I’m sorry, but the West is losing the cognitive war

Despite what well-wishers and international relations academics who parrot made-up IR schools of thought like to think, the modern geopolitical arena is a realist construct. No group of individuals perceive this more acutely than heads of government — whichever continent they may live on — who have to delicately weigh the scales to best guide their nations in an era of great power competition.

In this era of multipolarity, power is necessarily measured in relative terms. If one alliance system is perceived to have a relative gain in one domain, that is necessarily a relative loss for the other system. These gains and losses prompt nations who may be on the fence to rethink long-held positions of non-alignment, and embolden authoritarian leaders to dig in their heels and challenge the status quo.

Influence operations, thus, have two key roles in the modern geopolitical arena. First, to sow discord and weaken the willingness for nations to pursue the domestic and foreign policies that enable them to achieve national objectives. And second, signal to the world the relative losses of one’s opponents to hasten alliance abandonment and realignment risks.

While the world looks to growing disunity and political polarisation in the United States, the “peaceful takeover” of the CCP seems more and more like a fait accompli. This can only be reversed through the whole-of-government framework which emphasises the US’ continuing role as the global superpower while tapering expectations of Chinese hegemony.

Such a framework requires strong defensive mechanisms by which Western governments protect their populations from foreign interference, as well as reactive strategies to reshape the expectations of global players who may — to this point — have pursued a hedging strategy. 

How did we get here?

The political polarisation that has divided Western polity was very much planned.

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This is not to suggest that all charges of “misinformation” or “disinformation” to discredit one’s political opponents (which has become the vogue slander in modern political discourse) are true. However, overwhelming evidence suggests that foreign adversaries do play an active role in shaping political discourse to destabilise the institutional foundations of Western nations and weaken their perceived ability to project power. Ultimately, this is realism 101 — decreasing their relative power on the world stage.

Of course, the use of information streams to destabilise an enemy is not a new phenomenon. Analysts in this field love to cite the (perhaps overused) Sun Tzu line, “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”, to show the efficacy of these operations as part of whole-of-government warfare.

However, Western analysts must grasp that the modern era of information operations, which still seek to coerce foreign populations into taking foreign and domestic policy positions that may be contrary to their best interests, doesn’t seek to simply influence what people think but rather how people think. So much so has this concept taken hold over NATO military thinkers that many have advocated that the cognitive domain form a sixth domain of warfare. This will be addressed shortly.

Simply, these operations seek to gain influence over the heuristics and behavioural mechanisms by which the human brain decides on a future course of action. By influencing the parameters through which human behaviour is decided — through proliferation of content to overwhelm and reformat neurotransmitters for example — a foreign adversary is able to reframe how individuals interpret competing political truth claims in the domestic political arena and how they communicate with individuals within their communities. 

Take Operation Infektion as an example on the impact of these operations on the brain’s decision-making metrics. In 1983, KGB operatives placed a story in the Indian press asserting that AIDS was a bioweapon of the US government. The claims were later syndicated in publications across 80 countries through the USSR’s information networks. Despite the scientific flaws in the analysis that were put to bed by the US government, the assertions still hold influence over the population. So much so that research has found that over 52 per cent of respondents in some American demographics responded yes to the survey question that “HIV is a man-made virus.”  In this instance, the deterioration of trust in authority and the blurring of fact and fiction created an epistemological paradigm where scientific consensus cannot be achieved — in which emotive and affiliative reasoning has taken pride of place as a decision-making heuristic.

The proliferation of doubt-sowing content has continued to play a part in Russia’s influence operations to this day. Analyses from Indigo Strudwicke and Will Grant in #Junk Science: Investigating pseudoscience disinformation in the Russian Internet Research Agency tweets determined that bot tweets from Russian fake profiles in the debate over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine have been “very roughly, even-handed between pro-and anti-MMR”. To the pair, the primary role of such information operations was to “amplify the uncertainty” over vaccines. While a hot button issue, these information operations promoted a range of competing micro-narratives to obscure what the truth actually is, and in turn, overwhelming those who are trying to find it.   

So how does this influence the way in which individuals think?

This proliferation of competing views coupled with a deterioration of trust in traditional institutions have prompted voters to turn to emotional sense-making and affiliative rationales to determine whether a claim or a policy is correct.

Ignas Kalpokas, in A Political Theory of Post-Truth, puts this simply: voters in the modern mediatised environment are offered a “truth market”. If you Google any recent US President, you can see first-hand the wildly different reporting on the same story. Given this uncertainty, voters will consciously and subconsciously select the “most attractive offering” that is approved of by their social group and confirms their behavioural biases. 

How does this tie into NATO’s conception of cognitive warfare?

Cognitive Warfare, the paper presented at the first NATO scientific meeting on cognitive warfare in Bordeaux, 2021, detailed that cognitive warfare does not simply impact what people think, rather how they “collectively act and interact” to the benefit of an adversary.

“Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation,” the paper read.

“This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, by causing distraction, by introducing false narratives, radicalising individuals, and amplifying social polarisation to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives.”

Of course, the Deputy Chief of Defence for the French Armed Forces notes that cognitive warfare is a two-way street. Not only are our adversaries attempting to use this as a weapon against the West, but it must achieve strategic permanence in the West’s military arsenal.

