to running a Western business, Browder hired a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who eventually was arrested and tortured to death over the course of many months of maltreatment, torment, and cruel denial of emergency medical aid. Browder proceeded to lobby the US government, as well as Canada, and UK, for the passage of the Magnitsky Act, a human right law that would hold Russian oligarchs & officials responsible for his lawyer's death accountable by freezing their accounts in the US and denying them Visa. As a results, Putin passed a law banning adoptions by US families of sickly Russian babies, even those who were already in the process of being adopted.

The relations between Russia and US deteriorated at a precipitous rate since then, with Russia adopting a series of anti-Western measures, and hiring a slew of lobbyists to seek the overturn of the Magnitsky Act, which later gave rise to a global version. Amidst this international back drop, Bill Browder's remarkable and heart felt story of a brilliant, but seemingly ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and forced to rise to the occasion for the sake of justice for his clients, salvaging his reputation, and later to bring closure to his friend's family, stands out in a haunting and easily relatable way. What I just told you is the summary of the events known to the public from the many articles arose from the corruption investigation then, and from all the Congressional and State Department deliberations later, upon Browder's involvement in the conception of this law. But I'm not doing justice to this man's creativity, selfless devotion,  and successful fight against seemingly insurmountable obstacle even as it was obvious that in many ways Browder was just like any of us, battling family issues, afraid for his own life, confused and sometimes deceived by the endless obfuscation and lies of the Putin regime and the organized crime acting in cahoots with its law enforcement and intelligence.

But if you think the story ends with the successful passage of the law, and Putin's impotent fury, you are sorely mistaken. Putin proceeds to hire practically everyone he can to get the Magnitsky Law, a persona affront to his own finances, overturned, and in the processes, touches base with US-based opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, which was at the heart of scandals earlier this year. Fusion GPS was affiliated both with the Russian intelligence-connected lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, known for an assortment of fraudulent activities associated with the lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, and for her confrontations with Browder himself, and Michael Steele, the former British spook, who coordinated with assorted Russian and other unnamed sources on creating on what became known as the Trump dossier, which became the subject of a separate but related controversy. All of these actors came together during the investigation of Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, in a series of moves which are now largely being viewed by many critics as a set-up of greedy officials and naive campaigners to discredit Trump and sow chaos in the middle of a hotly contested election and its aftermath. Without reading Red Notice, much of what you've seen over the course of the past year will make much sense.  "Red Notice" explains why Russian active measures have gotten  to be so intense, relentless, and overwhelming - because of the deeply personal nature of the perceived affront to the one authoritarian ruler behind them, and because of what's at stake for his vindictive and deeply corrupt regime. Will his officials be shunned from the world's playrooms and become the international pariahs they deserve to be, or will the West be forced to concede defeat and at some point, try to work things out with Russia? That is the nature of the struggle we are facing.

A worthy companion to the story is Luke Harding's "A Very Expensive Poison", which tells the story of Alexander Litvinenko's assassination on British soil, which preceded the main thrust of Browder's story by a few years, but intertwined with it in a number of significant ways, and which also continues through the investigation of the gruesome polonium based murder into the many years of inquest and political shuffling by the British government, even as Putin's regime grew bolder, dared to assassinate more critics, dissidents, and journalists, invaded countries, and basically acted more like an organized crime gang seeking to assert its superiority, than a civilized nation with any claims to international legitimacy.  The book reads like a thriller, explains in depth and reveals many of the internationally known but frequently misunderstood and misrepresented events that had to do with Russia's meddling and took place since the early 2000s, and reveals how much investment Putin had put into the obfuscation of Russia's true intentions, obfuscation that made Westerners and others believe Putin's fabrications as if they were the truth, and discredited innocent people and countries for many years to come. It also goes a long way to explain the level of mistreatment foreigners trying to uncover the truth or simply do their job in Russia (and likely its allied countries, such as Cuba) as Putin seeks to show who's the boss by tried-and-true methods of the Soviet KGB - crude, criminal, and brutal.

The topic of deliberate obfuscation is further explored in Sharyl Atkisson's "The Smear", which reveals the political actors behind current proliferation of propaganda, fake news, astroturf, and other anti-truth phenomena in modern media on both sides of whatever issue.  Sharyl is a fine journalist who works hard to present all sides of the story in a frank, but fair manner. She has her biases, and sometimes gives the benefit of the doubt to people she personally sympathizes with (and denies cutting any such slack to people she finds less sympathetic - and you'll quickly figure out who those are). However, overall, she makes a well-supported argument and investigation of how people who are less informed or aware fall easy prey to corporate and political interests who hide their true agenda in layers of cynical PR moves, some additionally fed by foreign agents, and some simply reflecting the particular interests of the particular entity. Most importantly, she convinces that even the most politically devoted of political activists should stay clear of complete hackery that now passes for journalism and activism, and learn to perceive what these actors pay dear money to hide and bury in the midst of the noise we are inundated with on a daily basis.

