How a game of Russian Roulette gave us Trump

Russian Roulette, a new book by investigative reporters, David Corn and Michael Isikoff, is about a game of chance and the strange rules of flux by which the past shapes the present. It’s about the election of Donald Trump yet Trump is peripheral to much of the book.

It takes in events that have unfolded over decades to show how Vladimir Putin’s poisonous relationship with Hilary Clinton led him to launch a new kind of war on America and how bad, incompetent, or simply naive actors on all sides helped elect a brash New Yorker real-estate developer who came to believe he’d done it all on his own, simply because he understood self-promotion better than anybody else in the field.

Forget Fire and Fury – Wolff dealt with salacious rumours and snide innuendo to make a pretty obvious point that the current president is an idiot. The more intriguing question is to ask: how did that idiot get elected? And how Vladimir Putin went about pursuing his ambition “to return to the nineteenth-century style of ‘Great Power’ politics in which nations would pursue their own interests rather than an ideals-based international order”?

The result is a calm and ice-cold appraisal of the intelligence surrounding the Russian meddling in the US election of 2016. Like the best history this is, at times, complicated and paradoxical, where genuinely good people do the dumbest things and the bad people are often impressively smart: Obama’s unwillingness to step into the election even though he could see it was being hacked; the FBI’s inability to share what it knew with the victims of the hacking; the Clinton team’s naive security; Putin’s exploitation of western freedoms to pursue his goals.

It also makes a strong case for Hillary Clinton having the most clear-eyed view of what was going on. Her strong (and necessary) opposition to Putin is the very reason why this happened, though, admirably, the authors do not shirk away from criticism of the Clintons where it’s due. She was a terrible candidate, even if she might have made the President who best understood the nature of the new Cold War.

This is also a story about the generational resistance to new technology. The authors are particularly good at describing the mechanisms by which America’s IT infrastructure was co-opted by the Russians and how, for all their supposed sophistication, Americans were unprepared and incapable of launching a response. Some of this came down to people simply unable to make the paradigm shift to a new reality, with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, believing that the hacking was simply part of the game of spies and subterfuge and discovering only too late that the intelligence gathered was being fed back into the election to help decide the outcome.

Most compelling of all is the cybersecurity behind the headlines and the account of the two teams of Russian hackers who were designated as an Advanced Persistent Threat. APT 28 and APT 29 (known more familiarly as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear) didn’t just effect the US election of 2016 but had been causing trouble for years.

What is so refreshing about the story is how sensible it all is. Corn and Isikoff downplay Trump’s excesses (even the salacious details of the Steele dossier, which Corn was the first to report, are here given only cursory significance) and instead highlight failures of the American system that allowed Trump and his team to be played so easily. It also does little to enhance the reputation of the Obama White House, with Rice, particularly, appearing weak in the face of Russian aggression. “If you egg [the Russians] on, this will escalate,” she is reported to have argued, which stands in stark contrast to Clinton’s more confrontational outlook.

The dynamic between Clinton and Putin is, then, the most crucial. Trump, meanwhile, is portrayed as a man with an underdeveloped psychology. The President’s character will no doubt be the subject of many books in the future – it’s enough to say here that he seems strangely childlike at times as he sought the affirmation of the Russian strongman. Collusion, if that is what it was, would be a collusion that came from simple-minded greed rather than astute politics.

Throw into the mix the countless mobsters, oligarchs, and Putin cronies orbiting around Trump and you have the first full-length account of perhaps the most fascinating story in modern politics. No doubt there will be more to emerge in the coming months, weeks, and — judging by the current news cycle — days and hours. If you want to be ahead of the curve and follow the narrative as it happens, this is the book to read right now. It’s the best account we have, this side of the authoritative version to be published by a certain Robert Mueller (date yet to be announced).

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump By Michael Isikoff and David Corn (Twelve)