And in 2016, it was used directly against the United States when Russia intervened in the US presidential election in an attempt to delegitimize American democracy in the eyes of its own citizens. This, too, caught Washington by surprise, and the US government failed yet again to respond in a timely way to a threat that had been building in plain sight and that had been deployed against others for more than a decade. Most of America’s leaders had assumed it could not happen to us.
