Critics have derided the White House’s decision this past May to scrap its Cyber Coordinator post—created by the Obama administration to consolidate policy courses of action on cybersecurity issues—as short-sighted and tone-deaf, particularly at the height of concern over Russia’s nefarious activity toward U.S. political processes. However, the move creates an opportunity to examine whether the overall U.S. approach to cybersecurity has been overly narrow relative to the Russian threat—which itself has demonstrated the need for Washington to forge partnerships with industry and to expand beyond the network-centric aspects of information warfare.
Since the onset of Internet ubiquity in the early 1990s, Moscow has sought agreement with the U.S. to avoid a digital arms race, finding little receptivity on the U.S. side. However, in the early stages of the Obama and Medvedev administrations, the “reset” atmosphere found envoys locked in extensive bilateral consultations on cybersecurity. Despite some initial optimism, by 2012 the primary fruit of these consultations was a better grasp of the intractable differences in how Russia and the U.S. defined the cyber…
