Good morning, and thanks for inviting me to participate on this panel.  The destabilizing dictatorships of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – a dangerous and disruptive grouping that Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine have termed the “Axis of Upheaval,” and which I have called the “Dark Quad” – clearly present huge challenges to international peace and security.

This comes not merely from the so-called “no limits” partnership between Beijing and Moscow, but also now in the military alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang and the expanded and heavily security-focused “strategic partnership” between Moscow and Tehran.  Those countries’ increasing defense industrial base cooperation, their contempt for the global nonproliferation regime, and the potential for not merely opportunistic aggression but in fact deliberately coordinated warfare present major challenges to U.S. and allied defense and security planning.

I’d like to say a few words here about the broader political context of these challenges, especially in the context of so-called “Gray Zone” provocations, disinformation, and political subversion.  My comments here represent only my personal thoughts and do not necessarily represent the views of anybody else, but I’m pleased to have the chance to provide them.

We are Frogs Being Boiled

Let me start by saying a couple of words about the psychological dynamics of Gray Zone competition.  In that liminal zone between what is clearly peace and what is clearly warfare, the Dark Quad is working to put us in the position of the proverbial frog that is being boiled.   That is, they seek to put us in a situation in which the (figurative) water temperature increases slowly enough that we don’t actually fully realize that we are being cooked until it is too late. 

Their coercive bargaining strategies revolve around a constant effort to engage aggressively and provocatively with the West in ways that create destabilizing challenges on an unceasing basis.  As Dima Adamsky has described it in his excellent book on The Russian Way of Deterrence, for instance, Russian thinking on such topics is highly active and deliberately destabilizing, aiming to confront us with what is in effect a steady drumbeat of improvisational, and opportunistic provocations in ways design to unsettle, and disorient.  Russian theorists feel that such efforts to create “operational friction” generate “deterring potential,” which can thereafter be leveraged and exploited for purposes of coercive bargaining.  Crucially, this applies equally in both peacetime and wartime contexts, and indeed – in contrast to Western thinking – seems to envision little real distinction between the two. 

This can be a disturbingly effective way to gain incremental advantage, as we are acclimatized to seeing ongoing outrages as simply a sort of steadily-creeping “new normal.”  In this way, we are conditioned into notreacting to any given additional increment of provocation – or at least into not reacting enough to each such incremental offense to make its commission not worth our adversary’s while. 

This dulling of our sensibilities and our sense of outrage is not merely an incidental result of the strategy: it is part of the point.  The gradual de facto “granting of permission” we thus impliedly give to such provocations allows our adversaries not just to accumulate advantage over time and inflict growing costs upon us, but also to pre-condition us against being able to marshal an effective and immediate response to whatever they might choose to do in the lead-up to actual war.  (In the parable of the “boy who cried wolf,” for instance, imagine that it is actually the wolf that has deliberately triggered repeated prior alarms!)

And you can see much of this already happening, especially with the Russians.  Any number of the things to which we have become accustomed to the Russians doing, for instance – provocations such as subversion of elections in Western countries, placing bombs on Western aircraft, wars of territorial aggression, massacres of civilians and other war crimes, assassination and sabotage campaigns in Western countries, chemical weapons use on NATO territory and on the battlefield in Ukraine – might easily in more “normal” times have represented all but a casus belli.  Iran, too, seems to have been trying to boil our collective Western frog, with things such as direct missile attacks on Israel, assassination plots against U.S. officials, and sponsoring terrorism in Western capitals.

Today, it would appear, such provocations seem to be almost tolerated as “just what those folks do.”  We might see such actions as revealing a wholly uncivilized brutishness, of course, but we seem to dismiss so much of this now with what amounts merely to a sneer of condescension: “Sure, what else do you expect from the likes of them?” 

