Monday’s meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki caps a big few days on the topic of cyber election interference. On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller—tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election—indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers over the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The indictment, remarkable for publicly revealing the extent to which US intelligence services themselves have compromised Russian networks, is further confirmation of the US intelligence community’s unanimous view on the certainty of the Kremlin’s interference.

Trump doesn’t agree, expressing support for Putin’s denial of Russian involvement. With the 2018 US midterm elections approaching, the ‘warning lights are blinking red again’, and the world is watching to see how, or even whether, Washington will be willing and able to counter such activities. Tech companies are making significant preparations—even if they don’t always agree on what to do. But the White House has shown little urgency in taking concrete steps to protect the electoral process or even assist with private sector initiatives towards that end.

The 2016 US presidential election was a remarkable event in the history of US national security, in terms of the brazen nature of Russia’s interference (not to mention unresolved questions about the Trump campaign’s involvement) and the unprecedented nature and scale of the cyber tools deployed. Yes, foreign ‘influence operations’ are a long-established stratagem of intelligence services, but the brazen leveraging of cyberspace—and social media in particular—to influence voter behaviour took most by surprise.

Our recent article in the journal Contemporary Politics develops an analytical framework for thinking about how cyber interference affects voting behaviour. We ask how cyber tools can shape individual decisions, by making someone more or less likely to vote for a particular candidate, vote at all, or engage with political processes in other ways. We examine three cyber tools in particular.

Doxing is where confidential information is obtained and then released publicly, as detailed in Friday’s indictment. Another example was when the email account of Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta was hacked and his emails subsequently published on WikiLeaks. The online avatar Guccifer 2.0, now revealed to be a creation of Russian intelligence, played a prominent role in disseminating the stolen information.

Fake news, now a familiar (though often misused) term, is false or misleading content usually spread via social media and fashioned to appear credible or authentic. For example, a US Justice Department indictment alleges that during the 2016 campaign, Russian operatives promoted (false) allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, echoing Trump’s own message that the system was rigged.

Finally, trolling is the act of posting provocative and/or lurid content online to elicit emotional responses and widen existing social or political cleavages. Trolling behaviour isn’t just comments authored by automated bots or hired ‘troll farms’; it can also include paid advertisements on divisive social and political issues such as race, religion and gun control.

These tools were deployed with sophistication during the 2016 campaign. The hacked Podesta emails were published within minutes of the infamous Trump Access Hollywood tape emerging, distracting from that scandal. Paid advertisements targeted highly specific demographics such as Beyoncé fans or secessionist Texans. Facebook’s general counsel described Russia-linked advertisements as ‘an insidious attempt to drive people apart’. Our research unpacks how these activities might have affected the political behaviour of American voters and potentially swung a historically close election.

It’s impossible to know for sure whether Russia’s efforts were decisive, though James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, believes they were. But there’s enough evidence to understand how these tools operated and identify local conditions that may have exacerbated or blunted their impact.

In particular, it’s instructive to compare the 2016 US election with the 2017 French presidential election, which saw similar tactics deployed. Emails from the campaign of frontrunner (and eventual winner) Emmanuel Macron were leaked just before the final-round vote, fake news stories included a report that the Macron campaign was being funded by Saudi Arabia and supported by al-Qaeda, and a coordinated effort including trolling activity was directed towards supporting Russia’s preferred candidate, far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen.

Analysing and comparing the two elections suggests that local factors matter in shaping the effectiveness of cyber voter interference.

First, an election season spanning months in the US (compared to a narrow five-week window in France, including a media blackout just prior to voting) gave ample time for hackers to infiltrate political campaigns. It also allowed the fatiguing psychological impacts of fake news and trolling to accumulate.

Second, the incumbent French government, the Macron campaign and tech companies each took more initiative in conducting cyber defence—for example, taking decisive and public action in the wake of the Macron email leaks to caution the public and remind the media of their duty to protect the integrity of the vote. The Obama administration, in contrast, was inhibited by both confusion about the nature of the attack and partisan resistance from Republicans.

Third, the mainstream media environment in the US was far more sensationalist, overwhelmingly negative in tone and light on policy. In addition to the profit motive of covering Trump himself, news outlets were vulnerable to manipulation by being fed stolen information and focusing on scandal—such as the content of stolen emails—rather than the implications of the theft itself.

As Thomas Rid observes, cyber voter interference seeks ‘to drive wedges into pre-existing cracks’, not create new ones. Highly polarised or divided democracies may be more vulnerable due to their tribal nature, but our comparison of the US and French elections suggests that effectiveness of cyber tools also depends on how the sources and integrity of information entering into the public discourse are regulated.

