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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rices book, Democracy: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom, published in May, focuses on the merits of democratic systems of government and the need for the United States to remain active in promoting democracy around the world. It could not have come at a better time.

It is the most readable book on U.S. and Western democracy promotion since Natan Sharansky published The Case for Democracy more than ten years ago. Rice makes the case that the United States must continue to leverage its national example, diplomatic power, and international foreign assistance budget to strengthen and spread democracy. I do not know Rice, although I served in the George W. Bush administration, but I strongly support her focus on democracy promotion. I have voted with my feet on this issue by sitting on the bipartisan board of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems a democracy promotion organization funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other bilateral aid donors.

Rices book comes after more than a decade of limited success for the democracy project. The folks in the business call this limited progress the democracy recession. One can count on one hand the big wins for democracy in recent years. Myanmar is the country that comes to mind. At the same time, she reminds the reader that although democracy has been in recession for the last 15 years, we should recognize the great progress that has taken place over the last 50, 100, or 200 years. She includes a number of maps of the world to make that point. She also rightly references that, according to Freedom House, there are around 150 free and partly free countries out of about 200 countries in the world. This is a sign of major progress.

The book is thoroughly researched and includes country case studies that provide snapshots of various stages of democratic development. Rice covers Poland, Kenya, Colombia, Ukraine, Russia, and various countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Iraq, Tunisia, and Egypt. In each of the case study, Rice brings personal anecdotes from her time as national security adviser or secretary of state. The studies of Russia and Ukraine benefit from her decades of exposure to that part of the world. The fact that she speaks fluent Russian and was a Sovietologist (my Microsoft Word does not recognize this as an actual word, which says something) provides even greater insight.

Perhaps what makes the book most interesting is its constant return to the American experience. She includes a chapter about American democratic development, and reminds readers that women did not get the vote in the United States until 1920 and that African Americans were not fully given the right to vote until the 1960s. Her experiences as an African American woman in various parts of the world including in Alabama provide some important insights and perspective. Strikingly, she mentions that she has never missed an opportunity to vote because it would be an insult to her ancestors who did not have the chance to vote. Why does she use the American experience? One of the key messages of the book, and an observation that she tries to drive home, is that democracy takes a long time to build and that progress is not linear.

The book offers an implicit defense of the Bush administrations Freedom Agenda, outlined in Bushs second inaugural address in 2005. She discusses the halting progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, but notes that both countries have held multiple elections and have a variety of functioning, albeit weak, institutions. She remains optimistic that, in the long term, these countries will become democracies. Rice also takes on one of the usual critiques of the democracy agenda, which points to the successes of places such as Singapore and China. She spends significant time looking at China and ultimately concludes that China will also become more democratic over time.

What about the upheavals in 2016, such as Brexit and the surprise election of President Donald Trump? She gently disagrees with those who say these outcomes put the system at risk. She says that these events represent voters seeking to make change peacefully. She defends the rule-based international order set up after World War II, but also signals that many people have either not benefited from globalization or see many of the changes ushered in by globalization as threats to traditional ways of life or traditional values. Those who seek to promote globalization need to account for those threatened by it. She also makes the case that we need to be brought together and not be sliced and diced into ever smaller groups, each with their own interests. In summary, she suggests that the voters have given policymakers and politicians a series of strong messages, and that they should listen to the voters.

Rice makes the case that democracy promotion is unambiguously in Americas interest. Democracies are much less likely to go to war, much less likely to participate in terrorist attacks, and much less likely to tolerate human trafficking than nondemocratic countries. Many global problems are caused by authoritarian regimes (often weak and failed states, I would add). So democracy promotion is not only a values proposition, but also in our enlightened self interest over the long term.

In some ways, Rices book is welcome not only because of the democracy recession, but also because of the perceived reluctance of the Obama and Trump administrations to prioritize democracy promotion. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush each supported different dimensions of the democracy promotion agenda. Giving credit where credit is due, Myanmars opening happened under the Obama administrations watch, and the United States played a critical role in helping birth its young democracy.

