“Russia is not a superpower, it’s a super problem,” the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Linas Linkevičius, said on November 18, ten days after Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States. “As a child I still remember the sound of the tanks rolling through the streets of Vilnius, so even my generation—and I’m 34—still remembers when the Russians were here as a Soviet army. But they were Russian troops and they were invading us, so the last thing we are on this subject is naïve.”

The 2016 American presidential election, which has just produced the greatest political upset in living memory, is hard to find precedents for in recent history, but that is not true of the intervention in the American political process by Russia. The decision taken at the highest levels of Moscow’s decision-making apparatus first to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s emails and then to make the spoils public via WikiLeaks, was a deliberate attempt to interfere in domestic American politics.

Our navy’s senior admiral, John Richardson, made news last week by banning use of the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) acronym. The term had come into usage to describe the risks run by U.S. forces as adversaries—China, in particular—developed better long-range precision strike weapons. Richardson said the term “can mean all things to all people or anything to anyone—we have to be better than that…Instead, we will talk in specifics about our strategies and capabilities relative to those of our potential adversaries, within the specific context of geography, concepts, and technologies.” 

President Obama recently said the war in Syria “haunts me constantly.” It ought to. Because the killing of more than a half million of Syria’s people by their government, Iran, Russia, and ISIS will cast a long shadow over the legacy of the Obama administration. Especially because this devastation results from the success of the Obama doctrine, not its failure.