Trust in the underlying integrity of public discourse is vital for the functioning of a liberal democracy. The policy challenge is to regulate but not suffocate flows of information, promoting transparency and civility while leaving space for a diversity of opinions and perspectives. These issues are just as complex closer to home—Australia’s new Electoral Integrity Task Force has much on its plate.

President Donald Trump’s disdain for alliance commitments suggests that we might be heading into a new era in geopolitics—an era characterised by a post-alliance US. While US allies will be hoping fervently that that isn’t the case, it probably makes sense to think through some of the ramifications of that scenario.

True, the Trump administration continues to emit a range of conflicting signals about alliances. Within the pages of the National Security Strategy (PDF) and the unclassified summary of the National Defense Strategy (PDF)—the formal documents underpinning declaratory strategy—allies are seen as positive contributors to US security. Yes, the documents continue to expound Trump’s point about the need for allies to carry more of the weight. See, for example, page 28 of the NSS: ‘We need our allies … to modernize, acquire necessary capabilities, improve readiness, expand the size of their forces, and affirm the political will to win.’

But the dominant picture is that the current US alliances are an enabler, an asymmetrical strength in the emerging environment of competitive great-power relationships. Broadly speaking, the US has allies while Russia and China don’t.

Unfortunately, the president seems not to share that view. Reports of his conversation with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in March suggest that the president was envious of Sweden’s relationship with NATO—as a partner of the alliance rather than as a member of it. If true, that approach reflects something more than a concern about equitable burden-sharing: it suggests, in particular, a wish to avoid the automaticity of commitment that goes with NATO membership and Article 5 commitments.

It doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean an isolationist America. Even a post-alliance America would still have interests abroad. And the current US and Australian celebration of their ‘100 years of mateship’, dating from their cooperation at the Battle of Hamel in World War I, is clearly freighted with a range of messages that Canberra hopes to send to Washington: in particular, that America had an important global role, and Australian–US defence cooperation a history, before the post–World War II alliances came along.

But a more voluntarist approach to US strategic engagement would certainly mean a radical rethink by US allies of their own strategic futures. After all, the current alliance system is predicated on US engagement. In his post last week, Dominique Moisi drew the important distinction between US disengagement from NATO and one of the other members doing the same: ‘A sheep gone astray is one thing; if the shepherd leaves, the entire herd is at risk.’

At the risk of losing some of the elegant simplicity of Moisi’s metaphor, let’s concede that the shepherd has more than one flock. Some Europeans worry about the relative importance of NATO as Asia grows steadily in wealth, power and strategic importance. So it’s possible that the shepherd is merely rationalising priorities here.

But is that the real basis of Trump’s disdain for NATO? He honestly doesn’t seem to be more attracted to the US’s Asian allies than its European ones. Indeed, if the NATO summit in Brussels on 11–12 July goes badly, it will send a fresh wave of concern through Japan, South Korea and Australia about their own alliances, not a sense of relief that the increasing strategic importance of Asia helps make them safe. That’s because the US is even more central to its Asian alliances than it is to NATO. The San Francisco system is not called the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model for nothing.

Moreover, US allies in Asia live in closer proximity to radical and adverse power shifts than their European counterparts—and their doing so has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind. Yes, President Vladimir Putin is pushing the risk envelope in Europe, especially in regard to the Baltics, Ukraine and the Black Sea. And those are genuine issues for the NATO summit to address. But today’s Russia is a weaker power than yesterday’s Soviet Union. By comparison, today’s China is a—much—stronger power than it was in Cold War days.

So if the US does seem to be headed into a post-alliance age, it would be reasonable to expect a more substantial reorientation of US allies’ defence policies to unpack in Asia, not in Europe. Each of the Asian allies is more singularly dependent upon the US than any of its 28 NATO allies. If Japan and South Korea both feel a necessity to contemplate a Plan B for their strategic futures, we should brace for radical options in Northeast Asia. Moreover, we’d need to do a root-and-branch rethink of our own strategic future here in Australia.

Having America as merely an intermittent partner and not a committed ally would—and should—force a serious reconsideration of our options.

Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Washington on 27 April for only the second time since Donald Trump became president. It was described as a ‘working visit’ and lasted just 22 hours, including about two and a half hours with the president.

The sparsity of these visits (they’ve also met twice in Europe, including at the 2017 G20 meeting in Hamburg) is partly explained by the paralysis in Germany as a result of the 171 days it took to form a government after the September 2017 elections. But there’s no getting around the facts that the two leaders have little personal chemistry, their world views are poles apart and there are major policy differences between them.

