The Dive, 10/1/24
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"It won't make any difference: they won't stop even if you explode with rage." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.4
What I’m Reading:
1. How defense “experts” got the war in Ukraine wrong
Why you should read it: Cribbing from their recently published report on the subject, historians Eliot Cohen and Phillips P. O’Brien detail in The Atlantic how a coterie of Russia-focused defense experts all got their analyses of the war so wrong.
“One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confidently predicted that Russia would defeat its smaller neighbor within weeks. American military leaders believed this consensus, to the point that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair reportedly told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian attack. Although those analysts’ gloomy assessments turned out to be wrong, they’ve nevertheless made the United States and its allies overly cautious in assisting Ukraine in its self-defense… To the extent that analysts discussed Ukraine in any detail, its citizens were depicted as the demoralized and atomized victims of a corrupt government. The country’s substantial Russophone population was portrayed as largely indifferent to rule from Moscow or Kyiv. Ukraine’s equipment was no match for advanced Russian systems. They had experienced only static warfare in the Donbas and would have no chance against a Russian blitzkrieg. Volodymyr Zelensky was portrayed as an ineffective president. He was a comedy performer, not a wartime leader; his government, intelligence services, and armed forces had been penetrated by Russian spies and saboteurs. Ukrainians might not even put up much of a guerrilla resistance. On top of it all came consistent policy advocacy: assertions that Ukraine was not worth arming or that well-intentioned efforts to do so would merely increase suffering.”
“The same expert analytic community that erred early in the war continues to dominate much of the public and governmental discourse. Many of them persist in downplaying Ukrainian chances and counseling against giving the Ukrainians weapons that they have repeatedly shown themselves able to use with great effect. Some of them still warn of Russian escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, even as one Russian red line after another has faded to pink and vanished… The standard analysis of Russia and Ukraine paid almost no attention to the documented corruption of the Russian military, the rote nature of its exercises, and the failure of attempts to professionalize it. Far from having an abundance of well-trained personnel akin to American and British soldiers, Russian forces consisted for the most part of conscripts who had been bribed or coerced into signing up for a second year of duty in the same old abusive system. Many commentators wrongly compared Vladimir Putin’s forces to their Western counterparts, yielding predictions that Russia would employ ‘shock and awe’ against the Ukrainians—as if its air force had experience and organization similar to that of the United States. But the Russian military was not a somewhat smaller and less effective version of America’s. It was a brutal, deeply flawed, and altogether inferior armed force… This point is crucial: Many Western analysts had been trained as Russia specialists. Implicitly, perhaps subconsciously, they viewed Ukraine the way Russian imperialists did: as adjunct to Russia. In many cases ignorant of Ukrainian history, and even dismissive of its claims to national identity and political cohesion, authors of nearly a quarter of the reports we read did not even attempt to describe Ukraine as anything more than a target set for Russia. Many had never visited Ukraine, or spoken with Westerners—including members of allied training missions who had served there—who might have had different and better-informed views.”
Why it matters: “What is troubling is that analytic failures can happen again in any setting where small groups of experts in a particular country exercise outsize influence. Let’s hope analysts of the People’s Liberation Army will take a different approach if tensions with China continue to escalate… The correctives for recent intelligence failures do not include, obviously, chucking expertise altogether. But our report shows why, especially in moments of crisis, governments and the public need to hear from a wide variety of experts, demand relentless commonsense questioning, and, above all, create incentives for open, sharply expressed disagreement on fundamental issues. Expertise is not a form of occult knowledge, and those of us who consume expert opinion should always do so with a strong dose of skepticism. The analytic failure in Ukraine makes a strong case for something so often lacking in military analysis and the academic world more generally: intellectual humility.”
2. Why America should focus on Europe before Asia
Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, former assistant secretary of state A. Wess Mitchell and politics professor Jakub Grygiel argue that the United States needs to focus on Europe first and foremost—not Asia, as conventional strategic wisdom has it.
“The United States’ ability to cope with the pressures of great-power competition hinges on securing Europe and preserving the trans-Atlantic alliance. While it is true that there are serious and pressing national security problems in Asia and the Middle East, these can only be dealt with effectively once the Atlantic foundation of Washington’s global strength is secure. To conduct a future pivot to Asia, the United States needs a fulcrum in Europe—not vice versa… First, Europe is indispensable to the United States in balance-of-power terms. China may be the United States’ top overseas trade partner when it comes to goods, but when services and investment are taken into the equation, the most important economic partner by far is the European Union. The United States invests four times more in Europe than it does in Asia; Europeans invest 10 times more in the United States than in China and India combined. The United States has 30 allies in Europe compared to six in the Indo-Pacific. The collective GDP of European NATO allies is $20 trillion; that of allied Asia is $9 trillion. The combined annual defense spending of U.S. allies in Europe was $383 billion in 2023, while that of U.S. allies in Asia was $140 billion. European allies make up two of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council and a larger share of the membership of the world’s most important organizations than any other region.”
