Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz discussed his new book, iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age, on Laura Ingraham's radio show on Monday.
Ingraham first asked Gertz about the"hyperventilation" from the public over the presidential election, citing the intelligence community's declassified report on Russia's covert intelligence effort during the campaign released on Friday.
"It wasn't clear after reading that, in my mind, whether Russia wanted to help Trump or just debilitate Hillary Clinton and hurt her because, as far as I could tell, at least what I read, they believed Hillary was going to win the election," she said. "So, what should we be thinking about the current state of things, vis-a-vis the election itself?"
Gertz said that the intelligence report "muddled their message."
"What they missed, and this is what I focus on in iWar, is that Russia and Putin regard the United States as their main enemy," he said.
Gertz then explained how Russia's aggression and the power of Russian President Vladimir Putin increased during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of State and the entirety of the Obama administration.
"But, under Obama, I can remember in the early stages of the Obama administration, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community, the security community were all ordered by the White House not to say anything bad about Vladimir Putin, and this was because of Hillary's ridiculous reset, which was a disaster," Gertz said. "And then so, basically, they facilitated the rise of this neo-fascist dictator and then all of a sudden, when Trump wins the election, they're trying to say now that, 'Oh, the Russians are behind Trump.'"
Ingraham said that the United States does need a better relationship with Russia.
"They are nationalistic at heart and they have great ambitions," she said. "There's no doubt about it. But they're also under an enormous amount of pressure on the inside and the idea that, you know, we should continue to try to ramp up pressure on Russia, I mean, I guess–but, what is our end game here?"
Gertz said that NATO and Europe are "wallowing" while figuring out what they want to do and how to protect themselves.
Ingraham asked if that meant the United States should protect them despite the country's current domestic issues, such as illegal immigration and violent crime.
She said that with all of these problems, Americans will not jump at the opportunity to try to protect someone else, "unless the economy starts humming again."
"Right, well that's my whole point of iWar–that we can do these things without having to send troops there," Gertz said. "If we understand the mechanics of information warfare. Unfortunately, the U.S. is woefully behind. The Russians understand it. The Chinese understand it. The North Koreans understand it. The Islamic State understands it. The U.S. is lost in space."
He then explained that the U.S. is already in a state of war.
"[Obama] is living in this post-modern delusional dream world where everybody's supposed to sit around the campfire and sing 'Kumbaya' among nations, and it's just a–like I said, a delusion," Gertz said. "We're at war already. It's an information war. It's not going to be kinetic, and the Chinese–you know, Sun Tzu, the art of defeating your enemy without firing a shot and the Russians are working in the same thing. It's war on the cheap, basically."
Ingraham followed up and said that it would be more newsworthy if Russia was not trying to influence the election.
"What you document and remind us of, because we all have such short attention spans, just what the State Department became vulnerable–State Department information, State Department emails became so vulnerable with Hillary Clinton's private email server," she said.
Ingraham ended by saying that even though Clinton compromised sensitive information that adversaries could have accessed, somehow President-elect Donald Trump is to blame for giving in to foreign powers.
"It's unbelievable," Gertz said. "And I want to make the point that nothing has been done. First, it was WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning leaking tens of thousands of documents. Nothing was done to tighten security after that. Then it was [Edward] Snowden. And then it was Hillary's email server. I mean, this has been a characteristic of the Obama administration: complete disregard for the security of information."