Chancellor Merkel’s first visit to Washington in March 2017 was overshadowed by President Trump’s apparent refusal—now described by the President as a ‘misunderstanding’—to shake hands with her. Then, after the G7 summit in May 2017 in Sicily, at which the President’s views on key issues such as climate change appeared uniformly run counter to European views, the Chancellor made her landmark public comment to the effect that Europe was now on its own and could no longer rely on others.

The subsequent media speculation that Chancellor Merkel might become the leader of the West, given disillusionment with the US President, wouldn’t have helped the atmospherics. And it seems as though the President sees Germany as a particularly egregious example of all the wrongs he wants to right.

He’s accused Germany, among others, of unfair trading practices and intends to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium products from EU countries—including Germany—from today. When the Germans and other Europeans responded with threats of counter-tariffs, Trump replied by singling out German car brands for particular attention.

He has constantly urged other NATO members to lift substantially their contribution to global security and bear more of the burden for this, especially by meeting NATO’s target of members spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2024. Germany has been particularly recalcitrant in this regard: its defence expenditure is currently only 1.2% of GDP.

President Trump is justified in some—but not all—of his criticism. Other EU members have been highly critical of Germany for not investing more of its huge trade surplus within the union. And Germany’s poor showing on defence—although partially explained by history—is not at all commensurate with its size and importance globally and within Europe. There are many within Germany who also argue very strongly for it to accept more responsibility internationally.

So expectations weren’t high for the Chancellor’s visit to Washington last week. Despite a determined attempt by both leaders to show the assembled media that they got along—kisses, any number of handshakes, smiles, public congratulations from the President on the Chancellor’s re-election—Angela Merkel got precisely nowhere. That despite no doubt putting her arguments on all the important issues as directly and cogently as she can (and she’s a formidable and powerful advocate). On trade, she was forced simply to say, somewhat lamely, that ‘the President would decide’ on whether to impose steel and aluminium tariffs, a decision that has now been delayed until 1 June.

On defence, the Chancellor had to listen to President Trump yet again publicly calling on the Europeans to do far more and accept more of the burden. Her promise, in turn, that Germany would do its bit rang very hollow. It’s far from doing that and has little chance of meeting the NATO target by 2024. Even though the chancellor told the president that this would increase next year to 1.3%, the NATO target isn’t even mentioned in Germany’s grand coalition government (GroKo) agreement between Merkel’s Christian Democrat/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

On Iran, the President seemed still inclined to withdraw from the nuclear deal, although he did acknowledge that building on the existing deal (as proposed by President Emmanuel Macron) was also a possibility.

Inevitably, given the coincidence of timing, Chancellor Merkel’s visit is being contrasted with the visit to Washington a couple of days earlier by President Macron. There’s no question but that Mr Trump finds Macron a more congenial partner, and this was reflected in the high profile and pomp of President Macron’s program.

Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have approached the trans-Atlantic relationship differently. Mr Macron has tried to get personally close to the president, has hosted him in Paris (with all the trimmings), has announced a sharp increase in French defence expenditure and has been a strong partner for the US, including through French participation in the recent missile strikes in Syria. That has opened the door for President Macron to put French (and European) views openly and clearly, including to Congress, something Angela Merkel wasn’t able to do.

The Chancellor’s approach has been more direct and policy-oriented, outlining Germany’s position and not hiding differences. For example, she ruled out, in advance, participating in the Syria strikes and has stoutly defended both the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal.

It is, however, too much to contrast Macron’s three-day state visit with Merkel’s 22‑hour working visit. That reflects their differing styles, rather than being a deliberate US snub. And their visits to Washington were carefully coordinated: Mr Macron and Frau Merkel had spoken at length on 19 April, when President Macron visited Berlin, and no doubt were in close touch at the time of their respective visits.

And President Macron’s approach didn’t result in anything more on trade, Iran or climate change than Chancellor Merkel’s.

But it seems clear that, at least for now, Macron is filling a vacuum where Germany used to be. Partly reflecting its domestic political circumstances, Germany has been absent for too long on the big issues for Europe and the world. It’s high time that it resumed a leadership role, especially with such a willing and energetic partner as President Macron’s France.

And there’s no doubt that Macron is staking a claim for European leadership and for being the preferred partner of the US in Europe post-Brexit. He recently also outlined a vision— not necessarily shared by Angela Merkel—for Europe, and defended democracy and Western values, in a significant speech to the European Parliament.

