This article appears in the December 16, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
BIDEN’S DEMOCRACY SUMMIT
‘Hybrid Warfare’ as Revival of Imperial Geopolitics
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 11—One year ago this month, the United States, with the UK and NATO leaders, convened what they ostentatiously called the “Summit for Democracy,” just at the moment when Russian President Vladimir Putin was pressing for a serious response from NATO governments to what French President Emmanuel Macron now admits were legitimate security concerns. Their intention in this online summit (Dec. 9–10, 2021) was to divide the world into two blocs: “democracies” squaring off against “autocratic” or “authoritarian” states. This division provided a justification for NATO countries to rebuff Putin, insisting instead that they were defending Ukrainian “sovereignty and democracy” against Putin’s “authoritarianism.”
As the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been turned into a war of NATO against Russia, the sponsors of that Summit are furious that nations representing the majority of the world’s population, particularly those of the “Global South,” have refused to join the NATO-led “democratic” bloc in condemning Russia. This is the context for President Joe Biden’s announcement Nov. 30 of a second online Summit for Democracy, which will convene at the end of March 2023. The stated intent is to evaluate the progress made in fulfilling the “five pillars” of the 2021 Summit’s “Initiative for Democracy Renewal” set out then in detail, and to recommit participating nations to the process.
A review of those “five pillars of democracy” promoted by the sponsors makes it evident that the only purpose of the March gathering will be to provide a cover to justify continuing the war against the leading designated “authoritarian” regime, Russia, and prepare for war with the other leading designee, China. Further, it is to demonstrate a commitment to substitute “hybrid warfare” as a means of subverting diplomacy, replacing dialogue with a digitalized form of what was known in the past as “psychological warfare.”
The hypocrisy behind this is blatantly evident from applying the five pillars to the reality of the fascist regime in post-Maidan Ukraine. For example, as to the first pillar, “Supporting Free and Independent Media,” the Zelensky regime has shut down all opposition media in the country, accusing them of operating on behalf of Putin. Pillar two is “Fighting Corruption.” By every standard, Ukraine repeatedly is identified as the most corrupt regime in Europe.
Likewise, any objective review of the remaining three pillars—“Bolstering Democratic Reformers, Advancing Technology for Democracy, Defending Free and Fair Elections and Inclusive Political Processes”—demonstrates the delusional fraud perpetrated by the Summit, as Ukraine has threatened, jailed, or killed reformers who opposed the dictatorial Zelensky regime. The Kiev government has outlawed opposition parties and engaged in hybrid/information warfare through advanced cyber operations to censor, terrorize and murder opponents, employing such NATO-run operations as Ukraine’s Committee to Counter Disinformation.
It should also be obvious that such information warfare techniques are being applied against opponents to the war in every NATO nation, as the truth about the actual intent of NATO’s operations against Russia, and the reasons behind them, are suppressed by pro-NATO psychological warfare operations.
‘Whose Story Wins’
The use of hybrid warfare as a central strategic feature of war is not new, but has been advanced by incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities pioneered by British intelligence agencies and developed by Silicon Valley into mainstream military planning. “Hybrid warfare” refers to combining methods of irregular warfare with cyber technologies as a means of controlling the “narrative,” which is sometimes referred to as “soft power.” It is the subject of a RAND Corporation study published in 2020, “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noösphere, Noöpolitik, and Information Age Statecraft.” The authors fraudulently coopt the language developed by Russian scientist/philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky of the Noösphere as the “realm of the mind,” maliciously arguing that as the digital technologies of “artificial intelligence” advance, the application of such digital information technologies will supersede traditional strategies based on “realpolitik.” Thus, they assert, future wars will be determined based on “whose story wins.”
An element of this is the concept of “pre-bunking,” examined further by Daniel Platt in this issue of EIR, which is a means of controlling the narrative by eliminating “unacceptable” ideas from public discourse. It has been presented as a means of inoculating people against their susceptibility to “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “conspiracy theories,” by eliminating “false choices” from consideration. Rather than relying on “fact-checking” to “debunk” alleged disinformation, the concept is to pre-emptively debunk thoughts which run counter to the desired narratives churned out by these information warriors.
As such, it is presented by its sponsors as a more aggressive form of “content moderation” than the use of fact-checking. One of the lead studies on this was done by the Cambridge University Social-Decision Making Lab, together with Google. In previous times, imposing limits on which ideas are allowed for consideration, to be tested by debate, was considered to be the tool used by dictatorial “autocracies,” referred to as “brainwashing.” Today, it is called “democracy.”
Tool of the Unipolar Order
The original idea for the Summit of Democracy emerged from a U.S. State Department policy planning initiative adopted by the Atlantic Council, a “think tank” which defends the London-Washington Unipolar Order with funds from the British and American governments and military-industrial-financial corporations. According to a blurb on the Atlantic Council website, the “Democracy 10” (D-10) group was created to “serve as a standing platform for strategic collaboration that would allow the U.S. and like-minded allies to advance common interests and shared values.” The D-10 group has held annual Strategy Forum meetings since the first summit in Ottawa, Canada in 2014.
In a December 4 statement, Fred Kempe, the Atlantic Council’s president and CEO, provided a glimpse into the delusional, hysterical mindset driving the war hawks. After asserting that Ukraine is winning the war and Russia is losing, he called on the “U.S. and its global partners” to “double down in 2023 to shape the contest unfolding between democrats and despots that will define the post-Cold War order. U.S. President Joe Biden has consistently focused on this competition as a historic ‘inflection point.’ His third year in office provides him his best opportunity yet to score lasting gains in that contest.”
An example of such narrative-shaping was an event sponsored by British intelligence’s Chatham House Dec. 6, under the title “Russia’s War on Everybody.” Intended to expose Russia’s use of hybrid warfare, which the speakers defined as typical of Russia’s “whole of society attack,” they spent an hour ridiculing any idea that Russia has legitimate security issues with Trans-Atlantic/NATO policies. According to Edward Lucas, a former editor of the London flagship journal, The Economist, who was one of the speakers, peace is only possible by changing the way Russians think! “We are playing Russian games by Russian rules,” he said, and the West gave Putin a green light to attack Ukraine. The problems with Russia “pre-date Putin,” he insisted, but western intelligence has forgotten that.
Lucas’ racist attack on Russia demonstrates what is really behind today’s intelligence warfare— a return to the standard of British imperial geopolitics, which defined East-West relations during the Cold War. Decrying what he called the “self-indulgent” delusion that one can negotiate with Russia, he concluded that Western diplomatic and intelligence services were “once really good, during the Cold War ... but we destroyed it because we don’t think geopolitics is still going on.”
The consensus of the Chatham House panel was that the “long-term strategy” for dealing with Russia requires first winning the war, to end the Russian belief that it will be allowed to be a major power.
