Megyn Kelly is probably kicking herself for not delaying her interview of Vladimir Putin. Had she waited just a few days, she could’ve brought a leaked copy of the latest NSA estimate of the timeline, motivations, and targets of alleged Russian hackers during the 2016 election cycle to her chat with Putin and asked a lot of pointed questions about it. Even though that opportunity never materialized, she and other journalists still have the chance to ask some equally important questions of American officials about this rather interesting document and the young woman responsible for sharing it with the world. What follows are some of my suggested lines of inquiry for our friends in the Fourth Estate.

The Leaker: Reality Leigh Winner

As I read The Intercept’s story, I kept asking myself one question, over and over: did this young woman learn nothing from Ed Snowden? 

This extract from the arrest warrant affidavit contains details that, if accurate, speak to a total lack of awareness of or concern for the kind of “insider threat” detection measures that now exist in most, if not all, Intelligence Community components:

Why did Winner not use a truly secure means of contacting The Intercept? Why did she select this particular document? Why did she not contact a whistleblower advocacy organization for legal advice before even contemplating such a rash act?

The Media Outlet: The Intercept

In a statement published a short time ago, The Intercept claimed that

On June 5 The Intercept published a story about a top-secret NSA document that was provided to us completely anonymously. Shortly after the article was posted, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old government contractor in Augusta, Georgia, for transmitting defense information under the Espionage Act. Although we have no knowledge of the identity of the person who provided us with the document, the U.S. government has told news organizations that Winner was that individual.

That statement is at odds with the search warrant affidavit quoted above, which claims that Winner was in “email contact” with the “News Outlet” (The Intercept).

Who’s telling the truth here vis a vis Winner’s alleged email contact with The Intercept–the Department of Justice or the paper? Could Winner have emailed the wrong reporter at The Intercept, and the actual story authors were in the dark that she’d contacted the paper? Did Winner’s email bounce? And why did Intercept staff share an exact copy of the purloined document with NSA officials in the first place? Why didn’t they simply read key passages of the document over the phone, or include extracts in an email to NSA officials?

Given the fact that Winner printed the document and thus left investigators a digital trace of her actions, perhaps The Intercept’s decision to share a scanned version of the document wouldn’t have mattered–but maybe it would have, and why endanger a source (annonymous or otherwise) by behaving in such an irresponsible way with the document?

The Document: Some Answers, More Questions

The NSA report that Winner leaked contained a number of new details about the alleged Russian hacking campaign, including a flow chart that lays out in greater detail the precise mechanism used by the attackers in not only the spearphishing campaign but their attempts to actually gain access voter-related data and possibly voting machines themselves. Here’s the key paragraph from the story, which quotes Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, at length:

“Usually at the county level there’s going to be some company that does the pre-election programming of the voting machines,” Halderman told The Intercept. “I would worry about whether an attacker who could compromise the poll book vendor might be able to use software updates that the vendor distributes to also infect the election management system that programs the voting machines themselves,” he added. “Once you do that, you can cause the voting machine to create fraudulent counts.”

How long has the Intelligence Community known that Putin ignored Obama’s warnings not to interfere in our election? How much of the vulnerability-related information has been shared with municipalities that employ voting technology susceptible to the kinds of attacks described by NSA? Are states and localities currently assessing whether their electronic voting machine and voter roll infrastructure is vulnerable to these kinds of attacks?

When I worked for then-Rep. Rush Holt (D‑NJ), one of his major concerns was the security–or lack thereof–of electronic voting machines and the infrastructure that supports them. It’s been nearly 10 years since Holt had Princeton professor and computer scientist Ed Felton conduct a live hack of a Diebold voting machine for the House Committee on Administration, an event that should have served as a wake-up call about the potential for digital election fraud by one or more hostile actors. The leaked NSA assessment underscores that such cyber vulnerabilities in our election process remain. Whether one accepts or rejects the Intelligence Community assessment that Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services to interfere in our election is almost beside the point now. What’s clear is that this digital vulnerability is real and we ignore the implications at our peril.

In the latest issue of Survival, Hal Brands and Peter Feaver address an important debate in American foreign policy circles. Was the rise of ISIS inevitable, or was it the result of misguided U.S. policies? Most agree it is the latter, but the dispute gets fraught on the question of whether it was U.S. military interventionism or inaction that deserves the blame. Some say it was the invasion of Iraq that led to the rise of ISIS. Others insist it was Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011.