Rice likely wrote this book in part to prepare current and future policymakers for the long slog ahead. The bad guys have gotten a lot better at countering the use of social media (for example, the Great Firewall of China). Russia and its partners are very aggressive about closing civil societys space. In addition, a number of the unfree countries look like pretty hard dictatorships to crack from the outside. Rice and Sharansky would argue that we cannot know for sure if change is coming to these societies. Sharansky argues that dictatorships are actually quite brittle because of the way those societies are organized. Who, for example, would have said the Soviet Union was going to collapse less than ten years after 1982?

Finally, one of the last chapters in the book is titled, They will look to America. Will we be ready? Many observers worry that the Trump administration has already deemphasized the democracy agenda. They point to Trumps so-called skinny budget, which decreases funding for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and zeroes out the Democracy Fund. At the same time, the skinny budget does not reflect what Congress will appropriate and Congress has a large number of democracy promotion champions on both sides of the aisle. Critics also point to Secretary of State Rex Tillersons unusual absence from the release of the annual Human Rights Report by the State Department, a report that is traditionally presented by the secretary of state. All of the above makes democracy advocates around the world nervous.

On the other hand, Mark Green is the new administrator of USAID, which is a major funder of democracy promotion activities by the U.S. government. Green is a former member of Congress and the former head of the International Republican Institute, one of the four National Endowment for Democracy institutes. Also, the Trump administration has rightly raised concerns about democracy and human rights in Cuba, Syria, and Venezuela, among other countries. I recently asked a prominent democracy promotion advocate if he was worried about whether the United States would engage in democracy promotion under Trump. He told me, I am not worried because of Article One of the U.S. Constitution and the naming of Mark Green as USAID administrator.

Photo credit:ROB KIM/Getty Images

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Condoleezza Rice's Book on Democracy Could Not Have Come at a ... - Foreign Policy (blog)

America has two democracies, one political and the other free market. The concept of a political democracy dates back to Plato and his Republic.

Ludwig von Mises and my mentor Dr. Bill Peterson (a student and colleague of Mises) wrote extensively about our market democracy. Both of these great men are now just a memory but their legacy defines America. The political class dominates the news, while the market provides the solutions chosen by our citizens.

Plato described the political democracy as full of disorder. Today, the political democracy provides a spectacle of unpleasant news and often nastiness. Fights endure about historic statues, taxes, wars, foreign influences, and the size and reach of government. Politicians are often brutish, unpleasant, and uninformed individuals who ignore history, cater to special interests, and place selfish motives as their highest values. Only on rare occasions do these politicians reflect the heart of so many great Americans, who are kind, generous, fair, and God fearing.

Thankfully, in spite of the daily circus, our political democracy has largely achieved freedom, order, and the opportunity for our market democracy to prosper, as envisioned by our founders. We all owe an extreme debt of gratitude to our founders for their extraordinary vision, understanding of human nature, and willingness to sacrifice their lives for this amazing country. The United States of America was divinely inspired and our freedoms are embedded into the greatest constitution in the history of the world.

Americas other democracy, as Dr. Peterson liked to call our market democracy, is a continuous plebiscite of every citizen. It is supremely fair and must please the users or fail. Bad actors are weeded out in real time, quickly and adroitly. New ideas and companies are constantly entering the market with their only goal the desire to please the voter (buyer).

Our modern democratic market is a marvel catering to every need and whim of the citizens. Government has a measure of control over business, but the ultimate control and outcome is determined by the minute-to-minute decisions of the buyers, users, and customers.

The market also reflects the values of our citizens including fairness, equal opportunities, and the widest range of choice as companies compete. Citizens hold the fate of every business in their hands (iPhones) with a plethora of buying prerogatives. Buying habits, and thus the market, are rapidly changing as users abandon department stores in favor of online ordering and delivery without ever leaving the home. Even food and grocery providers now participate in this new landscape with cooked meals delivered at the precise location and time desired, as dictated by the buyer.

America continues to demonstrate the wisdom of our Founders, exhibiting an extraordinarily high standard of living and decency in our society. Our private institutions and businesses solve most of the challenges that our political democracy fails to resolve.

Private education and homeschooling are blossoming, creating a wide variety of choices for families and students. Private boards lead and manage public charter schools. Private companies provide drugs and health care technologies that save lives and solve complex medical challenges. MOOCs and distance learning (online universities) are becoming the norm, disrupting the expensive and lethargic colleges and universities.