“What these numbers show is that, precisely because of China’s growing strength, the United States cannot afford to forfeit Europe, either politically or economically. In a hypothetical scenario, if the United States lost its allies in Asia but kept Europe in its corner, it would retain the capacity to compete with China. But the reverse is not true. If the United States ever lost Europe—for instance, if China succeeded in neutralizing it or a Russian victory in Ukraine caused key allies to seek accommodation—U.S. allies in Asia could not replace the role of Europe… Whatever its flaws, modern Europe is the greatest accomplishment of U.S. foreign policy. From 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it took Americans two world wars, 14 presidents, and 38 congresses to get Europe—the source of the biggest threats to U.S. security in the 20th century—to where it is today: a continent of free-market democracies modeled, to a large extent, on the United States. Despite what its detractors say, the trans-Atlantic West represents the strongest force for progress in modern history, and it is worth preserving.”
Why it matters: “The point in all of this is not that the United States should want to ‘lose’ Asia or the Middle East. Americans have critical strategic and economic interests in all three regions. Rather, it is that Europe is the United States’ indispensable base in global geopolitics. As any architect planning a foundation, investor choosing a core holding, or politician tending to the base knows: Get that right, and other positive things can be added over time. Get it wrong, and you could very well lose the whole… The United States will be best positioned to deal with China, the greatest threat in U.S. history, with Europe, the greatest alliance in U.S. history, stable and on its side. The adage of U.S. strategists in the 20th century—Europe first, Asia second—remains true in the 21st.”
3. Why Germany isn’t as important as people believe
Why you should read it: Also in Foreign Policy, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Dalibor Rohac contends that the United States should shift its thinking about Europe away from its current and long-standing focus on Germany and toward stronger relationships with Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltics.
“Here’s a thought. Instead of the constant hand-wringing and trying to shame Germans into playing a geopolitical role commensurate to their size and centrality in the European Union, perhaps their allies should just leave them be. Berlin does not want to turn the Bundeswehr into a formidable fighting force, project hard power, or use its defense industrial base to arm Ukraine and other Eastern European nations. And perhaps that is OK… [It] is time to drastically reduce the centrality of Germany in the U.S. conversation about the trans-Atlantic partnership—on both sides of the aisle.”
“Neither lionizing nor constantly bashing Germany strengthens the trans-Atlantic partnership. Never mind the obvious naivete of a worldview in which multilateralism and trade have supposedly turned hard power obsolete. More importantly, unlike during the Cold War when Germany was a front-line state and its military had some heft, NATO is no longer about Germany. Germany’s territory is not being contested, and the country is surrounded by thoroughly benign neighbors in all directions. Should one be surprised that German voters do not support massive increases in defense spending?… The centrality of Germany in U.S. thinking about NATO is an unhelpful remnant of the Cold War era. Today, however, NATO is about protecting the countries of its eastern flank—from Finland in the north, through the Baltics and Poland, to Romania in the south. On balance, the presence of Western European countries, including Germany, in the alliance is helpful, but it does not affect the fundamental strategic rationale for the alliance’s existence.”
Why it matters: “True, given Germany’s current economic size, nothing ever happens in the EU without Germany. Yet, time and time again, not much happens with Germany either. Just as Berlin has resisted calls for a substantial military buildup, it has also thrown water repeatedly on efforts to turn the EU into a properly federalized institution with real fiscal and geopolitical heft. Especially given the state of German politics today, the prospect of a genuine German leadership on the European and global stage is akin to waiting for Godot in the eponymous play… To be sure, we should be hoping for a more strategically minded German leadership than the assortment of box-ticking accountants who occupy most, though not all, positions of influence in Berlin. But, as things stand, the United States shouldn’t just grant Germany its current privileged position to shape the trans-Atlantic relationship, nor should it go on an anti-European crusade simply to punish German fecklessness.”
4. No, Reagan didn’t win the Cold War
Why you should read it: Journalist Max Boot, author of a new biography of President Ronald Reagan, pushes back against notions prevalent among American conservatives that Reagan single-handedly “won the Cold War.”
“One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the ‘evil empire’ and that it was his pressure that led to U.S. victory in the Cold War. In reality, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended). Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a 40-year conflict. But Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what U.S. policy toward China can achieve today.”
“Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hard-line aides such as Clark, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA Director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell… There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognized that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force. If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarized zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.”
Why it matters: “There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the Cold War. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today… The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that U.S. presidents of both parties adopted during the Cold War. But Washington should not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mold. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place.”
