Stealing Elections Is All in the Game

Distinguished historian Marc Trachtenberg, professor emeritus at UCLA, thinks all this outrage is naive, and evidence of a clear double standard. In the following guest column, he provides some historical perspective that might temper our collective outrage just a bit. His point is not that Americans should be complacent or unconcerned by these activities, but rather that we should be neither surprised by them nor quick to see them as evidence of newfound Russian hostility. Instead, he suggests, this interference is a type of behavior that the United States helped establish; indeed, meddling in other countries’ politics has been an American specialty for a long time.