| It isn’t new at all. Foreign countries have been doing it since the invention of democracy. You can see this very vividly demonstrated in any classical histories, like Thucydides, all the way up through history, with all types of elections, from actual every-single-citizen democracies to the just-the-Electors HRE. This is also true in American history from the very beginning, when French interests, for example, worked against Adams. Or more famously, when the British strongly intervened to ensure the re-election of FDR. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/when-a-forei... The Kennedy election was also famously the target of Russian interference. https://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/ Simply put, there’s no foreign country in world history that wasn’t or isn’t interfering in domestic elections they have any kind of interest in. It would be very foolish not to. It’s a game that has gone on since the invention of democracy and will always go on, because every incentive is aligned with it and there are no norms against it. In general, you have to be very careful when people claim something is new and unprecedented. Sometimes they just don’t know and lack the necessary context, but often they’re constructing a narrative that relies on historical innocence/ignorance of relatively mundane detail. This has been a major problem with our news media that has been getting worse for decades: they don’t do the very important job of putting things into historical or even a current cultural context. Instead, they create narratives that are easy, get people fired up and consuming more news, and often inadvertently (or sometimes advertently) serve a partisan purpose. |