But our lack of outrage at such things is itself outrageous.*  This is a mark of how good the Dark Quad has been at “boiling” us Western “frogs” without serious response or consequence.  And these problems of frog-boiling are compounded when our adversaries accompany their provocations – as they do – with sustained campaigns of propaganda and disinformation intended specifically to divide us from each other and make it harder for us to recognize the nature of the challenge, to formulate and agree upon effective responses, and even to trust each other in the course of public policymaking at all.

The Vulnerabilities of Modern Democracy

And it may indeed be that modern Western democracy is particularly susceptible to such tactics.  This is perhaps true to some extent for any democracy, for in such a system – by definition – large swathes of the population and a great many disparate sub-communities play an inherently significant role in public policymaking as a result of the democratic political process itself.  This makes what a cybersecurity specialist might call the “attack surface” for subversion and manipulation inherently large.  We have long seen democratic politics as one of the inherent strengths of Western society and one of the secrets to our resilience, and this is true.  But very little in this world comes for free, and honesty also requires admitting that this strength has its downside too.

That said, while this problem of vulnerability to subversive and disorienting tactics is to some extent an inherent challenge for any democracy, I fear that in recent years we’ve made ourselves unusually susceptible.  This is the case for at least three reasons.

The Hyper-Democratization of Democracy

First, we do not today have just a democracy per se, but we have a particularly “democratic” one.  Indeed, we’ve worked quite hard over the years to make it so, and not without reason.  I suspect, for instance, that few people today mourn the eclipse of a polity in which an affluent, semi-aristocratic White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (WASP) elite called all the shots – in loco parentis,  as it were, for the rest of America’s diverse population. 

With the extension of political participation to previously marginalized groups, however, we have also created a much larger and more diffuse political community, with more diverse cross-currents and internal tensions, and which finds it more difficult to generate sustained political and policy coherence over time.  Again, this decentralization and disaggregation of the relevant demos in our democracy is in many ways a profound strength.  Nonetheless, it, too, does not come without a downside – such as our greater modern vulnerability to the kind of tactics our adversaries are employing against us.

The Poison of Social Media

Second, modern democracy has become much more vulnerable to adversary coercive manipulation and subversion as a result of the disappearance of yesterday’s comparatively small and curated information space, and its replacement by a massive explosion of expressive content dominated by hyperscaled social media.  There is certainly much to like about this.  The Internet, for example, has made possible a truly extraordinary leap in human access to knowledge and ease of communicative engagement that is no parallel at least since the rise of mass printing and paper-based publishing and distribution several hundred years ago.  In many ways, this has surely been very good for humanity.

Yet the downsides are also huge.  This downside lies, I would argue, not so much in the Internet per se, as in the rise to dominance of communicative engagement styles enabled and encouraged by social media business models and algorithms that deliberately maximize screen “engagement” time by compartmenting users into insular information microenvironments that reinforce biases and presuppositions, reward and encourage extremity of views without challenge or self-reflection, and encourage performative outrage and vicious social “swarming” behaviors by reciprocally-antagonistic ideational monocultures.

To be sure, social pressure dynamics within and between relatively insular societal sub-communities have always played a major role in human society.  Such dynamics inevitably help shape what members of a society find permissible or even conceivable, and it is a natural human tendency to reinforce communal boundaries with some degree of ostracism, exclusion, and suppression of the “Other.”  Historically, however, we engaged far more directly with our fellow humans in the flesh – and in the complexity and inescapable nuance of real-world daily life – and only on a relatively modest scale, typified by village- or clan-level interactions. 

The rise of print capitalism expanded this scale to the level of large urban populations or even that of nation-states, with all sorts of important socio-political and geopolitical implications.  Even then, however, humanity had seen nothing like the hyperscaled dynamics of today’s truly globalized social media environment, which penetrates society as nothing before, both “down” to the very hands and eyeballs of billions of individual humans and “out” across the breadth of human civilization. 

