Jill Kastner, William C. Wohlforth
LONDON, APRIL 29 (PS) – In 1933, when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, he told Joseph Stalin that the Kremlin would first have to knock off its subversive activities inside the United States. Likewise, when President Ronald Reagan wanted to ease Cold War tensions, his Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, made it clear to Mikhail Gorbachev that Soviet spooks must stop spreading lies about AIDS being caused by US bioweapons research.
President Donald Trump seems to want to follow his predecessors in improving relations with the Russians. But instead of demanding that the Kremlin curtail its skullduggery, his administration is unilaterally disarming – offering a quid with no quo. Since returning to office, he has gutted agencies that serve as bulwarks against foreign meddling.
For example, the new administration has fired FBI officials who were involved in criminal cases against Trump, depriving the bureau of dozens of its most experienced agents, as well as removing or reassigning top officials at the FBI’s national-security group and intelligence division. At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, at least 17 employees tasked with protecting electoral integrity and combating disinformation have been sacked under the guise of returning the agency to its original focus on critical infrastructure (never mind that electoral systems fall into that category).
Similar cuts have taken place at the CIA and the NSA: the director and deputy director of the latter were fired apparently on the advice of the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. And on top of it all, Trump recently signed an executive order cutting funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which supports, among other things, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America.
All these cuts leave America vulnerable to foreign subversion. Gutting the FBI weakens its ability to investigate foreign meddling, while firing the experts who help defend US elections gives America’s enemies more opportunities to sow confusion with conspiracy theories and cast doubt on election results.
We have already seen the effects of such malign influences in American politics, and now the problem will get even worse. The arbitrary firings at intelligence agencies create a cohort of financially precarious, potentially disgruntled current and former employees who will be targeted by foreign intelligence services; efforts by Russia and China to hire former employees are already ramping up, aided by recruitment agencies that may or may not reveal their clients’ identity.
Similarly, silencing strategic foreign broadcasters like Radio Free Europe deprives the US of a valuable source of soft power around the world. At a time when Russia and China are expanding their own soft-power operations, it makes no sense to shut these organizations down.
Having just written a book about the history of subversion, A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, we can speak to how odd this behavior is. In all our case studies of subversive activity and how to counter it, from the ancient world to the present day, we haven’t seen a single example in which a target unilaterally disarmed. What’s going on?
Foreign efforts to weaken or change the policies of a top power are as old as statecraft itself. While the Trump administration is entitled to reorganize the bureaucracy within the parameters of the law, its indiscriminate approach contradicts 2,000 years of great powers using defense, deterrence, and diplomacy to manage foreign threats.
A country defends against foreign meddling by educating its citizens and hardening itself against would-be attackers – for example, by providing resources and advice to election workers at the local level. It deters subversion by threatening painful responses if matters get out of hand – for example, by broadcasting unpleasant truths into the subverter’s territory, or by shutting down key capabilities, as US Cyber Command did to Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2018 midterm elections.
Targeted countries also use diplomatic carrots and sticks to keep adversaries’ subversive operations at a tolerable level – for example, by offering to reduce their own subversive measures (such as democracy promotion, which is threatening from the Kremlin’s perspective). But for such measures to make any strategic sense, a quo must follow the quid.
Is the Trump administration engaged in elaborate dealmaking behind the scenes, perhaps encouraging the Russians to back off in a mutual de-escalation? If not, what we are witnessing is unprecedented. It makes no strategic sense for the US to stop playing hardball with enemies who are continuing to subvert it.
Unilaterally removing the guardrails that protect against disinformation, election meddling, and similar hostile activities is obviously dangerous. Is there some unappreciated strategic logic to disrupting America’s defenses, or is Trump driven solely by his neuralgia over the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia during his first term?
Given the Trump administration’s apparently self-destructive moves, Americans are owed an explanation. While some tactics may need to be kept secret, the broader strategy should be subject to democratic accountability. In the case of both Roosevelt and Reagan, trade-offs in the subversion game were transparent and public. Under the former, official US policy was to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until various conditions were met – among them a halt to subversive activity in the US. Under the latter, the Active Measures Working Group at the State Department worked publicly with editors and diplomats worldwide to publicize Soviet disinformation.
Chaos in US defenses leaves the country vulnerable to its adversaries. If Trump truly cares about America’s sovereignty, he should make a persuasive effort to reassure the public that the country’s defenses are not being compromised.
Jill Kastner is a visiting research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the co-author (with William C. Wohlforth) of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford University Press, 2025). William C. Wohlforth is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the co-author (with Jill Kastner) of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
