'Our Nation Is Being Torn Apart. Truth Is Questioned.'
Fiona Hill’s warnings challenge Trump to keep America safe from Moscow’s efforts to destabilize democracy and snare influence around the globe.
Over the last several weeks, each impeachment inquiry witness put the Trump presidency in greater peril. But it was Thursday’s testimony from Fiona Hill that underscored the full breadth of the damage Russia has already done to the United States: “Our nation is being torn apart; truth is questioned; our highly professional expert career Foreign Service is being undermined.”
In unflinching language, Dr. Hill, a former National Security Council senior director, laid out how Russia used cyberwarfare to systematically attack our 2016 elections, and adroitly warned against a similar attack she expects in 2020. Her most revealing comments came with an appeal to the Trump administration and its congressional allies not to continue parroting a “fictional narrative,” which originated in the Russian intelligence service — that Ukraine, not Russia, disrupted our 2016 elections.
By categorically indicting Russia’s tactics and obliquely warning against President Trump’s acceptance of them, Dr. Hill touched the core of how and why Mr. Trump’s own actions and inaction have pointed him toward impeachment. And doing so opened a door to far larger discussion — the president’s failure to confront the huge Russian intelligence operation to disorient democracies as it seeks to expand its influence around the globe. So far, those tactics have not only taken down the United States several notches in global trust, but apparently have targeted Britain, France and Germany in similar fashion.
What the Trump administration and the rest of us need to acknowledge is that these campaigns are a type of low-grade full spectrum warfare — military jargon for the combined use of new and complex methods for attaining victory. To be sure, the attacks have been mostly bloodless, except in eastern Ukraine. But they constitute warfare nevertheless — fully analogous to the Cold War, when Russia also challenged the United States for the balance of influence around the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/opinion/trump-fiona-hill-russia.html
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