Our political democracy will always be chaotic, but thankfully we have Silicon Valley (a proxy for American ingenuity) and our market democracy transforming every industry from information technology, transportation, and education to communication and manufacturing. This process is disruptive and challenging but it continually improves the standard of living and quality of life of every American.

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America's Two Democracies - American Spectator

Dr. Martina Klicperova-Baker, a senior researcher from the Institute of Psychology & Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic, spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Tuesday, Aug. 22.

She opened her presentation on the state of democracy in Europe by referencing her own experience of living with, and losing, democracy in her own country.

Thank you for sharing with me your solar eclipse, Klicperova-Baker said. The day of the Soviet invasion [of the Czech Republic] in 1968 was the day of the eclipse. It is a day ingrained in our memory. It began an age of totality that lasted 20 years.

Klicperova-Baker was invited by the universitys Czech and Global Studies programs to utilize her specialties in the psychology of democracy, the transition to democracy and political psychology to discuss democracy in Europe.

She began the program by discussing the institution of democracy.

Quoting Madeleine Albright, Klicperova-Baker said, While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run it is the most fragile.

Despite the permanent tension of democracy, Klicperova-Baker said its the regime that best secures the rights and self-actualization of its citizens.

Democracies are killing fewer of their own citizens than other regimes, Klicperova-Baker said. And real democracies do not wage war with each other.

Klicperova-Baker pointed to democracies around the world, such as Canada and Australia, as examples of secular democratic systems in which citizens enjoy a high quality of life, yet conceded that, while democracy is imperfect, we dont have anything better.

The more we approach [an ideal democracy], the more it is running away from us, Klicperova-Baker said. It is always on the horizon.

Klicperova-Baker said the number of people living in democratic institutions around the world is growing, but the number of those in autocracies remains stable.

She attributed the difficulty of maintaining a healthy democracy as a reason autocracies remain prominent.

Humans are not necessarily naturally predisposed to a positive democratic coexistence, Klicperova-Baker said. The human psyche is, to a great degree, selfish and self-serving.

Klicperova-Baker then moved to the structure of democracy, breaking it down to its simplest values by alluding to the French Revolutions motto of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Liberty, or freedom, is exemplified by less frustration and, in turn, less aggression, Klicperova-Baker said. Equality, or vertical closeness, appears when the gap between the law and popular sovereignty is small. Fraternity, or horizontal closeness, is apparent in humanism, civic culture and civility.

Expanding on her final point of civility, Klicperova-Baker said, Civility is the most important aspect of democracy. Benevolence and respect: that is the cushion, that is the buffer to the permanent conflicts.

According to Klicperova-Baker, the Velvet Revolution and the Velvet Divorce are two events in Czech history that feature the importance of civility.

They were not even stepping on the grass, Klicperova-Baker said. It was a moral revolution, more like a cultural festival.

The Velvet Revolution was a number of peaceful protests in the late 1980s that ultimately led to the split that created the Czech Republic and Slovakia, also known as the Velvet Divorce.

Klicperova-Baker closed by examining the state of democracy in Europe, stressing the importance of looking at specific groups of people rather than entire nations.

To summarize her speech, Klicperova-Baker said, What is important? We found democrats, whether religious or secular, in every country. We cannot forget about the minority, the people who have it very tough in those countries.

How does one remember the minority? According to Klicperova-Baker, The democrats have to stand their ground; they have to fight for free and honest media.

To call this era post-factual or post-truth we must not accept that, Klicperova-Baker said. We cannot let that kind of language win.

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Czech researcher speaks at UNL on Europe's state of democracy - Daily Nebraskan

Polish prosecutors on Tuesday said they were looking into whether freedom icon Lech Walesa gave false testimony regarding allegations he collaborated with the communist secret police in the early 1970s.

Walesa, who co-founded the independent Solidarity trade union and then negotiated a bloodless end to communism in Poland in 1989, is a vocal opponent of the governing right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which he says is harming Poland.

The state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which prosecutes crimes from the Nazi and communist eras, said in a statement that it has been probing the Nobel Peace laureates testimony since June 29.

The new proceedings concern statements by Lech Walesa, who notably... described as inauthentic secret police documents that suggest he had collaborated, the IPN said.

