Max Hastings
On Sept. 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. On Dec. 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the U.S. On Aug. 8, 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. The point here is that for the best part of a thousand years, a convention prevailed that before one state waged war against another, it formally announced its intention to do so.
Belligerents’ diplomats were permitted to return unimpeded to their respective homelands — even the wartime Japanese and Germans went along with this, although they had launched surprise attacks such as that on the Day of Infamy.
The rights of prisoners under international law were sometimes respected, albeit sometimes not. Red Cross workers received at least intermittent protection. Combatants wore the uniforms of their respective nations, and it was tacitly if not always officially conceded that armies — yes, including that of Hitler — had a right to shoot prisoners who were captured using guns while wearing civilian clothes without identifying marks.
It would be absurd to suggest that the “laws of war” commanded universal respect or obedience, even sometimes by democracies, and least of all in conflicts with guerrillas. But there was a recognition that the worst effects might be tempered if some rules and conventions existed.
Today, almost all the above is out the window. If China invades Taiwan or Russia seeks to attack Ukraine, the only near-certainty is that their forces will attack without any prior declaration of intent. Moreover, if or when the shooting stops, it is unlikely that there will follow a treaty signed by both belligerents.
Instead, there will merely be a unilateral announcement of whatever new reality Beijing, or Moscow, or the rulers of any other state which has committed a successful act of aggression, deems to be appropriate.
The old explicit delineation between war and peace has been abolished. It is replaced by a new dispensation that seems almost certain to be permanent, wherein rival states compete fiercely and perilously, at a level designed to remain just below the threshold of full-blown armed conflict.
Three years ago, Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, said in a speech: “It seems that we all, East and West, are beginning to live according to the rules of wartime, when all means are good, and a reputation becomes an unaffordable luxury or, at the very least, an easily spent resource. And as a result, for example, a very important red line between politics and a special operation” — an intelligence agency mission — “is practically erased.”
Kortunov’s own country, of course, has done as much as any to create this state of affairs. Not — as was the case with the Soviet Union — for ideological reasons, but because President Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming objective is the preservation of his own power, the gangster culture over which he presides.
We should not pretend that this is entirely new. Strong states have always sought to use economic power, especially, to bully or cajole weaker ones. But every day the non-kinetic means of assault available to governments, including soft-power lawyers, bankers and cultural assets as well as the more familiar cyber-arms, become more potent and promiscuously used.
“War without warfare,” writes British academic Mark Galeotti in a new book, “non-military conflicts fought with all kinds of other means, from subversion to sanctions, memes to murder, may be becoming the new normal.”
Galeotti, author of several works related to this theme, calls his new one “The Weaponization of Everything.” Globalization has proved great for bad guys, whether states or individuals, because it has dramatically increased the range of tools available to befuddle or crush enemies.
Economic sanctions are an increasingly popular weapon against rogue states’ excesses. While these can hurt governments, however, they seldom cause them to change their ways — think Iran. By one estimate, European Union trade sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the Crimea seizure cost that country around $15 billion — a price Putin thinks cheap. Meanwhile, the measures are reckoned to have cost EU economies … $40 billion.
Then there is law. Chinese lawyers seek to lay a smokescreen of legitimacy upon Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea. London has become libel capital of the world, regularly exploited by Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern potentates to silence critics, exploiting their almost limitless funds to pay for top counsel against publishers and media outlets. It is frightening to behold the power that Russian billions exert in Britain, whether in gaining access to top politicians or in acquiring a facade of social respectability.
More than a decade ago, I was shocked to hear Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, remark as if stating the obvious that “London has become the money-laundering capital of the world.” Scarcely any of these vast Russian fortunes have been made through what we would call honest toil. Yet many billions that have been, in effect, stolen from the Russian people are today comfortably housed in the venerable City of London.
Successive British governments know that this mocks probity. Yet none dares to move effectively against ill-gotten wealth and its owners, because Britain’s bankers, hedge-fund managers and lawyers prosper too mightily for ministers to take the moral high road. Though our leaders make defiant statements challenging Russian military aggression or threats of it, they are too frightened to resist invasions by Russian cash. Britain likes to claim — in the past, rightly — that it has a less politically corrupt culture than the U.S. or Italy. This has become less true.
Meanwhile, Western public-relations companies and lobbyists earn large sums promoting the images and reputations of disreputable nations as well as individuals. In the wake of the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, almost certainly on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the regime spent an estimated $20 million on reputation management abroad. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron was photographed showing that he is among the shameless hosts who find nothing embarrassing about hanging out with the Saudis.
Meanwhile, great global media companies bow to the demands of Beijing, because the Chinese market is deemed too important to be expelled from. Chinese filmmakers have joined the patriot games played for so long by Hollywood through John Wayne and Rambo, and by their British counterparts through the James Bond franchise, now to produce a stream of super-nationalistic war movies, designed to condition their people for conflict with the West.
Ever-more state violence is contracted out to mercenaries, to shroud ugly action in a gossamer cloak of deniability. Russian intelligence agencies headed by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, reportedly use criminal organizations as cut-outs in assassinations, such as that of a Chechen leader in Berlin in 2019. (Germany last week expelled two Russian “diplomats” after a court ruled the Kremlin had ordered the killing.)
