BIDEN: Former Western leaders join forces to fight Russian meddling

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Article from WaPo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/global-opinions/former-western-leaders-join-forces-to-fight-russian-meddling/2018/05/10/f93dc3c6-5491-11e8-abd8-265bd07a9859_story.html?noredirect=on&__twitter_impression=true

Former Western leaders join forces to fight Russian meddling

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"Closer to home, there are signs Russia is interfering in upcoming elections in Mexico. Before the next U.S. presidential election, in 2020, which Biden may be involved in, there will be 20 major elections in European Union and NATO countries.

“You have a lot of examples of the Russians trying to stir up dissatisfaction, spur nationalism, in an attempt to weaken the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Rasmussen said. “I told Biden this is not just an American challenge.”

Biden will attend the first commission meeting in Copenhagen in June as part of the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. Both efforts are funded through the Alliance of Democracies Foundation. Biden told me that the commission will work toward finding best practices and policies among the United States and its European allies to thwart subversive measures by Russia and any other countries that may want to interfere.

“In recent years we have witnessed how the Kremlin has used cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and weaponized corruption to try to sow chaos and deepen divisions within our democratic societies,” he said. “We need to fight back against this malign influence by reducing our vulnerabilities and exposing Russia’s tactics.”

The current list of commissioners includes former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Chertoff, who told me that the commission is meant to look forward rather than to relitigate the controversies of 2016.

“This is not meant to be a historical exercise,” Chertoff said. “It’s an effort to promote those policies that will protect our democracies from being manipulated or subverted.”


The idea of building a coalition of democracies to counter rising autocratic threats to the liberal world order has been pushed for years by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). In his soon-to-be-released book, “The Restless Wave,” McCain recalls watching Vladimir Putin’s interference in several countries, including Ukraine and Montenegro, and how similar his tactics were in the United States.

China is the challenge of the century, but Putin is the immediate threat to America and other democracies, McCain writes. However, our effort to confront this challenge is hampered by our internal divisions, our divided politics and our dissociation from our liberal democratic values.

“We will stop him when we stop letting our partisan and personal interests expose our national security interests, even the integrity of our democracy and the rule of law, to his predation,” McCain writes. “We will stop him when we start believing in ourselves again.”

Global democratic leadership cannot depend on one senator, one former vice president or one commission. Leaders in open societies from different political perspectives must put aside old disagreements and join to share information, build defenses and educate our publics.

Absent that, Russia will continue to undermine our democratic systems, spur instability and fuel nationalism on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. If that is allowed, liberal democracies will fail their own people and no longer serve as a model for those living in autocratic systems today.
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