Let’s hope the Chancellor soon rejoins him. It would be a pity if the Washington Post proved right with its over-the-top comment on 27 April that German ‘hesitation’ risks it becoming ‘Europe’s weakest link’.

Before you snuggle by the fire with some eggnog and a copy of Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy (subtitled, in case you wondered, ‘of the United States of America’), I advise you to plan ahead, like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life:

MAÎTRE D’: Ah, good afternoon, sir, and how are we today?

CREOSOTE: Better.

MAÎTRE D’: Better?

CREOSOTE: Better get a bucket. I’m going to throw up.

MAÎTRE D’: Uh, Gaston! A bucket for monsieur.

Pail prepositioning will be necessary because you will soon encounter passages like this:

Together, our task is to strengthen our families, to build up our communities, to serve our citizens, and to celebrate American greatness as a shining example to the world. We will leave our children and grandchildren a Nation that is stronger, better, freer, prouder, and greater than ever before.

There is so very much more, as the strategy takes us on a journey from the recent dark past in America’s history, when

the United States began to drift. We experienced a crisis of confidence and surrendered our advantages in key areas. As we took our political, economic, and military advantages for granted, other actors steadily implemented their long-term plans to challenge America …

Thankfully, President Trump has ‘restored confidence in America’s purpose’. Trump is ‘defending America’s sovereignty without apology. The whole world is lifted by America’s renewal and the reemergence of American leadership’.

Friends, I am not making this stuff up. The same country that gave us Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan has now produced a national security strategy that holds a mirror up to Trump and, looking through a glass orangely, likes what it sees.

The strategy, and the bombastic speech that launched it, is primarily a continuation of Trump’s endless election campaign. The southern border wall will be built, lazy penny-pinching allies will be held to account, unfair trade deals will be countered, and American manufacturing brought home from overseas. America’s ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ enemies will be defeated by an ‘America First’ strategy—an amalgam of self-interest burnished with the modest confidence that the USA is ‘among the greatest forces for good in history’.

In an age of projectile tweeting, does language matter anymore? Not so much with Trump because he’s like that other great strategist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice: ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ Early in November, Trump explained his own version of the Dumpty doctrine to Fox News, when he claimed it didn’t matter that the administration had still not filled so many State Department senior jobs:

Let me tell you, the one that matters is me … I’m the only one that matters because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that, you’ve seen it strongly.

A key objective of the strategy is to make it look as though everything has changed from the Obama days, when the reality is that there is at least as much continuity with as there are differences from the security policies of past administrations. For all its bluster about a more competitive relationship with China, this will happen ‘in accordance with our “One China” policy’. Likewise, America’s alliances will stay—they will just be better managed to extract more burden-sharing.

The most important passage in the strategy is this:

[T]he revisionist powers of China and Russia, the rogue states of Iran and North Korea, and transnational threat organizations, particularly jihadist terrorist groups—are actively competing against the United States and our allies and partners. Although differing in nature and magnitude, these rivals compete across political, economic, and military arenas, and use technology and information to accelerate these contests in order to shift regional balances of power in their favor. These are fundamentally political contests between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.

The strategy closely focuses on China stealing US intellectual property, ‘proprietary technology and early-stage ideas’, and foreshadows the need to build stronger protections for the US ‘National Security Innovation Base’. The paper says there will be a clampdown on approvals for foreign (read: ‘Chinese’) investment into critical infrastructure and, about universities, it says:

The United States will review visa procedures to reduce economic theft by non-traditional intelligence collectors. We will consider restrictions on foreign STEM students from designated countries to ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to our competitors.

That announcement is relevant to Australia’s own domestic situation. We should expect the US to come calling on that topic. Australia gets three mentions in the strategy, including the assessment that we continue ‘to reinforce economic and security arrangements that support our shared interests and safeguard democratic values across the region’. As always, our brand is well received in Washington DC, even if neither the Americans nor we have any new thinking to offer about the future of the alliance.

A good political memoir offers the joy of the fight and the smell of the gang warfare.

Insight is ever welcome. Ditto inspiration. Plus laughs to help the medicine go down.

Gareth Evans’ Incorrigible optimist: a political memoir ticks those boxes, yet it’s no conventional memoir. Evans offers a how-to-do-it manual for diplomatic/strategic tragics: organising the fights and accepting the hard reality that all wins are partial. The jabs and jokes are sprinkled asides rather than stepping stones in a chronological career narrative.