The IPN said earlier this year that handwriting analysis proved the 73-year-old former president had signed a collaboration agreement and receipts for payment from the secret police using the code-name Bolek.

Walesa has always denied the allegations, which have dogged him for years.

The president stands by his statement that the documents are fake and werent authored by him, Walesa associate Adam Dominski told the Polish news agency PAP on Tuesday in response to the IPN statement.

He added that the handwriting analysis was expert analysis, not proof.

A special vetting court ruled in 2000 that there was no basis to suspicions that Walesa had been a paid regime agent.

But the allegations resurfaced last year after the IPN seized previously unknown secret police files from the widow of a communist-era interior minister.

Walesa enigmatically admitted last year to having made a mistake and in the past said he signed a paper for the secret police during one of his many interrogations.

A book published by the IPN in 2008 alleged that while the regime registered Walesa as a secret agent in 1970, he was cut loose in 1976 due to his unwillingness to co-operate.

Poles in general have mixed feelings about Walesa. His boldness in standing up to the communist regime is still widely respected, but the combative and divisive tone of his later presidency earned him scorn in many quarters.

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Polish prosecutors probe whether democracy icon Lech Walesa gave false testimony in spy case - South China Morning Post

Russian President Vladimir Putin. (AP Photo / Pavel Golovkin)

Virtually all of the debates over the intelligence communitys conclusion that Russia waged a multifaceted campaign to influence the 2016 election look at the issue through a prism of US domestic politics or the bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia. Thats understandable, given what a shocking outcome the election produced. But it also sidesteps the troubling reality that the Kremlins attempts to influence other countries electoral processes have been a problem across Europe for over a decade, and that our intelligence agencies werent alone in sounding the alarm. And thats a serious problem for those who are dismissive of the evidence of Russian intervention. Russias effort in our election may have been its most dramaticand arguably its most fruitfulbut evidence suggests it was hardly an isolated event.

The US intelligence communitys conclusions about how Russia intervened in our elections fits a pattern that European analysts say dates back to 2007, when Vladimir Putin told the Munich Security Conference that American dominance in a unipolar world was pernicious, and that NATOs expansion represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. The Kremlin saw a pressing need to confront a series of anti-Russian color revolutions in the former Soviet states during the early 2000s. Sebastian Rotella reported for ProPublica that Russian leaders believed the United States was using soft power means, such as the media and diplomacy, to cause trouble in Russias domain. The Russians decided to fight fire with fire, as they saw it. USA Today international-affairs correspondent Oren Dorell reported that Russian sabotage of Western computer systems started that same year. It was also in 2007 that Russians began experimenting with information warfare in Estonia, followed soon after by attempts at disruption in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia, according to The Washington Posts Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum.

Priest and Birnbaum reported that Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that informational conflict is a key part of war. Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said. Earlier this year, Russias Ministry of Defense announced that it had established a new cyberwarfare unit.

Classified documents from Macedonias intelligence agency that were leaked to The Guardian showed that Russian spies and diplomats have been involved in a nearly decade-long effort to spread propaganda and provoke discord in Macedonia. That was just one part of Russian effort to step up its influence all across the countries of the former Yugoslavia. The Kremlins goal is to stop them from joining NATO and to pry them away from western influence, reports The Guardian.

British officials say they believe that in 2015, Russia interfered directly in UK elections with a series of attempted cyber hacks and clandestine online activity, according to The Independent. German intelligence officials say that large amounts of data were seized during a May 2015 cyber attack on the Bundestagwhich has previously been blamed on APT28, a Russian hacking group, according to Reuters. In July, Germanys interior secretary, Thomas de Maiziere, and Hans-Georg Maassen, the countrys spy chief, warned that Russia will start publishing compromising material on German MPsin order to destabilise elections in September, according to Andrew Rettman at EUobserver.

In May, NSA Director Michael Rogers testified under oath before Congress that American officials had found evidence of Russian involvement in the recent French elections, which they shared with their intelligence officers in Paris. We had talked to our French counterparts, he said, and gave them a heads-up: Look, were watching the Russians, were seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure.

