But Russia’s larger gains came over the 10 years after November 2016, when the man Moscow helped elect dismantled U.S. defenses against foreign election interference, cast doubt on the U.S. commitment to NATO, and withheld assistance to Ukraine while it fought for its existence. These acts did not require collusion with Russian intelligence or a conspiracy hatched in Trump Tower, only an alignment of interests. The hand that mattered most was never hidden, and it did not belong to the sponsor but to the supported party—Trump.
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We have no public evidence that Putin planned any of this or foresaw all the second-order consequences. Overstating Moscow’s prowess, Cormac and his co-authors warn, may breed conspiracism, as it did after 2016, when “the Russian hand appeared everywhere.” Further, unlike most leaders installed or propped up by covert interventions, Trump was never a client that Moscow had to manage or sustain in office xx.
Few analogues to this exist in the public record. The U.S. funded Italy’s Christian Democrats from 1948 to 1968 and Eduardo Frei’s 1964 win in Chile. However, in each case, exposure came many years later, and the U.S. disclosed the operation itself through congressional investigations such as the Church Committee in 1975—long after the governments Washington had backed had left power.
In 1972, the East German Stasi bribed the West German opposition to defeat a no-confidence vote against Chancellor Willy Brandt, but the proof emerged only after the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany’s archives opened. In 2020, the United Kingdom’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported that the British government never looked into Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum. As a committee member put it, “no one wanted to know if there was interference”—different circumstances, same incentive.
In the 2016 case, the Kremlin has never acknowledged the operation, even after Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose company financed the Internet Research Agency, boasted on the eve of the 2022 midterms, “We have interfered, we are interfering, and we will continue to interfere.” It does not have to. The operation created the incentive, and Trump supplied the rest.
