"Sergeant, I Hope You Like Vodka"

After America’s military and foreign policy elite make the obligatory wave off of a new Cold War with Russia, or more specifically with Putinism, they will usually admit that Russian behavior since January 2014 when they lied about the seizure of Crimea constitutes a profound, relentless strategy of aggression against the West and especially the U.S.

But the most consequential act of Russian aggression was against American democracy starting in March 2016 and intensifying during the last month of the campaign with the well-timed released emails from WikiLeaks. Unless we just choose to ignore it, Russian intelligence directly intervened in the U.S. election and tilted the result toward Donald Trump. And given Mr. Trump’s professed friendship with Vladimir Putin, we should all get more familiar with Russian preferences, or as the Sergeant said in War Games, “I just hope they don’t make me eat none of them damn fish eggs.”

Admiral Michael Rogers, head of NSA, describing the WikiLeaks attack:

“There’s an ongoing investigation. I’m just not getting into the specifics. I still think there shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind. This was not something done casually. This was not something done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

WarGames (1983)