The Red Line: Guyana (Cambridge Analytica and the next Cuban Missile Crisis)

While everyone has their eyes on its imploding neighbours Guyana is entering its own new phase, one that is likely to make it one of the world's next big geopolitical flashpoints. With Iranian missiles, Cambridge Analytica buying elections, and a country up for sale this isolated jungle nation could be the next launchpad to threaten the world superpower at home.

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OCCRP: What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions

But OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers. [...]

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy. [...]

Exports to the world’s other biggest cocaine market, Europe, have suffered even less disruption. Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. [...]

Perhaps as a response to increased seizures, the street price of cocaine has risen by 20 to 30 percent during the lockdown period from mid-February until the end of April compared to the same period last year, according to Sciuto of the DCSA. Six months, criminal groups in Europe paid 25,000 to 27,000 euros for a kilogram of cocaine; they now fork out 35,000 to 37,000 euros, he said, adding that Spanish police have noticed the same trend.

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The Red Line: Venezuela

Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world was once the jewel of South America, the envy of the Latin world, but now the country sits on the brink of collapse. Venezuela has gone so far now that other nations like China, Russia, and the US have begun circling like hungry vultures, looking to smash apart the nation and divide up the assets. So this week we sit down and ask where will it all go, how did we get here and what is next for this South American titan. Giancarlo Fiorella - (Bellingcat institute) Nick Mutch - (Conflict Journalist) Christopher Sabatini - (Chatham House).

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statista: Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World's Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world's biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country. This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.

While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.

Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.

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Politico: Bolton unloads on Trump’s foreign policy behind closed doors

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s fired national security adviser, harshly criticized Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying that inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda. [...]

Speaking on an airport tarmac in Los Angeles, Trump introduced his new top foreign policy aide as “highly respected” and hailed their “good chemistry.” The remarks indicated that in O’Brien, Trump sees a more compatible adviser than Bolton, whose disagreements with the president and clashes with other senior officials often spilled into public view.

After the attack in June, Trump was poised to launch a military response against the Iranians — strongly urged by Bolton — but pulled back after Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others warned him that it was a bad idea. [...]

On Venezuela, a focus of his short White House tenure, Bolton claimed there were 20,000 to 25,000 Cuban troops in the South American country. The day they left, he predicted, the Nicholas Maduro regime would fall by midnight.

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WorldAffairs: What Comes Next? How the World's Most Violent Places Recover

The most violent places today are not at war. Eighty-three percent of all violent deaths occur outside of conflict zones, and in 2015, more people died violently in Brazil than in Syria’s civil war. Yet multiple places which were once engulfed in violence and instability have recovered and have since formed stable democracies. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security", joins Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, in conversation about how violent and weak states transform into stable ones.

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Politico: How Trump’s ‘weaponized’ use of foreign aid is backfiring

President Donald Trump has so closely linked U.S. humanitarian assistance to his attempt to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro — even placing goods along the country’s border as an incentive for Venezuelans to revolt — that some groups are citing security concerns and asking U.S. officials if they can strip legally required U.S. branding from aid sent to Venezuela, three aid officials told POLITICO. [...]

The situation reflects broader fears that Trump’s unusually politicized approach to handing out U.S. aid worldwide is backfiring, tarnishing America’s brand and possibly risking the lives of people from Latin America to the Palestinian territories. [...]

“This whole idea that in Venezuela aid was going to be part of a political change process — it’s rare to see it that overt,” said Joel Charny of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has not yet received U.S. funding for work inside Venezuela. “It’s just not a good way to do aid. If you’re really concerned about the welfare of the people of Venezuela you find the ways that are available to get the maximum amount of assistance to those people.”

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Vox: Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans (Nov 27, 2018)

Colombia is currently dealing with a massive wave of refugees coming from Venezuela. Venezuelans are fleeing their home because of a severe economic crisis under President Nicolas Maduro. There are high inflation rates and there isn’t enough food available for people within Venezuela to even eat. Thousands of Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge located at Cúcuta every day and Colombia doesn’t seem to be turning anyone way.

This borders episode looks at why Colombia doesn’t turn away these refugees, the shared history of the two nations and how there may be a limit to Colombia’s acceptance of incoming Venezuelans.

