“In Europe and America there’s a growing feeling of hysteria, conditioned to respond to all the threats…” begins Sting’s famous song “Russians.” This apropos song, while referring to the potential for nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, might well have been referring to today’s emerging crisis in cyberspace. Although the times have changed, the persistent challenges that pervade Russian and American relations remain. Scott Jasper delves into the nuances of the Russian perspective and American responses in Russian Cyber Operations: Coding the Boundaries of Conflict. His work is insightful, stretches beyond the conventional deterrence cannon, and offers relevant policy alternatives.

Jasper poses several successive arguments throughout his book and builds toward policy recommendations. First and foremost, he argues that cyber operations and, by extension, asymmetric warfare more broadly have become the core tools of the Russian Federation in achieving its geopolitical objectives (p. 4). Putting the instruments of cyber operations—espionage, disruption, degradation, and manipulation—into the Russian context, Jasper draws out the logic for the development and use of cyber capabilities, both in their pure code form (pp. 33–39) and in their manipulation of info