Bad statecraft

In a 2011 article titled ‘The Rubicon Theory of War: How the Path to Conflict Reaches the Point of No Return’, Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney discussed a distinction between ‘deliberative’ and ‘instrumental’ mindsets, and linked this to the origins of the First World War. When in a deliberative mindset, people consider whether they ought to do something; when in an instrumental one, they think about how to do it. Some time in August 1914, the authors argued, European politicians shifted from a deliberative to an instrumental mindset – instead of thinking about whether they should be going to war, they started thinking about how to fight it. Once they did, war became inevitable.

We’ll get back to this a little later, but first we need to take a diversion. As some readers will be aware, the UK-based Institute of Statecraft and its associated project, the Integrity Initiative, have been in the news a lot recently due to leaks of documents about their campaign to combat ‘Russian propaganda’. Today another batch of leaked documents was published on the internet. Among these is a set of notes for a talk entitled ‘Genesis and Features of Russia’s Hybrid Warfare in Ukraine’. The notes seem to be a few years old and to have been written by someone called Jon Searle, who is described as ‘HDIS, Bedford Modern School’. A bit of investigation indicates that Bedford Modern School is an ‘independent day school for boys and girls aged 7 to 18’ and that Mr Searle teaches religious studies there – not an obvious qualification for expertise on Russian hybrid warfare. Given some clues in the document, I’m guessing that Mr Searle didn’t give this talk; rather it was given by a Ukrainian delegation, and these are just Searle’s notes. Anyway, they contain the following striking lines:

General Conclusions.

The Russian Federation is a constant source of aggression aimed at the territorial, economic and political stability of the Russian Near Abroad and other European countries. There is a desire to re-establish Soviet/Czarist Era borders.

Simply responding to Russian actions will be self-defeating.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Question: Where does Russia go next?

Military and political leaders harbour a desire to return to the ‘glory’ of the USSR: aggression is inherent in the Russian condition, ‘aggression will [only] be over when Russia is over.’

This reminds me a bit of James Clapper’s remark that Russians are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt and penetrate’, though it’s a bit more chilling because of the phrase that ‘aggression will only be over when Russia is over’, which suggests a desire actually to destroy Russia. The fact that Mr Searle doesn’t consider it worth his while to comment critically on all this suggests to me some degree of agreement. In another document, the Institute of Statecraft’s director Chris Donnelly also seems to concur, remarking that, ‘A fundamental, universally-held Russian belief is that Russia can only be secure at the expense of their neighbours’ security. All the Russian leadership and military consider that other countries’ security is secondary to, and must be subordinated to, Russia’s.’

Russia, in short, is innately aggressive. What’s interesting is that Donnelly allies this with a very elevated opinion of Russian strategy and of the qualities of the Russian General Staff. According to Donnelly, Western states are incapable of proper strategy – they’re very bad at defining national interests and directing means to achieve them, and they’re also very bad at coordinating the efforts of all the parts of government towards a common goal. By contrast, he claims, ‘Russian thinking is not fixed but very flexible. The General Staff (GS) is able to change and evolve, learn lessons, develop new capabilities and concepts. Today, this is a very dynamic organisation.’ Russia has an ‘integrated strategic campaign’, says Donnelly, which involves more than just the military, but brings together all aspects of state power in a coherent whole. It is marked by ‘strategic coherence … concepts, training, equipment are coherent.’ This combination of strategic coherence and aggressive strategic culture make Russia a particularly dangerous enemy. Connelly concludes:

This is the strategic situation we will face for the next 25 years. Moreover, the “war” mindset is being pumped into the Russian population. It is one of the great successes of Putin’s propaganda offensive.

Donnelly adds a curious statement, that ‘Seizing and occupying territory is not the ultimate Russian objective, whereas for the Soviet Armed Forces it was. Their objective today is the destruction of our Armed Forces and war-fighting capability.’ I say this is curious because as Clausewitz pointed out, in war ‘the aim is to disarm the enemy.’ So of course the objective of the Russian military in case of war against us would be ‘the destruction of our Armed Forces’. But I don’t think that Donnelly is thinking in those terms. He takes a lot of effort to explain that the boundaries between war and peace have disappeared. So when he talks about the Russians wanting to destroy our armed forces, I think that he means right now, ‘today’ as he puts it, not in some future war.

How is that to be achieved? A clue comes in another report which came to my attention this week, published by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and entitled ‘Complex Strategic Coercion and Russian Military Modernization’. The Canadian Global Affairs Institute might seem far removed from the Integrity Initiative, but I read in the blurb at the end that the report’s author, Julian Lindley-French, is among other things a ‘Senior Fellow for the Institute for Statecraft’. According to Lindley-French, Moscow intends to achieve its objectives ‘via complex strategic coercion’:

 The modernization of Russia’s armed forces must thus be seen in the context of a new form of complex strategic coercion that employs systematic pressure across 5Ds: disinformation, destabilization, disruption, deception and implied destruction. Russia’s strategic goal is to conduct a continuous low-level war at the seams of democratic societies. … In the worst case, complex strategic coercion would be used to mask Russian force concentrations prior to any attack on NATO and EU states from above the Arctic Circle and Norway’s North Cape in the north, through the Baltic States and Black Sea region and into the southeastern Mediterranean.

Again, we see an interesting combination of beliefs in Russia as a) inherently aggressive, b) remarkably powerful (able to attack all the way from the North Cape to the Mediterranean!), and c) extraordinarily capable when it comes to strategic thinking and to the enactment of coherent policies which integrate all aspects of state power in pursuit of clearly defined objectives. Allied to this is a belief that the distinction between war and peace has disappeared, and that the West must act as if it is at war.

So, let us return to how I started this post and to the distinction between deliberative and instrumental thinking. When you look at the Institute of Statecraft, you see in essence the following argument: Russia is aggressive, its policy is coherent, it aims to destroy us, and it is already waging war against us. Alternatives – such as that Russian actions are largely reactive and improvised – are not considered. The conclusion is that we should stop thinking about whether we ought to be at war with Russia (we are), and think instead about how to fight it – i.e. we should start thinking instrumentally not deliberatively. And that, far more than Donnelly’s connections with British military intelligence (of which I too could be accused), is what worries me about him. For as Johnson and Tierney point out, what gets you into serious trouble is when you start thinking about how to do stuff which you really ought not to be doing at all. Fighting wars with Russia is a case in point. Donnelly and Lindley-French represent the Institute for Statecraft, but the statecraft they propose is one which we should all reject.