OPINION:
People seem aghast that Russia is attacking the United States with disinformation to encourage civil strife and undermine public confidence in its institutions. It’s not new.
The Soviet Union was picking at divisive social issues to weaken the U.S. as far back as 1960. Moreover, Russia is not the only one after us in cyberspace. China, Iran and North Korea also have anti-U.S. information campaigns.
The Russians are worrisome because we have finally begun to realize they are weaponizing information and creating a new form of warfare in cyberspace. They’ve always been better than us at spotting mega-trends that presage possible changes in the balance of power.
They, not us, were the first to fathom the meaning of our success in linking intelligence assets with long-range weapons. They predicted that we would become a hegemon. And we did.
But hegemons don’t make their enemies give up. They simply push them toward other ways to win. Vladimir Putin is betting on cyberspace, and he is moving to become as dominant there as we have become in traditional warfare. He hopes someday to have his own conversation like the one Col. Harry Summers had with his North Vietnamese counterpart after we’d lost in Vietnam.
“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” Col. Summers said, to which the North Vietnamese replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
Mr. Putin’s threat isn’t about viruses or Trojan horses. It’s about changing people’s perceptions of reality. It’s about infecting democracies with false information to manipulate public policy outcomes by changing what people believe is real. His strategy is to attack democracy’s underpinning, the public’s trust that governments and the private sector will treat people fairly.
He doesn’t care about which American politician wins an election. He cares about aggravating social divisions, creating disparate, grievance-based groups, and pitting them against each other to destabilize American society. His goal is not to attack us with information to defeat us, but rather to attack us with information to make us defeat ourselves. That is the strategic lesson of Vietnam.
It’s time to take the field in cyberspace and do what we must to protect democracy and freedom. A good place to start is by filling top human rights positions in the Trump administration. The president says his number one priority is to protect the American people, yet he has ignored one of America’s most powerful weapons to do just that.
Ronald Reagan was the last president to appreciate the power of human freedom. He understood the desire to be free is so compelling that people will accept unimaginable burdens and endure unspeakable violence to achieve it, and he used that knowledge to help destroy the Soviet Union.
U.S. military power kept Russian forces in check, but Soviet Communism died because Mr. Reagan exposed the Russian people to a better idea, freedom, and he did it without war. The president needs people to focus on freedom.
Next, we should re-energize the Helsinki process. Signed in 1975, the Helsinki Accords established standards for human rights, adherence to which became moral and diplomatic imperatives. The Thomas Theorem took over. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence.”
The consequence of defining the failure of Communist governments to meet Helsinki standards was popular demand for change that eventually swept them away. We need to establish human rights standards once again for people in closed societies.
Finally, we need to level the cyber playing field. If we must grapple with false information intended to influence the perceptions of our citizens, then our adversaries must grapple with the truth and how it influences the perceptions of their citizens toward freedom. We have proven technology that will enable people in closed societies to circumvent government censorship of what they can see and say on the Internet.
State Department officials have slow-rolled its development for fear of China “going ballistic” and the Board of Broadcast Governors, the entity that oversees funding for anti-firewall activities, happy with its political sinecures, and despite global Internet usage of more than 4 billion people, have decided its funding priority is short-wave radio. You can’t make this stuff up.
Once again, the United States faces the need to protect democracy and freedom, this time in cyberspace. It is time to act.
• Bruce M. Lawlor, a retired U.S. Army major general, is a former member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.