At social media hyperscale– and, significantly, without the feedback mechanisms and incentives for humane moderation provided by face-to-face engagement and personal interactive nuance – the modern social media information space generates a metastatic toxicity: a universe of fractious, hermetically-sealed bubbles of hypertrophic ideational conformity, shortened attention spans, and intellectual shallowness that reinforces existing biases and nourishes all manner of imagined grievances and grudges, while rewarding and encouraging reflexive out-group antagonisms.  In these ways, one might say, we have primed the pump for our own susceptibility to adversary propaganda, disinformation, and Gray Zone destabilization.

The Metastasis of Self-Criticism

Third, I fear we have become more vulnerable to such tactics as a result of what might be termed the “metastasis of self-criticism.”  For centuries, it has been Western culture’s genius for self-criticism that has helped both permit and indeed drive vast human progress.  Historically, Western societies have had an apparently unique ability to articulate compelling normative frameworks and then – and here’s the impressive part – to turn the mirror of those vales back upon themselves (often lamentably slowly, and sometimes quite painfully, but eventually) for purposes of constructive self-criticism and improvement.

The classic example of this, of course, is the way in which our own Founders articulated and tried to build a system grounded in a compelling vision of American liberty – values that were of world-historical importance and that provided a beacon of inspiration for the rest of the world.  We sinned rather egregiously against those values in important ways for many years, of course, by denying basic political rights to portions of our country’s population on the basis of raw prejudice. 

In time, however, we were able to muster both the honesty and the self-awareness to recognize the gap between our principles and our practice, and we eventually had the moral courage to do something about that gap by living up to those values better – even when such gap-closing cost the nation dearly in terms of lives and treasure in our Civil War. 

I am aware of no other culture that has ever displayed the kind of constructive self-criticism and self-improvement the West has done so often and so well.  We should be endlessly proud of this. 

Like many good things, however, such an instinct for self-criticism, in excess, can become a problem.  And I fear has.  Over the last few decades – in a development pioneered by the academic Left, to its disgrace, but which has subsequently been embraced by extremes on both the Left and the Right – our instinct for constructive self-criticism has metastasized.  It evolved first into a chronic and paralyzing form of hand-wringing and apologetic self-doubt, and then into intellectual vandalism and a caustic and destructive form of oddly narcissistic civilizational self-hatred.  Through this oikophobic prism, despite the manifest and worsening threats and challenges we face in the world, it is reflexively assumed – in different ways on the Left and on the Right, but nonetheless disturbingly so for both – that we are always the problem, that things are always our fault, and that it is our country, our leaders, and indeed our fellow citizens who present the real and worst dangers in the modern world.  Such conclusions are absurd, even grotesque, but they seem today to be disturbingly common.

So this is, as I see it, our third point of modern democratic weakness.  It is easy to see how this ugly worldview makes us easy fodder for adversary manipulation – and they, our adversaries, know it.

Fighting Back

As for fighting back against such adversaries, that is, of course, rather more easily said than done.  I have certainly argued in this regard for the importance – to make us “harder targets” in the face of disinformation and manipulation – of trying to rediscover something of the old confident and optimistic narrative we once had of ourselves and our civilizational value.  (This is especially important as our adversaries try to manipulate and prey upon the very principles and moral integrity that have historically helped make us special.)  I think we need to do more remembering, if you will, of just why the revisionist autocracies hate us and fear our political and social values as much as they do. 

Why do they feel that way?  Well, it is most certainly not as a result of these our being in any sense problematic or discredited.  Quite to the contrary; it’s precisely because these ideals are worthy – and indeed inspiring – and because of the vision encoded in them of liberty and self-government by a sovereign, self-constituting, and rights-bearing people.  That vision is one which dictators loathe.  We should revel in their fear, and be proud of ourselves once again for embodying that which terrifies the monsters so.

The path to getting our heads right by returning to such a sense of self-confidence – while also, at the same time, protecting that sense of self-worth from the sin of pride, and from morphing into arrogance – is not easy.  It is a path to and through healing and collective renewal that will require more than I am in any position to describe here, even if I pretended to know exactly what is needed.