“With regard to our enemy, we must be able to ‘read’ the brain of our adversaries in order to anticipate their reactions. If necessary, we must be able to ‘penetrate’ the brains of our adversaries in order to influence them and make them act according to our wishes,” General Eric Autellet wrote.

If cognitive warfare was to achieve strategic permanence in our defence apparatus, how can we simply define it? Bernard Claverie and Francois du Cluzel, in the paper, note that it is a means by which a military can degrade and reshape an enemy’s “reality”.

“Cognitive warfare is thus an unconventional form of warfare that uses cyber tools to alter enemy cognitive processes, exploit mental biases or reflexive thinking, and provoke thought distortions, influence decision making and hinder action, with negative effects, both at the individual and collective levels,” the pair opine.

“The stated objective is to attack, exploit, degrade or even destroy how someone builds their own reality, their mental self-confidence, their trust in processes and the approaches required for the efficient functioning of groups, societies or even nations.”

This concept intimately reflects the Chinese Communist Party’s conception of information and political warfare. To the CCP, weaponised narratives are fundamental to uprooting national identity — inherently weakening a country’s core foundations.

Rogers’ step-by-step process for Chinese disinformation were detailed in the NATO submission.

“To be effective, a hostile positioning operation would need to involve a three-step process: deactivate the target country’s existing identity through tactics such as the desynchronisation of its historical narrative, the questioning or demolition of its self-perception of its international relevance, and the delegitimation of its international status and role,” Rogers explains.

“Construct — if possible working in tandem with disgruntled or separatist domestic political forces — a new identity for the target, connecting it to new or pre-existing (but often marginalised) historical myths.

“Encourage the adoption and spread of the new position, both: domestically (inside the target country), particularly among disgruntled and separatist elements; and internationally, among the elites of other countries.” 

So how has the West lost?

If you’re like me, it’s likely that you’re over the finger-pointing following the 2016 US election. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” were thrown around at a whim — and reduced meaningful debate on political interference to a subset of the Republican versus Democrat divide. To move the debate past reductionist name-calling, below I detail those astroturfed groups that achieved the highest engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and how these relate to the proliferation of micro-narratives that have divided the electorate and facilitated the emergence of emotion and affiliative rationales as the primary drivers of decision making.

During the 2016 US election, Russia’s Internet Research Agency is expected to have created 81 Facebook pages, 17 YouTube channels, 133 Instagram accounts, and 3,841 Twitter profiles — actioned with some 1,000 staff member (Renee DiResta et al. The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency (New Knowledge, 2019): 7).

Interestingly, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence commissioned report, The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency, found that each of the top pages across Facebook and Instagram were tailored to target individual communities within the US election.

Top IRA pages: Facebook 

Top IRA pages: Instagram 

The first observation is that Facebook pages targeted primarily conservative audiences, while Instagram targeted progressive audiences. Already, this divides the electorate on their preferred social media, giving rise to the echo chambers we speak about so often — strengthening herding and confirmation bias. In fact, some of the fake social media “grassroots” brands above were so well developed that they even had SounCloud podcasts, volunteer groups, and funding from merchandise.

With tailored content to harness biases, it is easy to see how segments of the electorate can come to radically different conclusions from the same piece of information.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United States’ level of political polarisation has only been seen twice over recent decades across the democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western. These include the division seen surrounding France’s 1968 political crisis, and the division seen in Italy between 1971–78 following years of terror attacks and political violence. Meanwhile, research from the Pew Research Center have indicated that some 60 per cent of progressive voters are simply unwilling to discuss politics with someone whom they disagree with. 

The ramifications

Suggestions that the US has levels of political division not seen in a Western country since the crises in Italy and France, especially the case of the latter which saw President Charles de Gaulle flee the country amid widespread anticipation of a revolution, has international actors hedging — if not outright balancing — due to fears of alliance abandonment and/or entrapment with the US in an era of bipolarity.

The warning signs of this over recent months have been immense. In early March, China brokered a pact between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Whether either country has the intent of honouring the pact is immaterial for now. First, the CCP-brokered deal demonstrates to the world that China has become a dominant power in the Middle East, and that it can reasonably play the role of peacemaker between two countries who have been waging proxy wars against each other for decades — a far cry from the US’ sabre-rattling against regional adversaries Syria and Iran. Secondly, it signals a willingness for nations to move from the traditional US-led global order.

Perhaps a more sobering consideration is the speed in which the Saudi–Iranian rapprochement occurred.

Just three years ago, Bahrain, the UAE, and Israel signed the Abraham Accords with Saudi Arabia giving implicit acknowledgement. The Accords signalled the expansion of a new US-backed alliance grouping within the Middle East.

According to Masoud Mostajabi, associate director of the Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, this recent pact may not be the last.

“If this trend continues, more regional actors may turn to China as a mediator and trust it more than the United States. This development is positive for a region in need of increased diplomacy and dialogue between traditional rivals,” he explained.

“Iran stands to benefit from further avenues to absorb US sanctions, while Saudi Arabia can hedge its bets in case normalisation with Israel fails to materialise. China, in turn, benefits from expanded economic ties and a more secure commercial environment in the Middle East.”

Simply, until the United States can seize the initiative in the battle for influence — international actors will question the ability for the US to project influence and keep their allies safe. This may well herald a new era of the Domino Theory.