Editorials of The Times

The West’s response to Russian aggression has usually been too little, too late, and devoid of the one voice that really matters — President Donald Trump’s.

But at last, his administration is taking action, and Trump has spoken out, tentatively. On Thursday the Treasury Department announced it was imposing sanctions for the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. Officials have denounced the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain and Russia’s devastating bombing missions in Syria.

While such steps are encouraging, only a more robust, unified response from the United States and its NATO allies would impede President Vladimir Putin from expanding his pattern of heinous behavior.

Before leaving office, President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats, seized two diplomatic properties and imposed sanctions in response to the election interference. Trump, for reasons that have never been made completely clear, has until now resisted a congressional mandate that he expand the penalties. This was despite the warnings of intelligence agencies that Russia was already trying to meddle in the 2018 election and Congress’ near unanimous passage of the law demanding more sanctions.

The sanctions announced Thursday affect five Russian organizations and 19 individuals cited for spreading disinformation and propaganda to disrupt the election.

While this was Trump’s most significant anti-Russia move, these are the same entities identified by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling, in a recent indictment and only add two new senior Russian officials, with ties to military intelligence, to the list Obama sanctioned in 2016, according to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

The penalties need to go further, subjecting Putin’s wealthy cronies and their families to sanctions like travel bans and asset freezes that would put even more pressure on the Russian leader.

The administration also took the unusual step of citing the Russian government for a previously unconfirmed series of intrusions into U.S. power plants and the computer networks that control power grids that occurred about the time of the election. Those attacks suggest Russian state-sponsored hackers have been actively mapping out Western industrial, power and nuclear facilities for eventual sabotage, experts say.

While Trump said nothing Thursday about either the sanctions or Russia’s interference in the election, he did end days of silence about the attack with a military-grade nerve agent against the former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, despite Moscow’s denials. “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Something that should never ever happen. We’re taking it very seriously, as I think are many others.”

But Trump’s comments came a full day after his U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, took the lead with a more powerful statement at the Security Council. She insisted the United States stands in “absolute solidarity” with Britain after the attack. Russia’s use of chemical weapons on the soil of another U.N. member is a “defining moment,” she said, and there is a need to “hold Russia accountable.”

And the piling on didn’t stop there. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, whom Trump reportedly may fire, condemned Russia in a speech Thursday for being “complicit in Assad’s atrocities” in Syria and conducting more than 100 bombing missions in Eastern Ghouta, as well as being “responsible” for the Skripal poisoning.

All of this occurred after Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to expel 23 Russian spies and suspend high-level contact with Moscow, and also joined the United States, France and Germany in a statement denouncing Russia’s action as a clear violation of international law.

But the statement said nothing about joint action, and May’s measures either lacked details or didn’t go far enough. Putin, an authoritarian leader who is expected to be re-elected easily to another six-year term Sunday, has paid little or no price for his aggressions, including annexing Crimea, destabilizing other parts of Ukraine and enabling President Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.

He won’t stop until he knows that the United States will stand up to him and work with its allies to impose stronger financial and diplomatic measures to rein him in.

In a “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin shrugged off questions about President Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets, personal insults and vulgar language. Mnuchin suggested that he was above riffraff talk. “I think you should be focused on what the policies are,” he told the show’s host, Chuck Todd.

His words sounded high-minded, but they rang hollow. Mnuchin, who has milked taxpayers so that he and his wife can travel in style, might benefit from a refresher course in the axiom that character is destiny. It’s an idea that has been around for a couple of thousand years, and for good reason: It’s inherently true.

This brings us to Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, who also once seemed to give that concept short shrift. “I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals,” he said. “It is about ideas, the public good and doing what is best for the state of New York.” That was on March 10, 2008, a few days before Spitzer was forced to resign as governor amid revelations that he’d been a frequent patron of a prostitution ring. His hypocrisy was manifest, given how he had proclaimed himself an implacable foe of the sex trade because it exploited women. Character, meet your destiny.

This week, the 10th anniversary of his resignation, news organizations have resurrected the scandal, exploring how it rapidly unfolded and offering where-are-they-now profiles of key figures. Spitzer, now 58, has taken control of his family’s real estate business. After an unsuccessful run for city comptroller five years ago, he’s not through with politics so much as politics is through with him.

Few New Yorkers shed tears over his demise because, in the course of fewer than 15 months as governor, he alienated many voters and fellow politicians alike with his heedless manner. His fate is worth noting in light of present-day national politics.

Spitzer, a Democrat, warned a Republican assemblyman that he was a “steamroller” who’d run over opponents, modifying that word with a well-worn Anglo-Saxonism. He described Joseph Bruno, the state Senate Republican leader and a man 30 years his senior, as “old” and “senile,” throwing in vulgar language to show his own toughness. He gracelessly likened the governorship of his predecessor, George Pataki, to Rip Van Winkle, sleeping the years away — this in his inaugural speech, with Pataki sitting right there. During an argument, one state senator said, Spitzer threatened to cut off his head.

