Befuddled: How America Can Get Its Voice Back

Abstract

OnMarch 18, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin strode into the Kremlin’s gold-drenched Georgievsky reception hall to announce the annexation of Crimea. Kyiv was aghast, and western capitals spluttered with indignation, but the applause in Moscow was as thunderous as anything anyone had heard in decades. The takeover of Crimea relied more on influence than brute force. The Kremlin had spent years subjugating domestic media, honing its prowess at cyber operations, dispatching armies of bots to manipulate discourse on the internet, and putting a friendly spin on the news outside Russia with well-produced television broadcasts. In February 2014, Russia used its manipulation machine to pull off the largest land grab in Europe since the Second World War without losing a single soldier. Two years later, American voters went to the polls to choose a president. As they mulled their decision, some of them saw politically polarizing content amplified by troll farms on social media. Others absorbed press coverage of leaks that cast aspersions on Hillary Clinton. Unbeknownst to American voters, online operators employed by a friend of President Putin had cooked up the content, while the leaks were the handiwork of Russian military intelligence. These two operations marked the culmination of an extraordinary effort of reconstruction. For two decades, a motley crew answering ultimately to the Kremlin had painstakingly rebuilt their country’s institutional infrastructure for projecting influence. They had vivid memories of the 1980s when Soviet