Why should we spend any time thinking critically, when it's easier to let Russian active measures, political manipulators on the left and the right, and corporations feeding seemingly independent think tanks their talking points to just do what they do best? The answer to that question is very clearly answered in the stunning and shocking Broadway show "1984", which we managed to catch just before it ended its limited engagement on Sunday.  The show used a clever combination of live action by an amazing cast, including Olivia Wilde, video visuals, and flashbacks to make the audience feel an integral part of the events of totalitarian one-party dystopia brought to life on stage.  Interestingly,  as I rediscovered from being a part of this fantastic experience, the show was less about Communism as such, and more about statism, individualism, and humanity. Therefore, anyone who has ever experienced the oppression of state control will easily identify with the events portrayed in the show.

The anguished outcry of a seemingly confused protagonist Winston Smith, struggling to distinguish between false memories and real ones, can be any of us, not just through the elections last year, but through decades of seemingly increasing propaganda and proliferation of narratives, fake news, alternative facts, and basically, every conceivable version of interpreting reality except devotion to the truth.

"Because facts matter! Because truth matters!" - exclaims Winston at some point during the play, and it is something that is painfully needed to be said, and repeated again and again, in a climate where truth is nearly impossibly to define in the proliferation of fabrications, smears, accusations, biased articles, and distortions of all sorts.  Winston spends the rest of the play trying to remember the reality, hold on to even tiny slivers of truth as he knows it. His ultimate act of freedom and defiance comes in the form of a bold assertion: that 2+2=4. That objective, undeniable reality exists, and no amount of fearmongering, brainwashing, and information control can make it otherwise. And yet, the totalitarian statists are determined to crush any shreds of individuality. During one particularly poignant moment, the audience becomes tacitly complicity in the brutal and shockingly graphic torture that the the calm, professional representative of the states imposes upon Winston, still stubbornly clinging to the truth and a sense of individuality. "Don't just sit there, don't just watch it, help me!" - screams Winston, and we are all left there feeling awful and powerless, because we cannot get up and do anything, dare not do anything, dare not become part of the action. I wish, in fact, that the play would have allowed for such a maneuver. I would be curious to see if anyone in the audience would have dared to cry out "Enough!"  Instead, we watch as with crushing inevitability, the machine crushes the individual, forces him to betray everything he believes in. And even as his diary remains as evidence of what actually happened, in the future generations on stage we recognize ourselves, even with evidence in our hands, struggling distinguish truth from fabrication, still trying to get past what the ghosts in the past would have us believe. The show concludes with a disturbing thought: perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the party has been to restructure reality in such a way that we thought that it had fallen, where in reality, there it was, reaching with its tentacles from beyond the grave, making us think that war is peace, that black is white...

Let's admit to it, folks. We are not living in a totalitarian state. But we are living in a reality where individualism is increasingly devalued, and where we are being increasingly swayed to believe that truth is what we are told truth is. And the statist fellow travelers, under different names and with slightly adjusted agendas, have outlived the Communist Party, to continue affecting their influence insidiously and from within.... The Communist Party may be dead. But statism is alive, well, and proliferating, through deceptions, and propaganda, and through people trusting those they should never have trusted - and thus, the Big Brother is alive and well.

Soviet buoy washes up in Florida

Great... so now apparently Cuba is spying on the US with the assistance of ancient Soviet equipment. And pieces of it are washing up in Florida.

Protecting the Nameless Defenders

According to the latest reports, most of the diplomats attacked with sonic devices in Cuba were US intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover (Admittedly, even without official reports determining as much, this wasn't hard to surmise). This changes absolutely nothing about the course of action that should be taken. Intelligence-related attacks of this sort should not be met with impunity, and the courageous individuals who are facing such extreme danger on behalf of US security on foreign soil should be receiving best possible treatment.

How the Obama Administration Invited Foxes to Guard Chicken Houses While Crying Wolf

In the midst of the Russian hacking scandal in 2016, the HP (Hewlett Packard)  allowed Russian security firm to scrutinize cyberdefense system, which was used as a cybersecurity nerve center for much of the US military. That action may have alerted the Russians to the vulnerabilities in that system. Russians reviewed the source code - and the US intelligence and the Obama administration were aware of that and allowed this move to take place.

They then made lots of noise about DNC and Russian hackers and voting machines. When the real Russian cyberscandal lay elsewhere. The Obama administration was notorious throughout the tech world for its poor implementation of security safeguards across all agencies, and across the homeland security world, for allow Russian "diplomats" to covert near US infrastructure in various states they clearly shouldn't have been.