Brands and Feaver use counterfactual analysis to assess whether different U.S. policy decisions at four “inflection points” could have nipped the rise of ISIS in the bud. The first of these points was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The other three occurred during the Obama administration and include the decision not to press Iraq to allow the United States to leave behind a significant number of U.S. troops, the decision not to intervene aggressively early on in the Syrian civil war, and the decision not to intervene more forcefully to help the government of Iraq defeat ISIS before it took the city of Mosul.

The authors take a middle road, arguing that, “the rise of ISIS was indeed an avertable tragedy,” but that both restraint and activism share the blame. Had U.S. policymakers not invaded Iraq in 2003, or been more aggressive in Iraq and Syria from 2011–2014, they argue, “ISIS might not have emerged at all.”

With suitable analytic humility, however, the authors warn against overconfidence that any of the alternatives would have made a decisive difference to the eventual outcome:

We find, for instance, that limited intervention in Syria in 2011–13 might have had benefits, but it probably would not have shifted the course of the conflict so fundamentally as to head of ISIS’s rise. Likewise, not invading Iraq in 2003 would have left the United States saddled with the costs of continuing to contain that country, whereas striking ISIS militarily in late 2013 or early 2014 might have weakened that organization militarily while exacerbating the political conditions that were fueling its rise. Intervening more heavily in Iraqi politics in 2010 in order to bring about a less sectarian government than that which ultimately emerged, and leaving a stay-behind force in Iraq after 2011, represent a fairly compelling counterfactual in the sense that such policies could have had numerous constructive effects. But even here, choosing a different path from the one actually taken would have meant courting non-trivial costs, liabilities, uncertainties and limitations (p. 10).

We applaud Brands and Feaver, who served in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively, for their attempt to “move away from polemical and polarized assessments focused on assigning blame, and toward more granular, balanced analysis based on a fairer-minded view of what went wrong (p. 10).” At the same time, there is plenty of room for disagreement over their interpretation of the “what ifs” of such a complex historical question.

The most problematic issue is their treatment of the invasion of Iraq. By bundling the invasion of Iraq with the other three inflection points, the authors introduce a false sense of equality among them, making it seem as if they were all the same sort of decision, and of equal magnitude. In so doing, they obscure the most critical lesson from not only the invasion of Iraq but from the entire war on terror: the fact that American military intervention creates more problems than it solves, leading to destabilization and the amplification of civil conflicts.

To their credit, Brands and Feaver do acknowledge, in the conclusion, that “the most fateful choice was also the oldest one: the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, followed by mismanagement of the occupation” (p. 41) but they then temper that note by arguing that “it is not correct to claim that the invasion of Iraq set in motion forces that led ineluctably to the problems that the United States has faced since mid-2014.”

In a strict sense, of course, this is true. Other things could, in theory, have happened to blunt the rise of ISIS. But only a decision not to invade Iraq in 2003 would clearly and unequivocally have averted the rise of ISIS. The reason is simple: the single clearest cause of the rise of ISIS was the invasion of Iraq. As President Obama explained in 2015, “ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that came out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences, which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.” David Kilcullen, who worked on counterterrorism at the State Department in 2005-06 and was senior adviser to General David Petraeus at the height of the Iraq surge in 2007-08, put it even more bluntly: “There would be no ISIS if we had not invaded Iraq.”

It is also true that mismanagement during the Iraq war made things worse. Most notably, the decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and “de-Ba’athify” the post-Saddam government made enemies out of former Ba’athists, many of whom would later join the insurgency. But the invasion and occupation itself was the main ingredient that made Iraq a magnet for Muslim militants from throughout the Middle East and a hotbed of insurgency and terrorism. By 2006, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Trends in Global Terrorism found that the Iraq war was “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.” The war had “become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

By contrast, though Obama could have made greater efforts in 2010 to arrange a leave behind force, there was no way in 2010 that the administration could have predicted that their failure to do so would lead to the emergence of an ISIS. Moreover, even had 20,000 American troops remained in Iraq, blocking some of the immediate avenues for ISIS to emerge, their presence would have done nothing to alleviate the motivations behind its rise. In fact, as Brands and Feaver acknowledge, the continued high-visibility presence of U.S. troops would potentially have exacerbated many of the grievances that gave the group its energy and raison d’etre. As the endurance of the Taliban in Afghanistan has shown, the United States might have stayed in Iraq indefinitely without “defeating terrorism” and thus without resolving the problem of how to leave without risk.