Foreign Affairs: Why Venezuela’s Regime Hasn’t Collapsed

To succeed in ousting Maduro, however, Guaidó will need to get the Venezuelan armed forces on his side. Maduro does not have the charisma of Hugo Chávez, who was the country’s president from 1999 until his death, in 2013, nor has he been able to benefit from the same oil windfall as his predecessor. Since coming to power, Maduro has overseen a country in crisis. Inflation is expected to reach ten million percent this year, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have fled the country, and the ones staying behind lack food and medicines. Unsurprisingly, Maduro is deeply unpopular, and he has relied on the military for his government’s survival. In exchange for suppressing popular discontent, the military has gotten control of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, and used the government’s mantle of impunity to run and profit from drug trafficking and black-market trading. High-ranking members in the armed forces continue siding with Maduro because they do not want to lose this revenue stream or face prosecution for corruption, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses such as the death of protesters, unjust imprisonment, and torture. [...]

The opposition has also made it costlier for the military to keep supporting the regime by organizing peaceful demonstrations. The number of such protests has gone up dramatically in recent months, from around 700 from October to December 2018 to more than 6,000 in the first three months of 2019. The government, unwilling to respond to the protesters’ concerns, has resorted to repression, imprisoning activists and opposition leaders and at times even firing on protesters. This strategy can easily fail, since it might encourage the defections of officers who are reluctant to use violence against fellow citizens or who worry about facing human rights trials in the future.

Part of the problem is a lack of trust on both sides. There is ample evidence suggesting that low- and high-ranking members of the armed forces are ready to withdraw their support from Maduro. The alleged backdoor deal between opposition and government officials ahead of the April 30 uprising indicates that opposition leaders and individuals close to the president could indeed come to an agreement. How to guarantee and enforce the terms of the deal, however, is a more complicated story. The opposition has a hard time trusting powerful regime insiders, since the latter have often just used negotiations with the opposition to buy time. Guaidó also needs to balance different factions inside the opposition, some of which are more willing to compromise with the regime than others.

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The Guardian: Venezuela’s dead revolution shows the limitations of the crowd

The greatest of historical fallacies is to confuse crowds with power. Venezuela has disappeared from the headlines, because its headlines were about crowds, not about the realities of power. The trouble with crowds is that, sooner or later, they go home. The Arab spring of 2011 was about what took place in the streets of various capital cities. Crowds were reputedly drawn by the much-vaunted rallying cry of social media, but they dissolved in many places into nothingness. [...]

Mercifully, power in a democracy emanates from the ballot box. Probably the biggest crowd in London’s history, against the Iraq war of 2003, had zero impact on the elected government of Tony Blair. Today, no remain rally can reverse the 2016 referendum, just as no leave rally is entitled to claim crowd authority for a no-deal Brexit. That is the problem with crowds. They don’t do subtlety.[...]

We warm instinctively to crowds. They offer comfort and reassurance to us in our opinions. They mobilise emotion among the like-minded, and smother argument in fellow feeling. We sometimes forget that crowds can cut two ways. They can also be harnessed as an aid to leadership, as by the fascist movement, or as rabble to be suppressed as a totem of power. Maduro was able to stage an apparently sizeable rally in his own support. [...]

I believe that where the crowd can be most effective is when deployed tactically against a specific, winnable goal. In the climate change argument, local crowds in the north of England have all but stopped fracking. Anti-GM food campaigners won their war in Europe. Demonstrators against the Sackler family in New York are wrecking its reputation and cutting arts funding. Where power is shamed by publicity, it can concede ground without too much inconvenience. I would love to be a “crowd consultant”.

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Today in Focus: The Venezuela uprising: the story so far

Juan Guaidó described his attempted uprising last month as the “final phase” of his plan to oust Nicolás Maduro. But after a day of chaos and confusion in which Guaidó’s mentor, Leopoldo López, was sprung from house arrest, the Venezuelan president was still in power and many of the plotters had gone into hiding.

The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, is in Caracas and describes to Anushka Asthana the sense of defiance among supporters of Maduro, and Guaidó’s mood of optimism in an exclusive Guardian interview.

Also today: the Guardian columnist Owen Jones on the headteacher of the public school Stowe, who has claimed Oxbridge is persecuting students from elite backgrounds.

