Russia could be using Donald Trump to try to topple the United States

Konstantin Sivkov, who had served as a strategist for the Russian General Staff between 1995 and 2007, was keen to tell me all about the theory, which the chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, had set out in 2013 as a strategic vision for wars of the future. "Hybrid warfare," Sivkov began, "relies on the use of the enemy's own internal resources against him." Against an adversary with "a wobbly political base" and a "fractured moral core," Russia could use disinformation, cyber attacks, and other means of covert political influence to make the enemy "devour itself from within," Sivkov said. [Time]

For the first time, the nominee of a major party has questioned the U.S. commitment to defend NATO allies from a Russian attack. He has promoted the use of torture and called for a ban on Muslims coming into the country. Most recently, during a press conference on July 27, he suggested that he would even "look into" recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea and lifting the sanctions subsequently imposed on Russia.Taken together, these shifts appear to have created the nascent conditions — the wobbly political base, the fractured moral core — that would make the U.S. a fitting target for Russia's new approach to conflict. [Time]