The Americans, the New Enemy

We underestimate the vulnerabilities in our information environment, and here the US Government is the new threat

The people who know me well understand that I, under my gobby Manc exterior, am the calmest and most serene of individuals.

However, I do have my peeves, and, along with my anger with myself for misjudging the United States, I am increasingly angered by other analysts who appear wide off the mark when reassessing the threat from Washington.

Yes: the threat.

Screenshot of a post on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s verified Facebook (a US company) account, 19 April: how long before the US Government openly agrees?

Our government analytical work is traditionally steeped in optimism bias. Our analytical community and intelligence agencies have historically been unable to propose that, out of a range of outcomes, worst-case scenarios can possibly come to pass.

We have been unable to appraise just how awful other people can be. We are mislead by ridiculous notions of enlightenment and progress. Why is this? Who plagues our thinking with rational optimism? Steven Pinker? Mark Galeotti?

We have consistently underestimated Putin, from the 2000s when the UK Government was keen to appraise Putin as a young western European democrat, rather than as a historically and strategically Russian leader with a radically different approach to time; to 2008 and the invasion of Georgia; to 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine; to 2021 and Putin’s blunt warning that he was intent on the total destruction of Ukraine.

Why was our analytical community, incredibly prone to Kremlinology and reliant on specific individual pieces of evidence to build up analytical pictures, unable to pick up from Putin’s comments on the demise of the USSR? Putin even penned an essay claiming that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian. Still we were unable to formulate a coherent admonition that Putin’s expressed worldview could likely feed into action designed to realise that.

Spoiler: I was working in Government in the early 2000s (as a young intelligence analyst) and later from 2018-2022 (as a more senior cross-departmental lead on ‘counter-disinformation’) and was singularly unable to help formulate a more substantive stance against the threat. So I am culpable in these analytical failures.

However, since then I’ve thought a lot about what has gone wrong in Government analysis, particularly on Russia, in the past 25 years, both collectively and personally.

I think political leadership and steerage over policy direction is to blame to a large extent. The Government in 2000 was very keen to use economic liberalisation to hold Moscow to further democratic reform. That stance will likely turn out to be the most flawed political approach of the 21st century. In addition, although our intelligence reporting in its structure and techniques has improved since 2000, our analysis is still flawed, out of balance with collection and policy priorities, mired in group-think and, as I suggest above, optimism bias.

The Unseen Threat

I liked to think that I could bring some philosophical-cultural understanding to my work in Government, as someone who has lived and worked in Russia, and who has studied and written about Russian political and cultural philosophy. Although my approach lures me into cultural generalisations, I like to think that can balance the universalist approaches that some politicians and officials often use to interpret Russia.

The one thing that stays with me is the relationship between the idea and reality in the traditions of Russian thought, and how philosophical programmes can enslave Russians in the imperative to implement them. Mikhail Epstein calls this an ideocracy, but we should have done better in using this understanding to realise that Putin, in his 2021 essay, was doing more than writing down words.

There was in this essay both a warning to Ukraine and the ‘West’, but also a careful attempt at perception manipulation, laying out a vision of a future reality that is then enforced on its readers.

America is not Russia, and its philosophical, cultural, and political traditions are much different. I am not a universalist, but I cannot help but worry about things that American leaders have said, or written, and wonder why we also have dismissed the threat and intent from this.

Because the warnings are there: the Americans (this post is about the American leadership, and not the people) do not really like us. I won’t pretend to be an expert on American society (though I do watch a lot of their television) and cannot speak for them, but what their politicians say should give us cause for concern.

So this is not about the United States stepping back and withdrawing from the war in Europe, it is not about us going alone, without Washington. It is not about us putting into place now plans to defend ourselves — and Ukraine — from potential American hostility. Much of that hostility appears stoked by Russia.

The contempt that the American leadership has towards Europe has been laid bare. Vice President JD Vance told the Munich Security in February this year that the biggest threat to Europe is not from Russia, but from Europe’s ‘retreat’ from ‘fundamental values’ that the United States believes are fundamental.

Vance even likened the current European governments to ‘tyrannical forces’ that ‘censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections’. He promised that America would ‘fight to defend’ individuals’ rights to believe and say what they wanted. In this, he was aligning himself implicitly with Moscow’s assertion that the European continent has a ‘“traditional propensity” for various forms of totalitarianism which regularly produces cataclysmic global conflict’, and by definition requires intervention.

