Prominent Chinese citizens are disappearing at an alarming rate, sometimes in what look like clear cases of overseas rendition. Last week, Beijing went so far as to snatch Meng Hongwei, the president of Interpol.
Russians, meanwhile, keep turning up dead. Most recently, a prosecutor linked to the attempted Skripal assassination in Salisbury was killed in a helicopter crash, with two bullets found in the pilot’s body.
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At the same time, a US-based Saudi journalist vanished, presumed murdered, after being kidnapped in Turkey, apparently by Saudi agents.
All three of these extraordinary cases have happened, at the time of writing, within the past week. We are seeing the international order flouted with increasing flagrancy and from unexpected quarters.
China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, after all, are G20 nations. These are not tinpot tyrannies in the mold of Cuba or North Korea. Whatever their domestic shortcomings, they have a stake as global traders in a rules-based system that respects territorial jurisdiction. Yet all three seem willing to violate the sovereignty of other states with lethal intent.
I don’t want to over-dramatize things, but deploying state-directed force against someone living under the protection of another country is technically an act of war.
Some argue that, when America dozes, autocrats are emboldened. Donald Trump, they say, is an anti-trade, anti-NATO isolationist. His presidency was bound to weaken the Pax Americana, so we should hardly be surprised when nasty regimes start throwing their weight about.
There is some truth in this analysis, but it relies — as so much analysis does these days — on considering the president’s words rather than his actions. Despite his America First campaign rhetoric, Trump has behaved very much like his predecessors, intervening in the Middle East and Afghanistan, sending military support to Ukraine, facing down North Korea.
The United States has not withdrawn from the world, and remains, militarily, in a league of its own. Yes, other countries are catching up, but in a conventional war, the U.S. could easily defeat the next two most powerful states combined.
The trouble is that we no longer face conventional wars. We are in a world of cyberattacks, Twitterbots, and targeted provokatsiya. You can be a titan in the sunlit world of drones and missiles, but a dwarf in these shadowy crevasses.
It’s not that Western countries don’t meddle in other countries’ internal affairs. They do. From Nicaragua to Iran, the CIA has taken sides in elections, disbursed cash, and worked to overthrow hostile regimes. It played a big role in the formation of what is now the European Union, maintaining some of the founding fathers on its payroll. It overtly backed Yeltsin against Russia’s Communists in the early 1990s.
But there are lines that America and its allies don’t cross. We don’t order assassinations unless the target is a terrorist. We don’t cut undersea cables or sabotage foreign hospitals’ computer systems. We don’t engage in entrapment and blackmail.
Nor should we. If we believe that our Western institutions — free speech, free assembly, free newspapers, free elections, free courts — are worth defending, we ought to hold ourselves to our own standards. Still, I can’t help feeling that, in the field of cyber conflict, we are being routed.
In an actual conflict, of course, we engage in much more aggressive dezinformatsiya. During the Second World War, for example, Britain carried out ingenious deceptions — even planting fake papers on corpses that would then wash up in enemy territory — to lure the Wehrmacht into thinking that we would land in Sardinia rather than Sicily, Calais rather than Normandy. We even engaged in some gentle deception within the U.S. in 1940, publishing fake opinion polls to push Congress away from neutrality. Most of these operations were run by the London Controlling Station, Churchill’s favorite government agency. But the LCS was disbanded after the war and, though similar tactics have been used in subsequent hot wars (during the Falklands conflict, for example, Argentina wasted weeks trying to buy missiles from a company that turned out to be a front for British intelligence), it was never revived.
No one will attack the West with tanks and planes. That would be suicidal. But we are under assault in the infinite fathoms of the online universe, and doing little to hit back.
Britain and America lead the world in artificial intelligence. We need to harness some of that talent for national security. We should look at a modern online version of the LCS, based on the Five Eyes alliance.
The hegemony of the English-speaking democracies is waning, and something altogether colder and darker is rising in its place. If we want to preserve the world order, we need to fight and win virtual wars.