Now we learn that US just let the Russians examine source code for central Pentagon cybersecurity hub, with nary a word about it to the public. That's not only letting fox guard the chicken house, but inviting the fox to be there, opening all doors, and then crying wolf while pointing somewhere at a distance. Metaphorical heads should roll.

The Cuba Non-Response Response

The US has taken certain security precautions in response to the ongoing trouble for diplomats in Cuba, namely
1) cutting staff by 60% to leave only "emergency" personnel (what, they are not people?)
2) warning Americans not to travel to Cuba
3) moving visa applications for Cuban visitors to nearby countries
and
4) stopping official delegations to Cuba, though receiving diplomatic visits in the US.

You know what US hasn't done? Assigned any sort of responsibility to the Castro regime for allowing Americans to be repeatedly and continuously attacked on Cuban soil

The Cuban Travesty

What we know about the mysterious sonic  attacks against US diplomats n Cuba...

... Not much,actually.

What we know about the actions of the US government:

- Despite the multiplicity of victims,  most of the US diplomats and staff are still there.
- The State Department is planning to evacuate a "large portion" of the embassy, without clarifying when exactly that's going to happen,  nor giving reasons why it won't evacuate the entire body of our personnel, all potentially open to future attacks by the unidentified entity.
- After announcing that the State Department is considering shutting down the embassy, under pressure from five US Senators, the State Department agreed to a hastily arranged meeting with Cuban representatives, who are urging the US to be involved in the investigation and not to shut down the embassy.
- No further information about the source of the attacks was put forth at the meeting, but interesting, the US is now sure it wasn't Cuba, but no one will state what other actor it is or could be.
- Interestingly, no one raised any questions as to whether Cuba could potentially know who that other party is.
- Cuba is known to engage in friendly relations with a number of anti-Western entities, including North Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and others.

Let me get something straight here.

Cuba needs us a lot more than we need Cuba.

Yet, despite getting 0 useful information pertaining to the health of our diplomatic personnel, the State Department agrees to a meeting in the US on short notice. And immediately puts aside the question of shutting down the Embassy. And is suddenly sure that it's not Cuba, but appears uncertain of the identify of the mysterious attacker.

Color me skeptical for a moment.

What has changed from before the meeting to after?

Perhaps, the Cubans offered to cut a deal in exchange for not disrupting the relationship. What's a few dozen diplomats when major investments are at stake? The US (and various cronies) get good cuts. The affected diplomats are evacuated, at least for a while, shutting down the criticism about the urgency of the matter, while embassy remains open in a major diplomatic victory for everyone's benefited from the normalized relations (Obama's cronies, most of the career State Department employees, and those Obama appointees who are still in plays), the administration gets the credit for skillfully managing the situation, and everyone walks away happy. The culprit may never be found, but we have bigger fish to fry.

Except the inconvenient truth here is that the affected personnel is STILL in Cuba for reasons that defy logic or explanation - and that haven't, in fact, been directly addressed or explained by Tillerson or anyone else.

Cuba has recently been devastated by Hurricanes, and searching for mysterious sound devices with a flashlight is likely the least of their worries, even if they are honest about the effort.

However, most likely they are not and never have been. Here's why:

The affected territory - in and around diplomatic residences and the embassy, is limited in nature. IF this is a serious investigation involving Cuba, the US, Canada, and possibly other Western actors, if there was a stationary source of sound, it would have been found by now, or else completely destroyed by the storm. If it's a mobile device, the culprits would never leave it out there to be found. So even if Cuba is responsible for the attacks, it certainly won't ever make itself accountable, but it will play along with the United States and wag the tail nicely in order to continue reaping the benefits of normalization. More likely, if there's another entity involved, and Cuba is well aware of who it is, it gets to milk two cows - pretend to cooperate with the US in exchange for goodwill, while also getting paid off by the responsible party.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Most importantly, it can happen again and again, so long as our people are still there.

I am now convinced that simply evacuating the affected individuals, who are not even receiving the best treatment that they can in Cuba, is not enough, though it should have been the first priority.

The embassy has to be shut down for the safety of our foreign officers and other employees. We should not allow Cubans, and their malevolent buddies to play us for fools while they are enriching themselves with our investments, and legitimizing themselves  in the international community through diplomatic contacts and priority visits with our officials. If they want to build a relationship with the US, Cuban government must choose sides now, and give up whoever it is that is behind these unconscionable attacks on our personnel.

And our first duty is to our own citizens. We must regard all such incidents as attacks on our national sovereignty, acts of aggression, and do everything humanly possible to first, remove our people from the zone of danger and ensure the best possible treatment for them all, second sending a clear signal that we take such acts of aggression seriously, and third, leave any of our would-be partners with a clear choice of action: either they ensure that we get whatever we need to defang our adversaries, or they themselves will be regarded as facilitators and accessories of the aggressors and treated accordingly.