介绍： Foreign policy: The fog of wars
Adventures abroad boost public support at home
From The Economist 20161022

From SR 20161022 special report: russia

Audio:

0:00




RUSSIA HAS NO intention of going to war with America or its allies. Instead it will act through non-military means “to undermine the general ...

介绍： Foreign policy: The fog of wars
Adventures abroad boost public support at home
From The Economist 20161022

From SR 20161022 special report: russia

Audio:

0:00




RUSSIA HAS NO intention of going to war with America or its allies. Instead it will act through non-military means “to undermine the general political and strategic potential of major Western powers, to disrupt national self-confidence, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity…Anti-British talk will be plugged among Americans, anti-American talk among British. Germans will be taught to abhor both Anglo-Saxon powers. Where suspicions exist, they will be fanned; where not, ignited.” So wrote George Kennan, the “wise man” of American diplomacy, in a famous telegram from Moscow in 1946. Seventy years later the telegram seems as relevant as ever, because the system that Kennan described is being rebuilt.

Russia has launched cyber-attacks, spread disinformation and interfered in the domestic affairs of both neighbouring and faraway countries. Its military jets are buzzing NATO’s ships and flying close to American reconnaissance aircraft in Europe. The American government has formally accused Russia of meddling in the presidential election by means of extensive hacking. In Syria it has subverted America’s efforts to defeat Bashar al-Assad and threatened to shoot down American warplanes if they attack his army.

The BND, Germany’s foreign-intelligence agency, is investigating Russian activity in Germany after Russia’s state television ran a fake story about a 13-year-old Russian-German girl being raped by Arab immigrants in Berlin. Spread through social media, the story sparked protests against Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Russia has provided funds for the French right-wing party of Marine Le Pen. RT, the Kremlin’s foreign-language propaganda TV channel, has offered a regular spot to Nigel Farage, the former leader of Britain’s far-right UKIP party. Russia’s support for Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, who has also appeared on RT, has become a talking-point in America’s forthcoming election.

None of this is particularly new. Subversion, disinformation and forgery, combined with the use of special forces, were at the heart of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services. The KGB had a special department responsible for “active measures”, designed to weaken and undermine the West. It stirred racial tension by posting bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, planted stories about AIDS having been invented in America as a biological weapon and put it about that John F. Kennedy’s murder was plotted by the CIA.

Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB in the 1970s and one of Mr Putin’s heroes, set up special courses to train operatives in the use of active measures. At the height of the cold war 15,000 officers were working on psychological and disinformation warfare. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the department was renamed but never dismantled.

Modern technology has helped it widen its scope; the Kremlin now uses large numbers of “trolls” that spread disinformation and propaganda through online communities and social media. It also helps Russia to sow confusion by putting out multiple versions of events. According to Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary-general and a former American ambassador to Moscow, it is “an endlessly changing storyline designed to obfuscate and confuse to create the impression that there are no reliable facts, and therefore no truth.”

This echoes Kennan’s observation in 1946 that “the very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” Unlike Soviet propaganda, which aimed to promote communist ideology, modern Russian propaganda aims to show that Western policies are as rigged and hypocritical as Russian ones.

Assessing the effectiveness of these Russian attempts to influence opinion abroad is hard because they often tap into existing sentiments, from disenchantment with elites to resentment of immigrants. But research by Finland’s Institute of International Affairs has found that Russian propaganda has had very little impact on mainstream Western media and has never resulted in any change in policy. A strong and confident West should find it easy to brush off Russian media assaults. But sober political thinkers have noted some signs of a “Putin panic” in the West, and Mr Putin himself has said that America’s attempts to present Russia as an “evil empire” indicates “Russia’s growing influence and significance”.

In the eyes of his own people, Mr Putin has restored his country’s status to that of the Soviet Union. According to a recent report by the Aleksanteri Institute in Finland, a think-tank, “the West’s response to the Crimea annexation partially did exactly what Putin had demanded: putting forward the notion of Western weakness in the face of Russia’s superior ‘hybrid warfare’ capabilities implies respect and even fear of Russia as a powerful global actor.”

The country’s intervention in Syria in the autumn of last year was designed to reinforce the image of Russia as a global power. It did change the course of events, saving Bashar al-Assad from a seemingly inevitable fall, and made the humanitarian situation in Syria far worse. But Russia cares little about the future of Syria. It sees the war there as a way of forcing America to recognise a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union.

Weakness in strength

The wars in Ukraine, Georgia and Syria have demonstrated Russia’s willingness and ability to use its military power to achieve political goals. But they are not a sign of Russia’s strength; instead, they indicate deep insecurity. As Kennan wrote: “At [the] bottom of [the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [the] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity…This thesis provides justification for that increase of the military and police power of the Russian state…Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries-old movement in which conceptions of offence and defence are inextricably confused.” This nationalism continues to shape Russia’s behaviour today.

Mr Putin sees Russia’s wars as a form of self-defence, driven by the need to deter the West. That is what he meant when he gathered the country’s elite in the Kremlin’s gilded hall to announce Russia’s “reunification” with Crimea on March 18th 2014. “Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what has been happening in the world over the past several decades. Our Western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law but by the rule of the gun.” In Ukraine, he said, the West had crossed a red line. Western actions left Russia with no choice but to send its troops into Crimea.

Yet only a few days earlier Mr Putin had told the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that there were no Russian troops in Crimea. “He lives in another world,” she was reported to have said to Barack Obama. In his world the West was trying to undermine Russia. The colour revolutions across the former Soviet Union and the protests in Russia in the winter of 2011-12 were Western plots.


Copyright © 2015-2016 Share2China.com | Powered by Flask and MongoDB