The list of countries targeted by Russia goes on. Earlier this year, Dutch Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk announced that all votes cast in the March election in the Netherlands would be hand-counted because of software problems and fears of Russian hacking, according to Politicos European edition. The Norwegian Police Security Service informed that countrys Labour Party that it had been hacked, and Norwegian media reported that the group behind the cyber-attack was the same one that breached the DNCs computers last year. Russia is believed to have been involved in similar attacks throughout what it views as its sphere of influence.

Some skeptics have seized on reports that French and German intelligence officials were unable to confirm that Russia was behind recent hacks in those countries. But officials in both countries treat Russian attacks as an active and ongoing threat to their democracies. And Mark Galeotti, head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague, says that while the intelligence agencies were not able to establish direct ties to Russia, his sources in the French and German intelligence remain confident that they were behind the hacks. In any cyber case its very difficult to be absolutely conclusive, because even if its coming out of a machine thats situated in Russia, it could have been controlled by someone in North Korea or China or Belgium for all we know, and youd really need a forensic examination of the machine where the attack originated. And while people expect the kind of standards of proof that one would expect in a court of lawproof beyond a reasonable doubtthere comes a time when you have to talk about the balance of probabilities. Intelligence agencies very rarely rely on single-point informationa single source. When intelligence agencies say, Were pretty confident its X, its because they have alternative sources, whether its signal intelligence or human intelligence, inclining them in the same direction.

In the case of the recent US election hacks, it wasnt US intelligence agencies that originally picked up the scent. According to The Guardians Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, and Nick Hopkins, it was the GCHQthe UKs version of the National Security Agencythat first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious interactions between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. Then, as the Guardian piece outlines, Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trumps inner circle and Russians. That included intelligence officials from Germany, Estonia, Poland, Canada, and Australia. According to one source, French and Dutch spooks also passed on signals intelligence to their American counterparts.

Analysts say that the Kremlins motives are relatively straightforward. As its postCold War hard power declined, Vladimir Putins government has pursued its interests by stepping up its cyber-warfare and disinformation campaigns in order to divide, destabilize, and demoralize its geopolitical opponents.

According to Paul Goble, a former official with the State Department and the CIA who now teaches at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, Putin doesnt believe in democracy, and he wants to send the message to other people that democracy is a system that outside forces can manipulate, and therefore cast doubt on its legitimacy. A related goal is to weaken the transnational political, economic, and military institutions that have been the basis of American foreign policy for a very long time. The weakening or destruction of NATO, the weakening or destruction of the EU, dividing Europe from the United Statesthis has been Russias goal since the creation of NATO.

Galeotti agrees, telling me that when Vladimir Putin looks at these international institutions, what he sees are institutions created by the West, to serve the Wests interests. When Putin talks about sovereignty, his notion is nobody gets to tell us what to do within our own borders. Galeotti doesnt think Putin has a grand agenda, so much as he wants to be able to opt out of the post-1945 world order. With an economy roughly the size of Spains, Russias no longer a superpower, but, says Galeotti, Putin is clearly committed to making Russia great again, and one way to assert Russian power is to get everyone else divided and weakened. If you cant make yourself stronger, at least you can try to make others weaker.

Natasha Kuhrt, a Russia specialist at Kings College, London, is herself skeptical of claims that the Kremlin is pulling the strings of certain groups in certain countries. While she does believe that Russia has tried to influence other countries elections, she says that the media have overstated the impact. But she says the Russians have been very adept at exploiting anxieties about European integrationthe general trend of questioning certain values, lets say, partly for economic reasons and partly for other reasons. As for our election, Kuhrt adds that there is a kind of anti-Western discourse within Russia that is used mainly for domestic purposes. With most Russians living standards flat or in decline, the regimes legitimacy to a large extent rests on that now. So its also about showing what idiots Americans are for electing a buffoon like Trump.

Russia and the United States have attempted, and in many cases succeeded, to influence other countries electoral processes for the past hundred years. But analysts say the scale and sophistication of Russian attacks have taken this practice to a new level. Todays lightning-fast communications and low barriers of entry into online publishing represent a departure from the kind of influence campaigns countries waged in the past. Back in January, Max Fisher argued in a New York Times piece that our media are highly susceptible to being duped by dark PR campaigns, noting that while [r]eporters have always relied on sources who provide critical information for self-interested reasons, in 2016 the source was often Russias military intelligence agency, the G.R.U.operating through shadowy fronts who worked to mask that factand its agenda was to undermine the American presidential election.