Given the fact that it was in the interest of the United States to leave Iraq at some point, 2010 looked about as good as one can imagine for doing so. As Brands and Feaver point out, Al Qaeda in Iraq – the predecessor to ISIS – had been seriously degraded over the previous three years. Certainly the administration must have expected some level of increased instability after the withdrawal, but no one was arguing that a withdrawal would result in the stunning rise of ISIS. On the other hand, many people – including experts in the Bush State Department, predicted much chaos, violence, and civil conflict resulting from toppling Saddam Hussein.

The bottom line is that all three Obama-era counterfactuals that Brands and Feaver explore involve battling ISIS (in either its current or previous iterations) more forcefully and earlier in risky military interventions that themselves would undoubtedly have wrought future negative unintended consequences and blowback. The lesson to draw about how to avoid future monsters like ISIS is not that sometimes America should be more eager to use force, but that military action, especially in the Middle East, inevitably delivers negative unintended consequences, and so should remain an absolute last resort.

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord was the latest in a steadily expanding list of actions that highlight his contempt for multilateral diplomacy in U.S. foreign policy. This does not mean that Trump is an isolationist. He clearly favors bilateral engagement with other countries and doesn’t mind using American military power to wage war in the Middle East and apply pressure to North Korea. The question is, what does Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement mean for other areas of multilateral engagement?

A preference for bilateral over multilateral diplomacy may be appropriate in some cases, but the bilateral approach is not ideal for combating, for example, nuclear proliferation. Trump’s disdain for multilateral diplomacy is especially worrisome when combined with the deepening militarization of U.S. foreign policy. These two emerging trends simultaneously endanger the Iran nuclear deal, a major success for multilateral diplomacy and nuclear nonproliferation, while increasing the probability of armed conflict should the deal fail.

The Iran deal is a triumph of multilateral diplomacy, involving the United Nations’ Permanent Five (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China), Germany, and the European Union. This level of international involvement enhances both the legitimacy and strength of the agreement, which Iran has complied with since implementation began in January 2016. If the Trump administration wants to successfully renegotiate the deal, it would need the buy-in of the partner countries, a condition that becomes harder to achieve as Trump alienates many of our Iran deal partners with actions such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord.

If Trump truly wants to renegotiate the Iran deal (and not just unilaterally withdraw from it), then he will need the support of the very countries that he is repeatedly frustrating with his characteristically undiplomatic actions on the world stage.

The other major nuclear challenge facing the Trump administration is North Korea. So far, the administration has tried to rein in the North’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs through shows of military force and sanctions. Trump also wants China to do more to pressure North Korea. Pyongyang does not seem deterred by this approach. While there has not been a nuclear weapons test since Trump took office, there has been a steady march of successful ballistic missile tests and Kim Jong Un continues to place great value in his nuclear arsenal.

A multilateral diplomatic approach failed to bring North Korea to heel in the 2000s, so it makes sense that Trump would not place much confidence in a similar approach today. The administration has made no serious overt attempt at multilateral diplomacy besides introducing new sanctions via the United Nations. If the current approach of pressure fails to halt North Korea’s progress, the administration could choose to double down on their approach or try a different strategy that makes greater use of multilateral diplomacy. Trump’s aversion to multilateral diplomacy suggests that the administration is primed to keep ratcheting up pressure rather than change course.

While this latest withdrawal from a multilateral initiative is not the end of the world, it arguably has worrisome implications for nuclear nonproliferation. Multilateral cooperation is not necessary to solve every foreign policy problem, but it is incredibly valuable for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The sooner Trump and his advisors realize this, the better. 

Earlier this week I attended a very thoughtful and stimulating debate on the modernization of U.S. nuclear missiles hosted by the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at CSIS. The debate addressed the merits and downsides of two planned U.S. nuclear delivery system recapitalization efforts: the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intended to replace the Minuteman III ballistic missile system, and the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) cruise missile that is supposed to replace the AGM-86 air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). The ALCM is a dual-capable missile, meaning it can carry either a nuclear or conventional payload. While the LRSO is planned to be only used for nuclear missions, in a conflict scenario it would be hard to discern between it and a conventionally-armed cruise missile until the moment of impact.

