Breaking Dad

Continuing on the daddy of all sanctions-busting. Possibly

I shall continue here from last night’s short post on emerging messaging considering sanctions against Russia, and the possibility that US President Donald Trump might be loosening some of these.

News about possible changes in the United States’ sanctions posture coincide with this really useful New York Times piece from 2 July, examining how the failure to tighten sanctions has helped Moscow increase its violence against Ukraine.

Let’s be blunt about this: this failure has helped the Russians murder civilians, women and children across Ukraine.

There is a growing number of commentaries arguing that Trump is assisting Russia. Commentaries also speculate on the level of strategic thinking in the US White House, and the planning behind a series of steps that aid the Kremlin.

I think, though, that it is worth considering in depth the informational-psychological impacts of what is happening.

I wrote yesterday of the importance of coalitions in opposing Russia. The UK gets that instinctively: all our historical successes as an island have come from leveraging effective partnerships with other countries.

Unity here is crucial. When I was in the FCDO for the latest period (2018-2022), a major part of our policy work was building informational coalitions, so that governments across the world demonstrated collective commitment to common values, and shared understanding, capabilities, and responses. The UK was a major voice in pushing for such cooperation, having unique human and technical offers, and in policy terms also wishing to ensure that London could still leverage relationships in the aftermath of Brexit. The UK, as suggested above, still has the legacy thinking embedded in its foreign-policy work that centres coalition-building as a vital part of securing UK interests.

Some of this worked very well. The United States and Canada were important partners, adding resources and capabilities, and also enhancing the UK’s position as a cog in global efforts to counter FIMI. Some top-level achievements were made public.

Image: Screenshot from UK Government website

This page still exists. Scroll down to this:

Image: Screenshot from UK Government website

However, if you now click on the Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation, hosted on the US State Department’s website, this is what you now get:

Image: Screenshot from US State Department’s website

It seems that this is possibly part of Washington’s ongoing approach to reduce work into researching and mitigating FIMI.

Other people who are better clued in, such as the excellent American Sunlight Project, will know more about the internal US media environment, and how the US leadership is opening vulnerabilities there to FIMI. (It is very difficult for governments and organisations outside the United States to examine the US media landscape, for a range of policy and operational reasons.)

However, it is the appearance of coalition that is crucial, and for that reason recent developments from the United States push our work back. Possibly by several years.

The appearance of unity

Knowledge-management and -sharing are vital for capability-building. This is true for military issues, but especially pertinent for understanding and mitigating FIMI, a relatively new field which is developing at pace.

In fact, the speed at which FIMI develops far outpaces the policy and operational capabilities of a single country or government department, which is why I frequently call for better consolidation of capabilities within and across governments.

We are, as Mick Ryan argues, in an adaptation war. However, I look predominately at how adversaries develop and share FIMI approaches, and also how they message that solidarity in order to shield themselves from our attempts to isolate them.

I think there is a longer piece to be written about adaptation in FIMI and how we can manage that better.

However, what is crucial for now is the appearance of unity among Ukraine’s allies, and how this in itself is crucial to support Ukrainian morale, and to hold together an admittedly weak coalition.

Unity of discourse is also very important in how we set up a joint defence against Russia. This involves not just the content of our messaging, but its form.

Diplomatic discourse traditionally relies on the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of formal relations between governments, the management of international relations more through negotiations than by force, propaganda or application of the law.

However, the Kremlin a long time ago detached rhetoric from meaning, using discourse as a tool to establish coercive relationships over other countries. Traditional diplomatic practices seem to continue in Europe, where we wish to maintain equal, horizontal ties.

This is one of the ways where the United States is now diverging from Europe, and imitating Russia: Washington is also using political and diplomatic discourse to force other countries into vertical, patriarchal relationship structures. It is one thing to see NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte call Trump ‘Daddy’, and it might be outwardly amusing, but it does not solve the long-term issue about how we put into place a real European structure to understand and counter Russian FIMI, or how we deal with an American that is hostile to our security.

We can discern from Russian messaging some of the Kremlin’s priorities: Putin and his elite are almost certainly desperate to see sanctions removed. Alongside this, they are almost certainly very keen to demonstrate to the Russian people that their country is not isolated. In fact, international isolation is something that seems to really humiliate Putin and the Russian people.

There seems at the moment continuing movement from the White House to support the Kremlin. My work focuses on the information space, but I continue to maintain that this domain is a key area of the war with Russia. To delineate the information war from other aspects of conflict is, I feel at this moment, highly dangerous, and would set back our comprehension of what FIMI is. Possibly by several years. Rutte and others must take note, and seek consolidated and concatenated ways to move forward.