Why Trump should support a probe into Russia’s hacking

As reports increasingly indicate that Russia interfered with the U.S. presidential election to benefit Donald Trump, the president-elect has forcefully pushed back on the intelligence community. Admitting that Moscow played a role in the election, Trump believes, would delegitimize his victory, so he has doubled down on his position that Russia was not involved in the hacks on Democratic Party officials.

Yet for all Trump’s fears about losing credibility, the real threat to his presidency comes not from the evidence presented by the CIA but from his refusal to investigate and respond to Russia’s cyberattacks. If Trump carries out even half of his foreign policy commitments, he will make plenty of enemies abroad by the end of his first term. Those adversaries will seek ways to undermine the president, and Vladimir Putin has just offered a clear example for how to interfere with U.S. politics. That makes it in Trump’s best interest to conduct a thorough investigation into any Russian interference and respond forcefully — before Trump himself becomes the target in 2020.

For most of the Obama Administration, Russia confined its cyber operations against the United States to traditional espionage — using its vaunted capabilities to collect intelligence from the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House — all legitimate targets for such activities. As the director for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council, I saw firsthand Russia’s efforts to infiltrate U.S. systems. Russia’s collection efforts were targeted and often undetected, earning the respect of the intelligence community for their tradecraft and for abiding by a new set of “Moscow Rules” that governed the new great game of spying in the digital age.

For much of this time, China was the bad actor — carrying out massive campaigns that targeted thousands of victims. China was seemingly indifferent to getting caught and willing to operate outside the accepted bounds of state sponsored espionage by stealing trade secrets and intellectual property to benefit its national champions.

Trump should not believe that he can keep damaging secrets out of the hands of countries that may not support four more years of his presidency

Across both the President’s terms, the Obama Administration orchestrated a multi-part strategy to counter Chinese spying on American companies that included both increased sharing of threat intelligence on Chinese activities with targeted companies and diplomatic and economic pressure directly on China. The strategy of naming and shaming China and threatening the country’s ambition for great power status seemingly worked. In the fall of 2015, President’s Xi committed to cease targeting U.S. commercial companies to benefit Chinese corporations. Evidence in the last year suggests the agreement is holding.

While planning and operations to counter China were underway, the national security community turned to the question of what a “Counter Russia” strategy would look like. Until last spring, the answer was pretty simple — improve our defenses and hope that the relative gains we get from spying on Russia outweighed the losses from their spying on us.

All that changed with Russian interference in the election. Putin seems to have dusted off some old Soviet playbooks for information operations and put his intelligence apparatus to work collecting information that could be made public to influence U.S. elections. It’s a playbook that other countries can follow in the future, especially if they oppose Trumps’ foreign policies.

The biggest threat may come from China. In 2008 and 2012, evidence emerged that China had hacked into the Obama, McCain, and Romney campaigns. Rather surprisingly, no evidence has emerged that China went after either candidate or party this time around. If Trump carries through on his threatened trade war with China and continues to make nice with Taiwan, they could very well decide that they can’t sit out the 2020 election cycle.

Iran, with a growing capability and fears of a confrontation, may also decide it is in its interest for the president’s tax return to be made public. And Mexico, along with forty other nations that have developed offensive cyber capabilities, may conclude that it needs to come over the wall (sorry) and help elect a president that wants to see increased trade and immigration.

Trump should not believe that he can keep damaging secrets out of the hands of countries that may not support four more years of his presidency. Even if he could stop attacks against the White House and Republican officials, his massive business empire and complicated business dealings are a target rich environment. The release of such information could create crises in his first term and interfere with his chances of winning a second.

These real, credible threats to Trump’s presidency are only exacerbated by the president-elect’s refusal to admit that Russia was behind hacks on the Democratic National Committee and top Hillary Clinton staffers. He is effectively telling the world that the consequences for interference with the U.S. presidential election are low. That will encourage more countries to follow Putin’s lead.

Once in office, Trump needs to move quickly to signal to Russia that such interference was not appreciated and will not be tolerated

Once in office, Trump needs to move quickly to signal to Russia that such interference was not appreciated and will not be tolerated. Countering Russia will be a difficult task as Washington has less leverage over a declining and dangerous Russia than over a rising China, which is a major U.S. trading partner and has a common interest in keeping North Korea in check and preventing the South China Sea disputes from spiraling out of control.

Yet, the Trump administration will still have tools to respond. First, he should support any congressional efforts to determine Russia’s true role in the cyberattacks. Based on those conclusions, Trump will have an assortment of digital options to demonstrate to Putin and the rest of the world that interfering with U.S. elections is a grave offense and will carry heavy consequences.

None of this means that Trump is not the rightful winner of the presidential election. He can make a fair argument that Russia’s information operation in the campaign was not decisive in the election. But to safeguard America’s electoral system and his own political future, he must be clear that he did not need and did not want Russia’s help in winning the oval office.

Rob Knake is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served in the Obama Administration as Director for Cybersecurity Policy on the National Security Council.