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The New Yorker: An Unflinching View of Venezuela in Crisis

Alejandro Cegarra’s photo series “State of Decay” is an unflinching portrait of Venezuela’s collapse. How this country went from being one of Latin America’s richest societies to one of its poorest is a disaster of bewildering proportions, one that defies easy explanation. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but since the 2014 crash in world oil prices, on which Venezuela depended for more than ninety per cent of its export revenues, its economy has contracted continuously, unleashing an economic crisis worse than that experienced by Americans during the Great Depression. In the past five years, three million of Venezuela’s thirty-two million people have fled the country. More than half of all Venezuelans lack enough food to meet their daily needs. The country’s hospital system has all but failed; countless Venezuelans have died owing to a lack of medical attention and the scarcity of medicines for treatable illnesses. Hyperinflation is expected to reach ten million per cent this year. On top of everything else, Venezuela’s murder rate is among the world’s highest, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live in.

Shot between 2013 and 2019, Cegarra’s remarkable series of black and white images takes us beyond these statistics. (This year, the project was nominated for a World Press Photo award.) A native of Caracas, Cegarra depicts life in his home town as precariously strung-out and pared-down, shorn of any softness. We see street preachers shouting, inmates weightlifting, children running in fear, bloodstains on the ground, predatory soldiers with masked faces and black helmets, men brandishing weapons, one of them a youngster standing purposefully with a sawed-off shotgun. There are listless people in supermarkets with empty shelves, funerals and mourners, women and children with fear on their faces.[...]

At his swearing-in ceremony, in February of 1999, Chávez promised to transform Venezuela—and over the next decade and a half he did just that. While a global oil-price boom brought a trillion dollars into his treasury, Chávez declared his country to be the chrysalis of a revolutionary political force that he dubbed “twenty-first-century socialism.” He aligned himself with Cuba and spoke out against the United States. Meanwhile, the oil money was spent as fast as it came in, much of it on social programs to alleviate poverty, but also on expensive Russian weaponry for the armed forces and on subsidies to Cuba and other friendly governments that signed onto Chávez’s vision of a world free of Yankee domination.

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Haaretz: The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu 'Arch-murderer'

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election. [...]

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’” [...]

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic. [...]

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

Foreign Policy: Can a New Currency End Tehran’s Economic Woes?

Faced with surging inflation and a falling national currency due to harsh U.S. sanctions that were reimposed after the United States unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal with world powers in May, Iran is planning to remove four zeros from the rial, taking its current official exchange rate with the U.S. dollar from 42,000 to the more palatable 4.2. The official rate is meaningless on the street, however; in reality, the value of the rial is far less – this week, it was trading at 120,000 to the dollar on the black market. [...]

The redenomination proposal comes just over two years after a previous attempt on a smaller scale. In early December 2016, President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet approved a measure aimed at removing one zero from the national currency, effectively introducing the toman as the new official unit. Officials emphasized that it was not an attempt at redenomination but merely an initiative aimed at easing day-to-day transactions. It was criticized as a costly and insufficient move, so the initiative remained in a state of limbo and was ultimately rejected by lawmakers in September 2018. [...]

But in addition to the currency crisis and inflation, the local political landscape is also different this time. There is much more cooperation between Rouhani’s administration and parliament in terms of reaching economic solutions. For months, parliament’s economic commission has been reviewing and gradually passing bank reforms that promise to deliver the biggest changes to Iran’s banking system in decades— including granting the CBI more independence. [...]

In 2005, neighboring Turkey took six zeros off its currency and redenominated the lira in response to an inflation rate of higher than 50 percent. The move was relatively successful because it was implemented in tandem with wider reforms. But Turkey’s 2018 currency crisis proved immensely challenging and again decreased confidence in the lira mostly due to a problematic banking system. Turkey’s central bank gained independence in 2001 in the aftermath of an economic crisis, but that hasn’t meant it has been fully free of government meddling.

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Jacobin Magazine: Latin America’s Re-Militarization

Law No. 13.491, passed by the Brazilian Congress in October 2017, gives military courts jurisdiction over their personnel accused of human rights violations. Prior to the law’s approval, the Ministry of Defense publicly made the case that allowing civilian courts to handle such cases would hinder policing operations. Michel Temer’s administration increasingly used the armed forces for domestic policing duties, whether in rural areas against land rights activists or in the favelas and peripheries of major cities.

