If you were political knowledgeable during the 1980s you may know what it meant when an environmental activist group was called a watermelon. This charge implied that while the group may have appeared Green from the outside inside with was Red, as in Communist. Usually this charge was hurled with circumstantial evidence that Soviet Intelligence, the KGB and the like, either created the group or had seriously penetrated it, turning it into another arm of the Soviet’s attack on the West. During the Cold War this was a charge had to prove but once the Soviet Union collapsed and secrets spilled out many of the charges were substantiated.

Any good intelligence officer will tell you that you cannot create division in a nation or culture but you can exploit naturally occurring ones. The general members of these environmental and anti-nuclear groups were not the Kremlin’s puppets. These people sincerely believed in their cause, they were concerned about environmental degradation, nuclear waste, and the terrorized by the concept of nuclear war. Their fears and concern were hijacked by a hostile foreign power that did not share their concerns but rather used them as a tool to advance selfish self-interests and authoritarian rule around the globe. The fall of the Wall and the ending of the Cold War consigned calling a group a ‘watermelon’ to the ash heap of history.

America’s culture wars, xenophobia, and sharp political partisanship have created fresh societal fractures for the Kremlin, now under the control of oligarchs instead of communists, to use to divide and weaken the West. Master of human based intelligence the Kremlin’s agents moved against the western democracies and from Brexit to the 2016 American Presidential election they scored hits, wounding, us, their global adversaries. The full extent of their political interference in the US elections is still unknown, the investigations are ongoing though domestic political actors, knowingly or unknowingly, aid the Kremlin’s objective with obstruction, returning us to the 80s where activist political organizations, with resources and aid from our geo-political rivals, undercut our democracy and threaten freedom around the globe. China, even as it retreats further in despotism, is rising, launching ambitious projects for global economic dominance with the decade, Russia invades her neighbors and drives wedges between NATO’s member and her allies, never this century has American leadership been more vital and more absent.

Russia pours money and resources into America sharpening our divisions, turning us on each other and today the political ‘watermelons’ are Facebook groups and memes, partisanship over patriotism, and the destructive pursuit of power absent principles. This may very well be an infliction point in history and what we do and how we do it will shape the future.

Choose wisely.