One topic raised during the debate was the effect of the LRSO on strategic stability, an important and hotly debated issue. The advocates of the LRSO downplayed the destabilizing potential of the system by pointing out that the United States has used dual-capable cruise missiles in past conflicts. Concerns about strategic stability should be kept in mind, they argued, but the United States has a track record of using dual-capable cruise missiles while safely navigating such concerns.

This argument may be technically true, but it ignores a critical fact: all past uses of dual-capable cruise missiles were in conflicts with countries that did not have nuclear weapons—not between two nuclear-armed countries. Policymakers should be wary of arguments that use historical evidence to dismiss or downplay the negative effects of LRSO on strategic stability because there are no adequate past cases to test such arguments against.

Such an oversight is especially damning when one considers the likely targets of the LRSO. The missile, and the B‑21 bombers supposed to carry them into combat, are designed to penetrate the dense and increasingly complex air defense networks of “near-peer” adversaries like China and Russia. This enhances the ability of the U.S. Air Force to hold high-value targets, such as command and control facilities, military bases, and enemy nuclear forces, at risk. However, the same bombers could also be armed with conventional cruise missiles.

The ambiguity about whether a cruise missile is nuclear or conventional poses a dilemma for nuclear-armed opponents in a conflict or crisis situation. If the United States starts destroying high-value targets necessary for the effective use of nuclear weapons, will adversaries feel pressure to either escalate the conflict in the hope of getting the strikes to stop or use nuclear weapons while they still have some ability to do so? Will the adversary be able to quickly determine what kind of cruise missile was used against it if communications links are damaged and they suspect more missiles are incoming? The decision to develop and field the LRSO greatly affects these questions. If the United States only possessed conventional cruise missiles, then the target would be more confident that they were not under nuclear attack. 

Countries that the United States has already used dual-capable cruise missiles against did not possess nuclear weapons. Therefore, the United States and the targeted countries did not have to grapple with the dilemma. Firing Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base or using ALCMs to punish Saddam Hussein for attacking a Kurdish safe haven does not carry the same escalation risks as using conventional cruise missiles to tear down Russian or Chinese air defense networks.

It is misleading and irresponsible to point to past uses of dual-capable cruise missiles to downplay concerns about the LRSO. Historical evidence cannot settle this debate because there are no cases of the United States using a dual-capable cruise missile against a nuclear-armed adversary. There should be a lively discussion of the LRSO’s impact on strategic stability, but that discussion needs to have sound arguments. 

The biggest news about the Trump administration’s release yesterday of its $603 billion 2018 defense budget proposal is that there isn’t much. The anticlimax comes partly because most of the details were already out, thanks to the “skinny budget” plan for discretionary spending released in March and a recent leak. Moreover, the most newsworthy aspects of the proposal—its big cuts and chicaneries—came in non-defense areas and through 10-year projections that are little more than symbolic wish lists.

There’s a bigger reasons that Trump’s budget is historically unimportant: Congress is going to ignore it. Even the 2018 plan seems more statement than realistic attempt to guide appropriations. The breadth of the non-defense cuts used to fund the $54 billion defense increase makes it easy for even vulnerable Democrats to oppose it. That, along with Trump’s declining public support, even among conservatives, is why Republican backers won’t stick up for his plan.

Even if the budget were less impolitic overall, its military spending increase would face long odds thanks to the cap on defense spending, which is $54 billion less than Trump wants. Under the Budget Control Act, if an annual defense appropriation exceeds its cap, the Treasury must “sequester” the excess, pulling proportionally from all accounts in that category. Contrary to much reporting, sequestration hasn’t occurred since 2013, when it resulted automatically from the failure of the congressional supercommittee to come up with a deficit reduction plan.

Instead, Congress has cut a series of deals that raised the annual cap. Democrats made sure that the cap on non-defense discretionary spending went up by equal measure. The increases were paid for, in theory, by dubious future savings. Further Pentagon relief comes through abuse of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, which is uncapped out of deference to the pretention that it is “emergency” spending for wars. The OCO budget is annually stuffed with non-war funding—now at least $30 billion of it.

