“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without
fighting.”
“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be
extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be
the director of the opponent’s fate.”
--Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tzu
An accumulating mass of information suggests to me—and I
hope I am wrong about this—that Vladimir Putin has launched a war against the
United States and its European and other allies (the “West”). I also think that
Vladimir Putin is a student of Sun Tzu, and has applied strategies like those
above.
Whether Putin’s motive is simply a hatred for and desire to
destroy the democracies that humiliated the Soviet Union, the reassembly of
most if not all of Russia’s empire, or something else I don’t know. Certainly,
the destruction of the West is part of whatever he seeks.
His method of waging this war seems reasonably clear. Russia
is militarily and financially no match for the US and NATO. But he perceives
that the West is rich and complacent, and concludes that, reminiscent of German
Jews facing the rise of Hitler in the 30s, we are loathe to jeopardize our
comfort by taking decisive but extremely costly self-protective action so long
as his threat remains, shall we say, “soundless,” “formless” and “mysterious.”
Putin “knows when he can fight and when he cannot.” Russia lacks
the financial strength to mount a powerful military, but information technology
now provides a much less expensive as well as “mysterious” offensive force:
cyberwarfare. Not only is it cheap and hard to detect, but extensive dependence
on the internet and other computer-controlled infrastructure networks makes the
West exceedingly vulnerable to it. And with our uncensored social media and belief
in freedom of expression, we have forged weapons for our own destruction.
So Putin has for several years been developing and honing perhaps
the world’s most aggressive and effective cyberwarfare capability. This has
stolen sensitive information from the most carefully secured sites, locked up
and ransomed expensively protected computer systems, disrupted vital
communications and other infrastructures, and swarmed social media like Twitter
and Facebook with vast clouds of false, scurrilous messages designed to enrage
people, inspire hatred or fear, set communities against each other or
themselves, and impugn politicians Putin deems dangerous. His efforts may well
have thrown the US Presidency to Donald Trump, and provided crucial support to
such disruptive causes as Brexit, Kurdish independence, Catalan secession from
Spain, and the 5 Star movement in Italy, among others.
While Putin uses cyberwarfare against the West “to subdue
the enemy without fighting,” he has also initiated small and camouflaged military
invasions of Russian neighbors like Georgia, the Crimea, Ukraine, and Latvia. Nothing
so far is clear enough to shatter our complacency and mobilize our overwhelmingly
stronger military, but still valuable land grabs and useful threats to other
neighbors. These actions, along with a cyberwar effort whose extent is not yet
fully apparent, are the evidence for my concern that, without our knowing it,
Mr. Putin has launched a deadly war against the US and its allies.