Brazil’s 2008 “pacification” policy led to the deployment of military personnel to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the militarization of policing intensified in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of civilians are killed by the military and police each year. The new Ministry for Public Security, created in February, is led by an army general, and in May the Brazilian military was deployed in response to the nationwide truckers’ strike that blockaded highways. This was the first time the military had been used in this way since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.[...]

Brazil is not alone in militarizing its justice system. Military courts are increasingly asserting jurisdiction throughout Latin America. In June 2015, Colombia passed a bill similar to the one adopted in Brazil, shifting jurisdiction for most crimes committed by members of the military to the military courts. The Constitutional Court struck down the first two iterations of the bill, but the government was determined to make the change and crafted a slightly narrower law that has since taken effect. Since 2005, Venezuela has been using military courts extensively to prosecute civilians involved in protests against the government. In Chile, cases of human rights violations committed by the military are still tried in military courts. [....]

Many politicians have run on platforms promising to be “tough on crime” and have deployed the military to conduct domestic policing operations, as in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Elected leaders, seeking to deliver results for their voters in fighting drug trafficking and gang violence, are turning to their militaries and equipping them with increased legal powers.

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The Washington Post: Trump’s ‘populism’ is just a search for scapegoats

In Venezuela, the Maduro regime has accused companies that refuse to sell things for less than they cost — the result of how high the government has pushed inflation and how low it has set price controls — of waging an “economic war” against the so-called Bolivarian revolution. The government has nationalized factories in response and then sold things at a loss itself, which, of course, has only added to its money-printing needs.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at what he calls the “interest-rate lobby” for trying to force the “mother and father of all evil”— higher interest rates — onto the country as a supposedly quack cure for Turkey's sagging currency and growing inflation. Erdogan, you see, believes against all evidence that lower rates actually cause lower inflation, rather than the other way around, and he has said central bankers would be guilty of “treason” if they didn't go along with that. [...]

But that's almost beside the point. The real story is that, like President Nicolás Maduro's inability to understand that price controls cause shortages or Erdogan's ignorance about the fact that lower interest rates actually lead to higher inflation, the Trump team seems actually shocked to find out that taxing imports so that they cost more makes things, yes, cost more.  

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Haaretz: New U.S.-Russia-Saudi Oil Alliance Could Also Have Implications for Israel and Iran

The two governments – also two of the world’s major energy producers – had reportedly agreed to “institutionalize” the relationship between Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Does this include all the OPEC members who are meeting in Vienna on Friday? Almost certainly not.

OPEC exists in theory to ensure its members’ market share of the global energy market and to try and boost oil prices, ensuring their major source of income remains lucrative. But it depends on consensus and coordination between the members. And geopolitics can intrude – in this case, the deepening enmity between two of the major oil producers: the Saudis and Iran. [...]

Now, though, some nations – led by the Saudis and Russia – are calling for an increase in production. They are losing market share to U.S. shale oil producers and argue that, since demand is currently high, putting more oil on the market will not dramatically affect prices. They calculate that any dip in prices will be offset by the increase in production. [...]

A U.S.-Saudi-Russia axis could increase the Trump administration’s economic clout, especially when it is anticipating trade wars with Europe and China. It would also lock the United States into a new power partnership, separate from its traditional alliances in NATO and with the European Union, fulfilling Putin’s long-cherished dream of undermining the postwar Western alliances that prevailed over the Soviet Union. Now it seems he wants to undermine OPEC as well.

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The New Yorker: Trump’s Imploding World Order

Trump still wants a summit with Kim Jong Un, the White House insisted on Thursday. As Trump headed to his helicopter on Friday morning, he told reporters that discussions between Washington and Pyongyang had resumed. He even held out hope for the June 12th date in Singapore. But his words were the latest unsettling prospect in a tumultuous time of all-or-nothing diplomacy that intrinsically increases the dangers of conflict. In the sixteen months of Trump’s Presidency, the United State has witnessed a stunning undoing of long-standing norms—of the U.S.-led world order, core alliances, trade pacts, principles of nonproliferation, patterns of globalization, world institutions, and, most of all, U.S. influence. A lot of it began in 2003, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it has accelerated with breathtaking speed since Trump took office. [...]

