Having hijacked the White House in the 2016 election, Moscow Center is poised to make an all-out effort - far larger than the campaign they mounted in 2016 - to retain effective control of the US Government by heading off looming Republican losses in the 2018 mid-term elections. Were the Democrats to gain control of the Congress in November 2018, it would be only a matter of months before Donald Trump was impeached and removed from office. Should he remain in office, the Lubyanka would have at least another two years of mischief-making, disrupting the US government and the global American alliance system.
An American failure to thwart Moscow's designs would send a signal across the world that resistance is futile. If what used to be known as the Sole Remaining SuperPower is unable to resist Russia subversion, what chances to smaller states have against the Third Rome.
The American intelligence and security community has thus far done a much better job of sniffing out Russian tradecraft than in suggesting effective countermeasures. The challenge, of course, is threading Scylla and Charybdis - how to frustrate Russian subversion without infringing on traditional liberties. This dilemma was familiar during the Cold War, when Joe McCarthy gave anti-Communism a bad name.
One place to start might be campaign finance reform. As it stands, there are few effective constraints on "independent expenditures" by anonymous sources of "dark money". Little did anyone suspect that the largest source of dark money would turn out to be the Kremlin.
Will Congressional Republicans look the other way, and accept Moscow Gold in return for retaining political power??