Congress will likely cut a deal of that sort again this year. Because changes to the caps take 60 Senate votes, Republican control of both branches affects bargaining dynamics less than it might seem. The recent passage of the 2017 budget—midway through the fiscal year— is instructive. Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, the majority and minority leaders, essentially negotiated the deal and handed it to the president as a fait accompli. He could sign or veto and shutdown the government. Despite the absence of funds for his promised wall, he grumbled and signed. There’s no obvious reason for that pattern not to repeat itself with a budget deal later this year.

What’s most notable about Trump’s defense budget is what it wouldn’t do, even if it were fully realized, somehow. It wouldn’t deliver anything like the historical buildup Trump promised as a candidate and now brags about. Nor will it serve even the more modest goal of fixing the military’s overhyped readiness problem, which the president refers to as “depletion.” The spending increase for 2018 would go largely to other priorities. Personnel spending would get a 3% increase, versus Obama’s plans, which would cover pay increases and higher end-strength numbers in the ground forces. “Research, development, testing and evaluation,” would get a 10% boost, which would largely benefit future weapons systems. There is a small increase (2.1%) in “operations and maintenance,” which in theory might go to readiness-enhancing things like training, equipment, and spare parts. But in practice that increase would largely go to cover the costs of the force’s minor growth. That means the military would get slightly larger but no more ready. In the longer term, the increases to force structure might generate demands on operational spending that budgets don’t fund, meaning that Trump’s limited buildup would exacerbate readiness problems.

Whatever happens with the budget, the president may just announce that he fixed the military, following his habit of declaring victory in contrivance of facts. Or he might blast Democrats for failing to back his buildup and blame any problems on them. Republican hawks in Congress already blame Democrats for the same sin and Trump for not requesting more for the Pentagon. Democrats will say they are for a military increase too, just not without domestic spending increases.

What all this ignores is that even a smaller budget could end the military’s readiness issues with better prioritization. There would be more to spare for readiness if the budget-makers in the White House, Pentagon and Congress didn’t prefer to spend it on procurement and other priorities. That reallocation would be especially feasible under a strategy that asked less of the military, allowing it be smaller and less strained.

The budget does usefully request another base closure round and a cut in foreign military financing, where we basically pay foreign states to buy U.S. weapons. Congress ought to preserve those measures as they toss the rest of the budget. As I recently explained in the Boston Review, the irrelevance of Trump’s budget is a generally good thing. Sticking to the budget caps, or better yet a lower cap including OCO funds, would force useful discipline on the Pentagon, potentially increasing efficiency and maybe even encouraging an overdue move toward restraint.

President Trump made headlines with his impromptu remarks after he learned of the tragic attack in Manchester earlier this week.

President Donald Trump put the latest incident in perspective: “So many young beautiful innocent people living and enjoying their lives murdered by evil losers in life. I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. They would think that’s a great name. I will call them from now on losers because that’s what they are.

“They’re losers, and we’ll have more of them, but they’re losers, just remember that,” he added.

He spoke from the heart, but there is wisdom in the President’s words, as I explain at The National Interest’s The Skeptics. 

I note that “loser” is the same word that Ruslan Tsarni used to describe his nephews, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two Boston Marathon bombers.

When asked what provoked the bombing suspects, the uncle stated: “Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves—these are the only reasons I can imagine.

“Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, is a fraud, is a fake,” Tsarni added.

Other words include nitwits and idiots. My colleague John Mueller, who has assembled a catalog of all the post‑9/​11 terrorism cases in the United States—92 as of January 2017—characterizes most of these plots as bone-headed. These words describe mostly instances in which the would-be terrorists managed to kill and injure no one, not even themselves. But we should be equally dismissive of the losers that manage to detonate their bombs, or fire their weapons. Trump got it right.

I explain:

The word “loser” works because it doesn’t imply that there is anything particularly special about the individuals who perpetrate these heinous acts. They might wish to make a statement by indiscriminately killing and injuring helpless victims. They might fashion themselves as heroic, or uniquely evil, or superhuman. They are none of these things.

And I conclude:

I refuse to reward these losers. I refuse even to mention their names. Though we should never forget their victims, we shouldn’t allow [killers] to change the way that we live. They were sad and angry, and they lived unhappy lives. They wanted us all to be unhappy, too.

I’m not having it. I just cranked an Ariana Grande shuffle on my iPhone.

You can read the whole thing here.