Nonetheless, with respect to near-term policy choices, I suspect there is more we can do in pushing back against those who are working so hard to stir the pot and to weaponize our society’s vulnerabilities against us today.   And since the kind of psychological and cultural renewal I’m talking about – and the self-confidence that would come with it – won’t happen tomorrow morning, we need to buy ourselves some time.  And that may mean getting our knuckles a bit bloody.

We can surely, for instance, do more to make our adversaries’ strategies of imposing “operational friction” on us more challenging and more costly to them.  As I argued recently to NATO colleagues, when an adversary employs Gray Zone-type provocations against us, we can and should do more to ensure that he gets his “fingers burned” in the attempt. 

Our adversaries in the Dark Quad are operating on the basis of the “principle of the bayonet” often attributed to Lenin:  “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed. If you encounter steel, withdraw.”  And our adversaries will continue thus to “probe” as long as they still “encounter mush.”  Why not show them some steel? 

In theory at least, such approaches are to some extent already being employed in the cyber domain, under U.S. doctrinal concepts such as “defend forward” and “persistent engagement,” though I’d wager we have still been far more reticent, even timid, than we need to be there.  I would urge us not just to step things up but also to generalize the principle.  We need to display less “mush” and more “steel” everywhere.

Moreover, though we have hitherto been very reluctant to consider such things, it may also be worth going on the socio-political offense in other ways as well. 

The paranoid dictatorships of the Dark Quad have long assumed that Western powers are engaged in an ongoing, full-spectrum campaign of socio-political subversion aimed at regime change and “Color Revolutions” in their countries.  This, for instance, is very much what the Chinese Communist Party believes – and fears. Vladimir Putin also complains loudly about this, and while the so-called “Gerasimov Doctrine” of Gray Zone competition and subversion certainly does well describe what Russia has been attempting to accomplish vis-à-vis the West, on its face and on its own terms it is also a description of what Russia believes the West has been doing against it for years.

The funny thing, of course, is that systematic domestic subversion of the dictatorships that array themselves against us isn’t U.S. policy – nor that of our allies.  Nonetheless, those dictators blame us for it anyway, and seem sincerely to believe that it is our policy. 

In keeping with my “fingers burned” suggestion, therefore, perhaps the real question for us is this: Why notrespond to our adversaries’ threats and challenges by actually starting to do a bit of what they think we’ve been doing all along? 

To be sure, we would need to remember – and perhaps even wish to signal – that such a policy of actually working to undermine their political systems is likely more useful as a tool than necessarily as an objective.  While I would be happy to see some healthy regime change in any or all of the members of the Dark Quad, there are obvious potentially escalatory downsides when a competition is framed in truly regime-existential terms and when the bad guys have nuclear weapons. 

Accordingly, subversive ruthlessness on our part is probably best thought of as a means rather than an end – and we might need to be willing to scale such efforts back down to the degree that our adversaries abandoned their own subversion and provocations against us.  But why not give ourselves some competitive leverage – and put themon the back foot for a change – by taking the figurative fight to their home turf?

After all, if they truly believe we’re already doing it, it wouldn’t really be too “provocative” to take this step.  We’re blamed for taking it already, so their anger over this would seem to be basically baked into their approach already.  In a sense, by not doing what they attribute to us already, we’re just foregoing a costless way to exact a price from them for their belligerence, to penalize them for their geopolitical aggressiveness, and to gain bargaining leverage.   So if we’re indeed serious about fighting back, why not stop passing up such an opportunity?

Anyway, that’s some food for thought from me to get some discussion going here this morning.  Thanks for listening!

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

*  Frankly, the civilizational contempt that such tactics engender in Western observers is discreditable.  If anything, precisely because some of our adversary dictatorships are the heirs to ancient and sophisticated cultures, one should arguably hold them to a higher standard than one might a country with less of a long and proud tradition.  (We should respect these worthy ancient cultures enough to understand how much their peoples deserve better, more humane, and different rulers today!)  But that’s a discussion for another day.