I am probably not qualified to discuss this topic and don’t really have time to find that much evidence for my takes so take everything said with a grain of salt. However, I am really interested in foreign policy and read a lot about it. Also the foreign policy establishment is smarter, but often treats the world as a giant risk game without thinking about the consequences of their actions on the actual people, so in my opinion we need more average Joe’s to discuss foreign policy.
I think information warfare has been one of the more overrated developments in the world. “The Perfect Weapon” by David Sanger gave us the perspective from someone in the BLOB, who tried to stress how existentially important information warfare was for our future. Admittedly it seems scary: Russia hacked our election and installed a Manchurian-candidate like figure that destroyed all our institutions.
Firstly Trump was not elected primarily because of Russia. This argument always seemed more like a coping mechanism by liberals. Much stronger reasons for why Trump won were running an uncharismatic candidate that was character assassinated for years by the right wing media. I actually think she was an incredibly qualified candidate and part of the reason for people hating her was sexism, but that doesn’t change the fact that most Americans range from indifferent to her to considering her some sort of anti-Christ. It also doesn’t hurt that we have an incredibly quirky and undemocratic system to select the president. There were 75,316 people in several states who had they all voted differently would’ve changed the electoral calculus (1). This is admittedly not a lot of votes they needed to swing, but that’s still significant (based on five-thirty-eight .8% of the votes in important states). It is at best ambiguous whether had Russia not hacked the election Hillary would’ve won. For comparison to other interests however, the Russians spent 1.25 million dollars, while Trump spent 617 million dollars, and Clinton spent 1.2 billion dollars (4). Yes we should care more about Russian spending because it it an attempt to subvert our democracy, but based strictly on effectiveness there seems to be other more important factors.
Let’s suppose that the Russians were able to flip enough voters in swing states to change the outcome of the election. In this case what did their information warfare actually accomplish. As “The Perfect Weapons” nicely shows, Trump clearly had a respect for Russia’s capabilities, “even claiming he admired Putin’s strength” (5). Trump for all his faults and weirdness towards Russia didn’t really do anything for them. He opposed pro-Russian regimes in Syria and Venezuela. He also continued through executive orders to apply sanctions even specifically for hacking elections, (2) in addition to other Russian actions. Yes Trump was pro-Russian in his rhetoric, but his actions never lined up. Maybe we are just lucky, and a second term Trump would have fulfilled a threat of withdrawing from NATO (3). And who knows how Trump would’ve reacted had Russia invaded Ukraine during his presidency. However these actions never materialized, and we cannot judge the effectiveness of hypotheticals.
The cost of warfare is not simply the equipment and lives. Information warfare is relatively cheap in this respect, costing very little to wage, and generally not directly killing anyone. However, this information warfare cost Russia a large amount. This is the primary reason why just general information warfare without much focus is mostly a bad idea. Russia made the party who was generally a bit more dovish, into a party completely full of absolute Russia haters. Yes he divided the country, but a large part of that division involved dividing the country against your own country. People don’t like having their elections hacked obviously. The republican party minus a small vocal pro-Putin element already hated Russia. Why alienate the other half of the country. I don’t think Putin thinks of the Russian people too much either, but sanctions are not good for your people. If the general Russian person on the street had the choice whether to create a worse economy in exchange for slightly influencing the United States presidential election and dividing the American public, I think the answer would be pretty obvious. We sometimes have the tendency that countries are actually just their people, and what benefits the country should at least benefit their people.
The west’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has completely shown the limits of international information warfare. This could’ve been the information warriors time to shine. They could’ve lead the narrative in the west that the Ukrainian government were evil Nazis whose people required liberation. However, the general narrative in most of the west has been almost uniformly negative. Maybe it’s hard to change minds against something so obviously evil, but maybe a more useful application would be to show how much progress the Russian forces were making in their campaign, and how scared the west should be. However they have been completely unsuccessful at this as well.
Information warfare sounds sexy and modern which is why people talk about it, but seems overrated as a policy tool, and even in the effected country doesn’t necessarily have the effect people want. On a domestic level it is very important to control the narrative. However as a tool for warfare at least in the way Russia implemented it, it’s pretty unsuccessful, and can often backfire by making everyone hate you. This is why I don’t necessarily agree with sentiments in the reading like “It was a stunning lack of judgment all the way around- a failure to grasp the gravity of an old threat wrapped in a new technology.” (5). I think this overrates its importance. The book also made the claim that the Russians “destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.” (5). However, to imply that democratic movements are impossible due to a small subset being fraudulent seems absurd. Somehow we were able to make literal internet trolls sound like the soldiers of the future.
(1) - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-margin-loss-votes
(4) - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-interference-affect-the-2016-election/
(5) – “The Perfect Weapon” by David E. Sanger