In essence, the governor warned he was prepared to inflict fire and fury. His use of scatology was intended to belittle others. He had no doubt that he was always the smartest man in the room.

In the end, no one wanted to have his back.

Bruno, hardly a sympathetic figure himself, returned the Spitzer tirades by describing the governor with words like “bully,” “meanspirited” and an “overgrown kid” prone to “tantrums.”

The next time Mnuchin goes on a Sunday show, the host might ask if he knows anyone in the upper reaches of national politics to whom all those words apply. And then ask if policies are really all that count and if character is not the ultimate shaper of destiny.

Dozens of biotechnology startups across the country are investing in the research and development that Big Pharma has stopped funding. Clementia, for instance, is zeroing in on rare bone diseases. Catabasis Pharmaceuticals is focused on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other terrible neurological conditions. Quanterix and others are developing blood-based diagnostic tests to help doctors offer more targeted cancer treatments, for example.

The pipelines and progress of these companies are visible, and their clinical trial results knowable, since they conform to Food and Drug Administration protocols as well as Securities and Exchange Commission investor regulations, in the case of publicly held companies.

Theranos, a company that claimed to have reinvented blood testing, and thus a big swath of medicine itself, conformed to none of this. Its founder, the far-too-famous Elizabeth Holmes, controlled the voting stock, the board of directors and the corporate messaging to execute one of the most outrageous acts of corporate prestidigitation since Enron convinced us that it had reinvented energy. Enron was so good at it that even Newton might have been an investor.

Claiming it had come up with a portable analyzer that could perform a full range of tests with only a pinprick of blood, Theranos cast a medical spell over sophisticated investors, the public and the media. But Wednesday, the company settled fraud charges leveled by the SEC against Holmes; a former Theranos president, Ramesh Balwani, has also been charged but will go to trial.

The agency accused Holmes and the company of raising $700 million from investors by faking data, orchestrating tests and simply lying to investors and the media to cover up that they had no device that actually worked and were mainly using outside laboratories to assess blood samples.

Holmes, who did not admit or deny wrongdoing, will pay a $500,000 fine, which seems trivial given that the company was once valued at $9 billion, purportedly making her Silicon Valley’s first self-made female billionaire. She’s also barred from serving as an officer or director at any public company for 10 years, and she’s returning 18.9 million shares. The penalties are small for such chicanery, but federal prosecutors are still conducting a criminal investigation.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any biotech’s failure. We should expect it. Biotechs by their nature offer the promise of disruptive breakthroughs and discoveries, but they’re mostly all-in propositions, based on one molecule or one test. Fail in a Phase III clinical trial — and a majority do — and you’re finished. It’s a moonshot business; companies are going to blow up.

Startups blow up in Silicon Valley all the time, too, but what’s surprising is how long Holmes could peddle her disruption tale before regulators stepped in. The story was just too good to resist — a brainy 19-year-old drops out of Stanford and creates a device that can make blood testing vastly easier and more accessible. Her investors included Valley powerhouses such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, health care players such as Walgreens and BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and Tako Ventures, founded by Oracle’s Larry Ellison. She also assembled a brand-name board that included at one time or another two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger; former Sen. Bill Frist (a physician); and superlawyer David Boies, whose firm was involved in efforts to quiet a company whistleblower and who reportedly tried to get The Wall Street Journal to kill an article that uncovered the fraud.

In 2013, Holmes added another heavyweight to the board, Jim Mattis, the general in charge of the U.S. Central Command. While in that command, Mattis, too, caught the Theranos fever and pushed to have the company’s tests used in the field. Holmes had pushed the military story line even harder, telling Walgreens, which thought it was using its tests, that its analyzer was already aboard military helicopters. That was false. The Defense Department is a regular investor in tech startups and like any venture capitalist is willing to suffer investment losses. But Theranos got red-flagged at some point by the FDA and defense officials. Mattis would get green-flagged to a better gig after his time on the Theranos board: secretary of defense.

Theranos’ gullible investors acceded to Holmes’ demand for supervoting stock and were willing to believe whatever she was selling, even as her story began to unwind.

“I think the board has complete confidence in Elizabeth Holmes as a founder of the company, as a scientist and as an administrator,” Boies told The Times’ Reed Abelson in April 2016, a few months after The Wall Street Journal article that Boies reportedly tried to have killed cast serious doubt on Theranos’ technology and execution.

It’s possible that the finger-prick blood analyzer Holmes envisioned will someday make it to market. But Theranos shows us once again that when a startup promises disruption, you are just as likely to get stuck.