Artículo World Politics Review, 23.02.2022 Howard W. French, corresponsal extranjero y escritor sobre asuntos globales
Over the past several weeks, there has been nearly as much speculation about the nature and objectives of the Biden administration’s highly vocal approach to warning about the imminence of a Russian invasion of Ukraine as there has been about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions in the current crisis.
The most prominent strain of analysis, by now distilled into broadly held, conventional wisdom, is that by providing detailed, near-daily updates about Russian troop deployments around Ukraine’s borders, including highly specific intelligence and tactical analysis, the Biden administration has been seeking to “get inside Putin’s head,” thereby giving him pause or relegating him to inaction.
If, in the end, Russia does not launch an all-out invasion—or even move to formally occupy the areas of Ukraine that it has already invaded—the approach may come to be regarded as brilliant, as perhaps will the Biden national security team members who settled on it. But this is not the only way to understand the ongoing information warfare around the crisis in Ukraine, nor in my estimation is it the most convincing.
Much has been made of the declining power of a U.S.-led sanctions regime to oblige unfriendly actors to ply to Washington’s will, including by myself in last week’s column. The ongoing disclosure-heavy approach, though, fits within a much older frame that seems to have lost much less of its vigor in recent decades. The most potent and resilient asset in the U.S. foreign policy toolkit actually dates back to the early phases of British empire, and it involves a power that these two countries uniquely wield: their incomparable ability to shape, and when necessary, destroy the reputations of other nations and their leaders.
This power to frame the images of other countries in costly and sometimes decisive ways grows out of the unparalleled spread of the British empire between the 17th and 19th centuries, and the global expansion along with it of the reach of the English language. That, in turn, singularly boosted the power of the country’s media establishment, along with that of its now even more successful U.S. complement and successor.
Historically speaking, the ability of the Anglo-American press to shape geopolitical events far and wide has had little to do with right and wrong in terms of any conventional ethical or moral reckoning. Thus, in the late 19th century during the “Scramble for Africa,” when British imperialism was fast expanding on that continent, the British press routinely intoned about the savagery of Africans who dared resist the takeover of their homelands by advancing armies. Never mind that the British were endowed with recently invented Maxim guns that could fire 600 rounds a minute and caused huge numbers of casualties against mostly defenseless people whenever they were deployed. The role of the press was not only to cheer on British forces, but to destroy the legitimacy of their adversaries, such as the African kingdoms of Ashanti and Benin, playing up claims of their practice of human sacrifice or their involvement in the local slave trade. Toward this end, Benin, whose capital was systematically sacked and looted in 1897, was labeled the City of Blood. The blood referred to, however, was that purportedly shed by Africans in heavily hyped, putatively barbarous practices against each other, and not the large-scale slaughter of Africans and utter destruction of the seat of a major kingdom by advancing British forces.
This role of the Anglo-American press not only as cheerleader for their own countries, but also as a potent force for discrediting adversaries can be seen in countless chapters involving the use of Western force abroad. More than a century earlier, in 1756, it was deployed in order to promote the assertion of British power in India, when the British press helped propagate an exaggerated story about the execution by Mughal forces of British captives in the so-called Black Hole prison of Calcutta. This lay the justificatory groundwork for Britain’s conquest of Bengal one year later, which the press duly cheered on.
In one of the most famous U.S. examples of this expansive genre, domestic newspapers loudly trumpeted Spain’s perfidy in sinking the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1889, killing 251 sailors and marines. It was later determined that the sinking of this U.S. Navy cruiser was caused by an accidental explosion of its own powder charges, and not by Spanish attack. But the New York Journal and New York World, respectively owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, employing the tactics of what would become known as yellow journalism, used the incident as pretext to whip up support for the war with Spain that would strip that country of its colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific and make the United States an imperial power.
One needn’t reach back nearly so far to find powerful examples of this sort of practice, either. Twenty years ago, leading American media, including some of the most respectable outlets there are, readily bought into the story promoted by Washington that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. Establishing a consensus on that issue irredeemably framed Hussein as a villain who had to be removed, paving the way for a U.S. invasion based on a pretext that turned out to be entirely false.
There are lessons here for adversaries of the United States and of the West more generally in the world today, starting with Russia, but including China and others. The Anglo-American condominium that has long led the West may no longer be what it used to, and its sanctions-first approach to crisis diplomacy may be losing some of its teeth. But its ability to frame adversaries as being on the wrong side of history, as moral offenders or simply as irredeemable bad guys remains strong. This may help explain why China is hedging between Russia and much of the rest of the world in the crisis over Ukraine : It fears the lasting reputational damage that would come from supporting a bid to use force to erase a European border. It probably also helps us understand China’s caution in using force to tighten its grip on Taiwan. Beijing may claim the territory as its own, but that autonomous island’s democracy has a powerful salience, especially in a world still so dominated by Western media and information.
This is why, in part, Russia has worked so hard to develop its own capacity for information warfare and disinformation, including the bridge-building it has engaged in with major shapers of image and information in the United States, such as Fox News. It is also why China is investing so heavily in building its own networks of news and information gathering and dissemination around the world. Foreseeing an era of extended competition and possibly conflict with the West, neither wishes to cede ground on the information front.
For now, however, Russia is badly hindered by something quite old-fashioned: hard-to-deny facts. In recent days, Russian diplomats have multiplied their appearances here and there in the media, straining credulity by saying that their country isn’t threatening anyone, even as nearly 200,000 of its troops are forward-positioned in areas near the Ukraine border. One went so far as to say that Russia has never attacked another country, a line that China itself has often used, and one that is even more bereft of truth under the circumstances.
If the tanks roll into Russia’s western neighbor in the days ahead, the limited effectiveness of threatened sanctions as a deterrent will have been proven, but Putin would be foolish to think that he will be able to climb easily out of the deep villain’s hole that the global media will cast him into. And he indeed will have done much of the work for them.
