TO: PRESIDENT PUTIN
FROM: YOUR NATIONAL SECURITY TEAM
RE: THE AMERICAN DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
You asked us to evaluate the success or failure of our disinformation campaign and to make recommendations for its future. Here are our observations:
- In a sense, the 2016 campaign was successful beyond our wildest dreams. For the price of a few million rubles, we succeeded in electing a president who might as well be one of our agents, assuming he isn’t actually one already. (You know more about that than we do). Trump is destroying the credibility of American democracy both at home and abroad and threatening the continuing existence of NATO. He openly despises the EU and wants to split it apart, just as you do. He also openly sucks up to you. The Republicans love you, and the Democrats are convinced you are an invincible, evil genius. Who could possibly ask for more?
- The problem is that, somehow, he frequently doesn’t speak for his own government, so he hasn’t succeeded in lifting the Ukraine sanctions, although no one doubts he would if he could. He’s also very capricious, and he views every human interaction as a test of his manhood, which makes him potentially dangerous. Finally, the Democrats fear and hate you, so if they win in 2020, they’re going to make our lives as difficult and unpleasant as possible. The backlash may not justify the clear temporary gains we have enjoyed over the last two years.
- While nothing in American politics is inevitable, you had better assume that the Democrats will prevail in 2020. That means you have a brief window this year in which you could seriously consider taking drastic action in Ukraine without worrying too much about meaningful retaliation from NATO. We’ll have more to say about that in a memo tomorrow.
- As to how you should proceed in the 2020 elections, we recommend that you provide support through social media to both Trump and Bernie Sanders. Like Julian Assange, Bernie actually agrees with a lot of your critique about the abuse of American power. If he were to be elected, you would have to listen to lots of sermons about international law, but he wouldn’t actually do anything to stop you in Ukraine or anywhere else. He would be even more ineffectual than the leadership of the EU.