The book is that of a man ever at work to create system and symmetry in a chaotic world. He quotes the journalist David Jenkins: ‘Evans was never a man to find contentment in a wilderness of single instances. He longs for order, predictability, certitude. His mind craves structure.’

Evans is pedantic about principles and paperwork and prose. His staffers could always recite the Evans system for arranging the papers and the coloured tabs. Surveying the sea of documents squirrelled in my bit of the parliamentary press gallery, Evans once pronounced: ‘There are two sorts of people in the world, Graeme, those who file and those who don’t.’ He filed it all.

See that mind’s serious purpose in the book’s structure: 10 thematic chapters on complex issues introduced with simple titles (Justice, Race, Enterprise, Diplomacy, Cooperation, Conflict, Atrocities, Weapons, Education, Politics).

If you need to know how to construct and then ride an international panel of the eminent and expert, here’s the recipe. Evans explains how he used the whip from the get-go on the commission that assaulted the doctrine of state sovereignty by proclaiming the concept of R2P, the ‘responsibility to protect’.

At the first meeting of the panel, co-chairman Evans announced that he’d come up with ‘responsibility to protect’ as the title for the report: ‘This was met by what I can only describe as a collective, incredulous intake of breath … To suggest the report’s title before we had even begun to discuss its content, let alone taken any soundings in the dozen consultations that were scheduled to take place around the world, was considered a little presumptuous, even for an Australian.’

The discussion of R2P is a fine example of Evans’ obsession with defining concepts and codifying what can be done on the international stage. His years as foreign minister (1988–96) left enduring marks on the Oz diplomatic vocabulary: Australia as a ‘middle power’ seeking ‘like-minded coalitions’, doing ‘niche diplomacy’, acting always as ‘a good international citizen’, working constantly in Asia to be (in Dick Woolcott’s phrase) ‘the oddest man in’, putting ‘ballast’ into the Indonesia relationship. As a middle power in a crowded market, he argues, Australia must show timing and smarts when picking its issues, mixing persistence with diplomatic capacity, creativity and credibility.

The defensive account of his East Timor policy and upbeat story of the Cambodia peace process are case studies in slow drilling through hard boards, with lots of splinters.

Evans stands with Bert Evatt and Percy Spender as one of the rare foreign ministers who changed the structure of our foreign policy. He made ASEAN central to Oz policy and helped create post–Cold War institutions for the new Asia: the ASEAN Regional Forum and Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation. Australia wanted APEC’s ‘C’ to stand for ‘Community’, but ASEAN wouldn’t have it. And so, Evans observes, APEC’s name three decades later is still a linguistic oddity: ‘four adjectives in search of a noun’.

Because of its thematic approach, this memoir argues as much about today’s headlines as it does about past battles. Donald Trump is dismissed as ‘a narcissistic, ethically challenged, ignorant vulgarian’. The incorrigible optimist judges that this president ‘manifestly out of his depth intellectually and without any compensating moral moorings’ will be ‘contained by a combination of outright judicial and bureaucratic resistance and also growing congressional resistance, as uncomfortable as that will be for the Republican majority’.

The Evans recipe for Australia in the time of Trump is less America, more Asia. As America and China slug it out ‘for not only regional but global dominance’, Australia should take stands not sides. Take stands against China when it overreaches, he writes, ‘but taking sides in the region, to a greater extent than has been the norm for decades, is something about which Australia should remain very careful’.

Australia should go with flow as it did in joining China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, but should push back hard when Beijing’s behaviour is unacceptable, such as with China’s island building in the South China Sea. Evans says Australia’s navy should sail within 12 nautical miles of those reef installations, offering this sanguine assessment: ‘True, any such naval or similar airborne operation runs real risks of tactical incidents occurring, but China is not remotely interested in embarking upon or promoting violent military confrontation with anyone, and the prospect of any such confrontation escalating out of control is extremely unlikely.’

Despite 21 years of ‘rigorous insensitivity training’ in Australian politics, Evans says he never lost his ‘total commitment to the principles of a rule-based international order’ and his ‘comprehensive distaste for the sheer moral indecency of conducting international life either without principled standards, or with double standards’. This is a recipe for frustration, even moments of incandescent anger. The staffers and diplomats had a wry phrase: ‘Earth to Gareth!’ The Evans comment is that ‘my temperament is not of the cloth from which Zen masters are cut’.

After Oz politics, Evans went off to build an NGO version of a foreign ministry with the International Crisis Group. He writes that his management philosophy was to put up with ‘some brilliant but cantankerous directors and analysts—so long as the returns exceed the maintenance costs’.

It’s a good description, too, of the brilliant Gareth Evans.