Mercenaries of the Wagner Group are fighting in several countries, most prominently Libya and Syria, at the behest of the Kremlin. Russia’s “little green men” — non-uniformed special forces — spearheaded the 2014 seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also been paying billions to military contractors, in the past for providing support services, today ever nearer to the “sharp end.” An estimated 70% of America’s intelligence budget goes to private contracts.
Until recently, Chinese civilians were prohibited from carrying arms abroad, but today such companies as China Security & Protection, Shandong Huawei Security Group and Genghis Security Services play an increasingly active role in implementing Beijing’s policies abroad, and some of their employees have been spotted with weapons.
In September 2014, Estonian security officer Eston Kohver was on his way to a meet with an informer when he was kidnapped and bundled across the Russian border. (The Russians insist he was on their side of the frontier). In Moscow, he was charged with espionage and only released when exchanged for a jailed Russian spy. His misfortune, it later emerged, was to have incurred the anger of border smugglers who had reportedly become spies for the Russian state.
Galeotti describes North Korea’s Committee Bureau 19 as, “in effect the Hermit Kingdom’s organized crime office.” It is responsible for large-scale smuggling, the manufacture and trafficking of amphetamines and forgery of foreign banknotes. As is well known, the country organizes multimillion-dollar online frauds.
The North Koreans and Russians can claim that there is nothing new in this way of doing dirty business: Six decades ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sought to subcontract the killing of Fidel Castro to the mafia. But the links between espionage and crime have expanded exponentially, much to the advantage of big crooks.
Cyber is the towering, revolutionary instrument of conflict. A new breed of professional, the cyber-mercenary, sells his skills to any nation or criminal gang willing to pay for them. We can all understand the peril posed by attacks that paralyze banks, expose data, steal commercial and scientific secrets, shut down hospitals, stop trains. Few of even the biggest Western businesses are effectively protected against the sophistication of Chinese and Russian hackers.
Galeotti suggests, however, that cyberattacks may not be as decisive as sensationalists claim. He cites the example of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet assault on Iran’s nuclear program. This certainly inflicted substantial damage on centrifuges and much else, set back the Iranian bomb schedule by many months. Yet the author says that if this was the best the most advanced cyberwarriors in the world could achieve, he is unconvinced that electronic assault is as conclusive a game-changer as doomsayers suggest.
I am unsure whether he is right about this. True, military systems can recover from even successful cyberattacks within hours or less. In a shootout in the South China Sea, however, a Chinese ability to disarm even for minutes U.S. Navy carrier catapults or radar systems could prove critical.
All of us have become aware of the pernicious impact of fake news, not least upon an astonishingly credulous American readership. Yet Galeotti is not entirely a pessimist about social media. This can be a force for good, he argues, especially in fingering perpetrators of wickedness, and state promoters of it.
The brilliant Netherlands-based, pro bono website Bellingcat mobilized the public in Ukraine and around the world to pin responsibility for the 2014 shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, with the loss of 283 lives, onto the Russians who provided the deadly Buk missile. Social media users identified images of the launcher being trundled from Russia into eastern Ukraine, and found emails sent by triumphant separatists boasting about their achievement. No reasonable person could thereafter doubt Putin’s culpability.
Likewise, the citizen-journalists of Bellingcat named the Russian intelligence officers who attempted to murder the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, U.K., in 2018. They also “named and shamed” the Kremlin undercover agents who, in August 2020, sought to murder opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the same Novichok nerve agent.
Deniability is a key objective of many state attacks carried out below the threshold of war. Thus, the tools of freedom — not least exercising a right to vote in favor of sensible leaders — can be used to resist and spotlight wrongdoing.
Galeotti concludes his book with the assertion that “we are heading into an age when everyone may be in at least some kind of a state of ‘war’ with everyone else, all the time, and it is just a matter of degree.”
As I read such accounts, the phrase that echoes in my mind, though not used by Galeotti himself, is “the Great Game.” This was what the British dubbed their century-long struggle with Russia for dominance of the region bordering the North-West frontier of India, conducted through bribes to local rulers, spies, adventurers, occasional assassinations and spasmodic shootouts.
There were many absurdities about the Great Game, just as there are about its modern version. These beg the question: Does it all matter? Are not today’s conflicts in law courts, online, through the banking system, or killings of rival mercenaries whose fates need not trouble us, preferable to mass slaughters such as the 20th century’s world wars?
I submit that we would be mistaken to shrug our shoulders. All the activities sketched above impair the order and stability that are critical forces in preserving the world from self-harm. The peril posed by weapons of mass destruction has never gone away, and almost certainly never will.
In the dark days of the Cold War, we were daily reminded by politicians and the media of the threat from nuclear weapons — the balance of terror. Today, we scarcely hear such words mentioned. Yet the bombs are still there, and they are held by ever-more nations.
Our leaders need to go on being afraid, because only prudent fear can deter them from gambling recklessly upon extending the borders of conflict, as Putin and President Xi Jinping of China risk every day. The mortal peril posed by undeclared war — cyberconflict, clashes on the electronic frontiers of our societies and of our defenses — is that it can very suddenly get very hot.
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