Even if there might be elements of that speech that were demonstrative, the infamous subsequent Signal chat revealed publicly what US leaders think privately about Europe, and the scorn they have for the Old World.

We should not only be concerned about abandonment by the Americans. We should ready ourselves now to protect ourselves from an America that is now hostile to our security and to our interests.

The Turn Against Europe

What has been remarkable about the White House since November is how quickly it has embraced a worldview that has for so long been central to messaging that has emerged from Moscow.

It is not difficult to put the strategic and tactical parts of this together. Russian politicians and prominent voices have long equated liberalism with fascism, warning that the ‘Western’ historical process of liberating individuals from systems has gone so far that it has actually detached people from their human identity, entrapping them in the tyranny of ‘transhumanism’.

Here, once more, Vance is in sync. Perhaps more tellingly was Vance’s February attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, when Vance accused Ukraine of pressganging men to fight: ‘You guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems’. When pushed on whether he had witnessed this, Vance replied: ‘I've actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people. You bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr President. Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people in your military?’

I am a keen watcher of television and social media, and I know that the only place that Vance is likely to have watched such stories is from Russian media. Russia frequently pushes the argument that Kyiv is pressing unwilling men to fight (Ukrainians do post videos of conscription, but their strategic intent is generally different). I doubt Vance spends much time scrolling, like I do, through Russian Telegram, so the claim that Ukraine is a dictatorship forcing men to fight Russia almost certainly comes originally from Moscow, even though I do not know the process by which he was exposed to such videos.

Washington has not yet started supplying Russia with armaments, though it has helped Moscow a great deal in its war on Ukraine by restricting Ukrainian military activity and temporarily halting aid, including intelligence.

But that is not the main point: the war is already here, and being fought in its initial stages in the information space. The information sphere is a crucial part of this war, as I have often argued, and to delineate informational capabilities from kinetic intent, as some academic disinformation studies have done, deflects attention from the real threat.

That, in fact, is one of the reasons why many failed to spot Russia’s invasions of Ukraine: a reliance on ‘open source’ and its rational methodologies that overshadowed the human intent, the hatred Putin and other Russians have towards Ukrainians and their barbaric desire to destroy that country. That is why I often curse myself.

The War of Words

When I wrote earlier this week of the coming war, I was allowing myself some latitude.

The war is already here. Maybe not with tanks outside your house, firing over the roof at enemies, maybe not with foreign militia patrolling your streets or Iskander missiles hitting your buildings.

But everything is connected, and not even America is an island. Information manipulation is a crucial way to undermine societies and their cultures, and the fact that US President Donald Trump, Vance and their officials have amplified Russian information operations clearly positions them as hostile to Ukraine, and to Europe.

The mere suggestion of concessions to Russia, the potential ownership of Ukrainian territory, resets the links between ideas and reality, imposing new realities and new futures on us. The war of words matter, and although their starting place is in Moscow, they end up in the minds and actions of Americans. Read what Dugin wrote recently:

To repeat: the EU, as the center and headquarters of the liberal dictatorship, is now entering into a state of direct war with us in Ukraine, while America is stepping back and withdrawing from the conflict. And this is good news. The field of operations for Zelensky’s terrorist beggary is narrowing — but we know how effective this blood-soaked clown has been at squeezing out funds and military support. Therefore, the war continues — and we must be prepared to wage it to final victory. At this point, I can no longer even imagine whether we will stop at Ukraine’s western borders or not. Nor do the Europeans know — for they themselves are doing everything in their power to ensure that we do not stop in Ukraine in this war.

This worldview almost certainly influencing US policy. Studies are suggesting a growing sympathy among Americans to Russian messaging. It is alarming that Trump’s famed ‘reverse Nixon’ appears to be turned back on America, prising Washington away from Ukraine and the entirety of Europe. It is highly frustrating that we are still underestimating the threat.

We need to understand more how Washington is aiding Russia intensify its information operations against us. Typically the US media system has been out of bounds for the UK Government and its research. This is why we need to support US organisations such as the American Sunlight Project and researchers like Olga Lautman who are investigating the complex link between Russian and US messaging and the seeming increasing intertwining of their media spaces.

We need also to understand that Moscow’s wars are not just about Ukraine. The Kremlin is using the destruction of Ukraine as a means to dismantle Europe’s entire security architecture. Washington has not just pulled away from Europe, but is actively helping Moscow do this. We must be prepared for the worst.