The litany is long: a rising China; Russia’s interference in several democratic elections and its forcible challenge of sovereign borders; North Korea’s unprecedented nuclear arsenal; Syria’s catastrophic civil war; Iran’s destabilizing interventions and the collapse of the nuclear deal; new turmoil along the Israeli-Palestinian border; the unravelling of global trade pacts; the dismemberment of the European Union; Venezuela’s breakdown; and America’s longest war, in Afghanistan. [...]

Trump has disrupted the global order far more than the domestic order, Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, told me. “Domestically, the President has not had a huge impact on policy. Everything has been resisted by the ‘swamp,’ the bureaucracy, and Congress,” he said. “Internationally, the world was already moving away from the U.S.-led order when Trump took office. But he is pushing a rock that was already rolling down the hill much faster.” In a commencement speech at the Naval Academy on Friday, Trump touted the success of an agenda that rejects past policies and promotes stand-alone U.S. supremacy in the world. “We are not going to apologize for America—we are going to stand up for America. No more apologies,” Trump said. “They are respecting us again. Yes, America is back.” He told cadets at the Annapolis stadium, “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Nothing like winning. You got to win.” [...]

Trump has even challenged the notion of a united Europe, suggesting that other nations may want to follow suit after Britain’s decision to exit the European Union. Since the nineteen-fifties, merging Europe into a common whole has been a central U.S. principle to foster peace on a continent rife with conflict for centuries. The cracks in America’s core alliances are weakening the West—and its ability to forge peace through joint policies. In turn, challengers, notably China, are gaining ground.

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Quartz: What will Cuba’s revolution look like without a Castro in charge?

The National Assembly on Thursday confirmed the only candidate for the post, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s first vice president and a Communist Party loyalist. He replaces Raúl Castro, who took over the country’s leadership from his brother Fidel in 2006. [...]

Still, in many ways, Cuba’s presidential transition is far from revolutionary. It’s part of the periodic updating the Castro brothers have carried out to maintain Cuba’s socialist regime, whether it be by opening up the economy or dialing back state repression. Like his predecessors, Cuba’s new president will have to rejigger the definition of the Castro revolution to handle the island’s economic and political reality—currently in a precarious state. [...]

The latest iteration of the revolution, as shaped by Raúl, is still in dire need of revision, observers point out. It remains hobbled by its two-currency system—one for locals, another pegged to the dollar for tourists and international business—that stalls economic growth. Cuba must also deal with the collapse of Venezuela, which it relied upon for cheap oil.

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The New Yorker: Putin, a Little Man Still Trying to Prove His Bigness

During his third term as President, which began in 2012, Putin and his allies grew increasingly ambitious, seizing Crimea, in 2014, intervening in Syria’s civil war, in 2015, meddling in the 2016 American Presidential election, allegedly plotting the assassinations of exiles and dissidents over the past couple of years, and, shortly before the 2018 Russian Presidential election, boasting of a new nuclear weapon capable of evading U.S. missile defenses. [...]

“He is not necessarily a Soviet man, but he is a Cold War man. And he’s a K.G.B. man,” Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, reflected at an event at the New School, in New York, last month. “And, for every K.G.B. officer, it was a dream to be known or to be thought of as somebody who can take down American democracy. For him, that image around the world would probably be even more important than this kind of partnership and parity with the United States.” [...]

Western powers long considered resistant to Russian mischief are increasingly vulnerable. Britain is now investigating whether Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 referendum on Brexit. In Germany, Russia allegedly exploited tensions over immigration to undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s strongest advocate for aiding desperate refugees from war-torn countries. Moscow is blamed, for example, for planting a false story about a thirteen-year-old German girl abducted by migrants that emotionally skewed Germany’s immigration debate in the run-up to its election last year. Meanwhile, Spain has charged Russia with fomenting support for the Catalan referendum on independence in 2017. [...]

Russia may now be questioning its investment in Trump’s victory, however. Since his election, Trump has—so far—not helped improve Moscow’s relationship with Washington. This month, the United States imposed new sanctions on Russia—including on its intelligence service—for cyberattacks on the American electricity grid, aviation, and other infrastructure. “The Russians may want to take credit for Trump’s victory, but they may now see that as a mixed blessing,” Tom Pickering, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Under-Secretary of State, said. “They have a man in power who acts as if he’s on a reality-TV show, for whom governance is a second priority.”

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