This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Under Trump, things unraveled much more quickly, in a dimension few Americans could truly grasp. The agreement Obama had reached with Xi Jinping to cease industrial espionage ended the day Trump kicked off his trade war with China. Trump’s abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal—the only thing keeping Iran’s hackers on good behavior—unleashed more Iranian cyberattacks on American interests than ever before. The Kremlin—which had yet to feel much of any pain for its 2016 election interference or its hacks on the Ukraine and U.S. grids—never stopped hacking our election systems, our discourse or our infrastructure. Our fickle allies in the Gulf—the Saudis and Emiratis—only became more brazen in their choice of targets. Having avoided so much as a slap on the wrist for their brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudis blinked and kept going.