President Obama is belatedly treating the Russian cyberassault on the US elections with the gravity it deserves. The American leader claims to have evidence that Vladimir Putin directed the hacks that helped to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And he vows to retaliate “at a time and place of our own choosing”.
In reality the president has barely a month left to act before the inauguration of his successor, President Trump. If he is to punish President Putin then he must do so swiftly and not only because Donald Trump, in his eagerness to shape a new relationship with the Kremlin, may bury the hacking. The United States has been exposed as a diminished power unable to defend its cyberborders. It is a dangerous signal to send to the world.
The response of the Obama administration has been slow and embarrassed. That is because it fears a cyberconflict could slide into a full-scale cyberwar. If you rattle your sabre in cyberspace, say the experts, it is often unclear what you’re rattling and whether it will change behaviour. Cyberwar operates in uncharted domains and Russia is more experienced and more accomplished with those uncertainties.
Mr Putin’s denials are no longer credible. He has mounted a challenge to the US and, implicitly, to Europe. His hackers have the capacity, and full political backing, to meddle in elections and undermine western institutions. The Kremlin’s intended message is surely this: we can show the West that liberal democracy is weak and decadent. State-steered hacking plays into Russia’s broader strategy of disinformation, manipulation of the facts and hybrid warfare. All have been wheeled out during the Obama years to test the limits of his passivity and to split the western alliance.
The stealthy infiltration of eastern Ukraine was accompanied by the hacking of the electric power grid. The facts surrounding the shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine were masked by Russia. Double dealing over Syria and manipu- lating the Olympics; every move has shown contempt for the US and for Britain. The Russian propaganda machine, through Russia Today and Sputnik, tried to influence outcomes in the Scottish and EU referendums. Its displays of strength have been designed to demonstrate Britain’s weakness. It has sent an aircraft carrier through the English Channel on its way to help to bomb Syria in the knowledge that Britain plays a marginal military role in the campaign.
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Mr Trump continues to argue, as does Mr Putin himself, that there is no clinching evidence of Russian subversion. To do so, however, is to deny an inconvenient fact. Mr Putin has embarked on a challenge to the West that is tantamount to a modern Cold War. The stakes are different — the paralysis of western governance rather than nuclear destruction. Yet the brinkmanship of Mr Putin injects so much risk into the international system that a cyberwar stand-off could slide towards a military showdown.
President Obama has to choose a response that does not risk splitting the West and one that does not give away too much information about American cybercapabilities.
What is needed now is a swift and potent response, the departing president’s last chance to project power. Tighter sanctions against Russia could be reversed by a Trump administration. But the declassification and publication of documents peeling away the facts about Mr Putin’s personal fortune would have a real impact. Much information has already been gathered by the US Treasury department. The Kremlin’s stealth would thus be countered by western openness. The details would be a revelation to many Russians and would spread alarm among the elite. Who knows? It might even cast a shadow over the Russian leader’s re-election bid in 2018.