We Are Already At War With Russia

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

You just didn't know it

As the world’s power dynamics change, none of us knows what’s going to happen, but you may be wondering if the U.S. will have to go to war with Russia. That’s the wrong question, because we’ve already been at war with Russia for some time.

You may not have realized we were at war with Russia, because we’ve been facing our enemy online. That’s definitely better than facing your enemy on a battlefield, but don’t think this war has been bloodless. Putin learned a lot from the collapse of the USSR and the loss of the Cold War. The Soviets could not compete with us economically and ultimately could not keep up with our war machine. So while we continued increasing our military might, thinking that would keep us safe, Putin came up with a different idea. He could undermine the U.S. by keyboard. Russian bots and trolls managed to put Putin’s favorite puppet, Donald Trump, in office, an action arguably as damaging to our country as if armed soldiers had landed on our shores. The harm Trump inflicted on America really has been that severe.

At the same time, Russian hackers have succeeded in extracting a heavy tax, of sorts, on our industries. Hacks to municipalities, hospitals, energy companies, meat processing companies and plenty of other entities have forced them to hand over billions of dollars in ransom to regain control of their computer systems. It’s sort of like the way ancient regimes extracted tribute from their vanquished foes, except in this case it’s not so obvious who is extracting the tribute. (Except it actually is.)

I don’t know how many rubles Putin has spent stirring up division on social media, fostering the right-wing worship of Trump and infiltrating our computer systems, but I’m pretty sure it’s far less than the cost of either a hot war or cold war. And judging from everything else Russian hackers have done, it’s well within their abilities to shut down our power grid. 

Give that a thought. Do you have access to well water, solar power, a wood stove? No? Most of us don’t. Every time the power goes off in my house, it’s a whine-fest, and it’s rarely lasted for more than a few hours. In theory, I know how to do a fair number of things that would get me through such a crisis. In practice, I’ve never had to depend on them.

I thought the war with Russia would always be fought by keyboard (and perhaps the occasional proxy war). I never seriously thought we’d ever face an old-fashioned hot war with Russia. 

Not very long ago at all, the people in Ukraine thought the same.