US investigators are currently looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or pedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook, according to Julian Borger at The Guardian. A Pew study released last year found that six in 10 Americans get news from social media, mostly from Facebook.

Here at home, the growing evidence that Russias intervention in our elections was only the most recent, and successful, example of an international campaign that dates back George W. Bushs presidency is a serious problem for those who dismiss or discount the US intelligence communitys findings.

For some on the left, including a number of voices at The Nation, the real story involves one or more of the following: Democrats hyping a story line in order to excuse their embarrassing loss to Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton loyalists defending their candidate from the same charge; rogue elements within our intelligence agencies either fabricating or exaggerating Russian involvement to undermine Trumps legitimacy after he compared them to Nazis, or those same elements of the deep stateinveterate cold warriorssabotaging Trumps efforts to bring about dtente with Moscow.

But these narratives dont hold up when viewed in a larger geopolitical context. Its unlikely that in 2015 British intelligence tipped off US spy agencies about those suspicious contacts because it wanted to absolve Hillary Clinton for her future loss to Donald Trump. The Dutch arent interested in what lessons the Democratic Party took away from their defeat, nor are the Lithuanians invested in the idea that Bernie would have won. And its highly unlikely that Germany, which was torn apart during the Cold War, is chomping on the bit to launch a new one.

In recent months, one intelligence official after another has testified before Congress that the Russians will take the lessons they learned in the US election last year, and in previous campaigns elsewhere, and use them again in the future. Last week, CNN reported that, emboldened by the lack of a significant retaliatory response to its attack on the 2016 election, Russian spies are ramping up their intelligence-gathering efforts in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials who say they have noticed an increase since the election. According to the report, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have detected an increase in suspected Russian intelligence officers entering the US under the guise of other business. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper warned on CNN about potential Russian intervention in the 2018 midterm elections. They are going to stretch the envelope as far as they can to collect information and I think largely if I can use the military phrase, prep the battlefield for 2018 elections, he said.

The fact that theres a significant amount of skepticism on both the left and the right is blunting calls to prepare for the next attack. The president has hesitated to even acknowledge that this is a serious issue. And, while a recent analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that just $400 million invested in replacing paperless voting machines with machines that read paper ballotsless than the Pentagon spent last year on military bandswould help secure our election infrastructure, no such funding is in the works. In fact, in late June Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, which Ari Berman says is the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines arent hacked. The level of concern should be even higher now that we have evidence that the Russian military intelligence did target election systems specifically: The Intercept reported last month that leaked NSA documents showed that Russian military intelligence launched cyber-attacks against an election-software vendors internal systems. A subsequent report by Bloomberg said that US investigators had found evidence that Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states.

Compare our lackadaisical response to the seriousness with which Europe is taking the issue. Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum reported for The Washington Post that European countries are deploying a variety of bold tactics and tools to expose Russian attempts to sway voters and weaken European unity. Across Europe, counterintelligence officials, legislators, researchers and journalists have devoted yearsin some cases, decadesto the development of ways to counter Russian disinformation, hacking and trolling that theyre now trying to use to safeguard their own democratic processes.

France and Germany have pressured Facebook to take down thousands of automated accounts that spread fake news. In Sweden, school children are learning to spot fake news. Fourteen hundred Slovakian companies have agreed to boycott a list of fake-news sites. The EU is employing hundreds of volunteer researchers to expose false stories on the Internet. In Lithuania, write Priest and Birnbaum, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed elves link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes Elves vs. Trolls.

While Russian interference in last years election was all about us, Moscows use of asymmetric tactics to undermine multilateral institutions and aid pro-Russia parties in so many other countries is not. The difference is that with some Americans across the political spectrum insisting that we should simply move on, we arent doing much to counter it. Doing so doesnt mean creating an environment of neo-McCarthyite hysteria, escalating hostilities with Moscow or blundering toward a shooting war in Syria. It simply requires that we acknowledge the reality of the problem and work with our allies to address it in a sober and serious way.

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Russia's Attacks on Democracy Aren't Only a Problem for America - The Nation.