The article I’ve linked below points out some interesting reasons as to why Obama is powerless to respond to Russia’s hacking with anything more than rhetoric.
Fred Kaplan, the author, points out that we have better cyber rocks to throw back at them, but we have way more glass houses than they do. From industry, government, military, financial, law enforcement, etc. We’d lose if it came down to a cyber war.
We have better cyber rocks to throw at other nations’ houses, but our house is glassier than theirs.
…
One problem is that so much of America’s economy, social structure, and military command-control systems are heavily dependent on computer networks. If Russia (or China or a number of other countries) launched a cyberattack against us and we responded with a cyberattack on them, they could strike back with another, possibly more damaging cyberattack on us. In other words, escalating a cyberwar doesn’t appear to be a winning game for us.
An interesting article well worth the time to read it.
I’m betting Obama does nothing and passes the problem on to Trump, who will never accept that there was any hacking in the election.
Well if Obama does nothing, that will embolden Russia to do even more hacking against U.S. interests. Only thing that will convince them to stop is if they feel done consequences as a result of their actions.
He says he’s going to do stuff, but he has little credibility on the issue after his “red line” that wasn’t. He’s a consummate bluffer. More likely he’ll just say during the 2020 campaign that he had plans to deal with Russia harshly but Trump killed them when he took office. A bit of a replay of the strategy against Bush. “Yeah, we had a bigtime strategy against Al Qaeda that we were going to implement just before Clinton left office, but Bush wouldn’t follow through.”
We’ll never know one way or the other. The best cyber attacks can take years to discover. The US will never disclose exactly where and when we retaliated. Russia will never admit they were adversely impacted.
Gaaawd, lying our way into war, murder of civilians, torture, destabilizing an entire region, creating ISIS, and burning $4 Trillion was so long ago. Who cares!?
It is a pretty interesting approach. On the one hand, it clearly falls short of starting WWIII over this and implicitly accepts that Trump wins anyway, yada yada. There is proportionate payback, arguably, without the kind of cyberwar risks outlined in the OP’s article.
The point of the article is not that Russians will be moved by this information- they already expect their leaders to be corrupt. The point is the effect it could have on European banks and such. If they don’t want to do business with him any more, that hurts Putin and friends.
Whether that is convincing is another question, but it seems like a better tack than say, turning off the lights in Moscow or messing with their dams via cyberwar.
In terms of American lives lost, perhaps. But the US’s involvement didn’t result in the long term destabilization of the region nor create safe havens for terrorists. The economic cost of the war took some time to recover from but I think the Iraq War was a bigger disaster economically than Vietnam. At least LBJ didn’t say “We’re off to war- let’s cut taxes!”