5. The case for public nuclear power
Why you should read it: In the pages of The Nation, journalist Fred Stafford makes the case for a big public nuclear power build-out led by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
“Thanks to its potential for decarbonization, nuclear energy is more prominent in national policy than it’s been in decades. The Biden administration has thrown the weight of the government behind the technology: subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, regulatory reforms in the ADVANCE Act, and extensive engagement with the industry in the Department of Energy. For the first time in the United States, a closed nuclear plant, in Michigan, is being restarted. ‘To reach our goal of net-zero by 2050,’ Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s secretary of energy, recently stated, ‘we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country.’ But after staggering cost overruns and delays at the most recent nuclear megaproject now complete in Georgia—more than double its $14 billion estimate and seven years late—no companies are ready to build the next one.”
“Because of all the nuclear power, the TVA ranks as providing the second-lowest share of fossil-fueled electricity among the 10 largest ‘balancing areas’ of the grid—the regions with distinct rules and incentives for electrical resources, each controlled by a single grid operator—behind only the main one serving California. That’s despite the TVA’s gas plants. Environmental groups blast out a different data point about the TVA, though: It’s dead last among the same 10 by share of wind and solar electricity… The Tennessee Valley is looking at massive new electricity demand thanks to a surge in manufacturing in the South and, according to a recent university study, an expected 22 percent growth in the region’s population by 2050. To meet that growth at the same time as it retires the rest of its coal plants, the TVA is turning to a suite of resources, including gas plants, solar farms, energy storage facilities, and, once again, nuclear power. And this time the nuclear program serves national interests beyond regional ones: kicking the tires of American industrial capacity to build big things.”
Why it matters: “In 2022, the TVA announced its decision to launch a new nuclear program… If the project succeeds, the TVA could one day rely on SMRs instead of gas plants for flexible, on-demand power to complement increasing renewables. Both [TVA chief nuclear officer Tim] Rausch and IBEW [union] see that as a good thing. Offering so much utility to the grid while emitting no carbon into the atmosphere and no pollutants into local communities is what justifies the substantial cost of building the first SMRs. The TVA’s standardized design for BWRX-300 deployment could become a template that is shared with other utilities: particularly smaller public ones across the United States or even those in developing nations that need clean, 24/7 power for industrialization.”
6. Why America can’t build ships
Why you should read it: For his Construction Physics Substack, Brian Potter goes over the woes of the American commercial shipbuilding and finds that American shipbuilding was never quite the powerhouse we.
“Commercial shipbuilding in the U.S. is virtually nonexistent: in 2022, the U.S. had just five large oceangoing commercial ships on order, compared to China’s 1,794 and South Korea’s 734. The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own. It costs twice as much to four times as much to build a ship in the U.S. as it does elsewhere. The commercial shipbuilders that do exist only survive thanks to protectionist laws like the Jones Act, which serve to prop up an industry which is uncompetitive internationally. As a result, the U.S. annually imports over 4 trillion dollars worth of goods, 40% of which are delivered by ship (more than by any other mode of transportation), but those ships are overwhelmingly built elsewhere… U.S. shipbuilders have struggled to compete in the commercial market since roughly the Civil War. Outside of a few narrow windows, the U.S. has never been a major force in international shipping. The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.”
“To try and support the merchant marine and reignite shipbuilding employment during the depths of the depression, in 1936 Congress passed another Merchant Marine Act, which amongst its provisions included an extremely generous subsidy for American shipbuilders. These shipbuilders could receive a Construction Differential Subsidy (CDS) that covered the difference between American and foreign costs, up to 50% of the cost of the ship; in other words, it assumed that U.S. ships were roughly twice as expensive as ships built elsewhere… But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous [World War II] shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry. The huge fleet of cargo ships was quickly sold off to foreign countries and private shipowners. Within three years, Britain, France, Germany and Denmark had completely or nearly completely replaced their wartime cargo ship losses with U.S.-built ships, and the American-owned fraction of global shipping tonnage had fallen to 48%. While the U.S. could have used the opportunity to jumpstart its commercial shipbuilding industry, it chose not to. Even at peak Liberty Ship production the U.S. had not been able to produce ships as efficiently as Britain in terms of labor hours, and after the war both American steel and American labor were far more expensive than in Britain. The U.S. dismantled or mothballed its emergency shipyards, and shipbuilders mostly abandoned the large-block style construction, returning to pre-war methods. Protected by its generous subsidies and often blocked by union rules, American builders had little incentive to try and overcome its labor and material disadvantages with novel, efficient techniques, and U.S.-built ships remained far more expensive than ships built elsewhere. By 1950, the U.S. was once again a marginal producer of commercial cargo ships.”
Why it matters: “What’s behind the US’s long history of being unable to compete commercially? In looking at the history of US shipbuilding, two major trends stand out. The first is the high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel. Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China... The U.S., on the other hand, never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success. Historically it has been isolationist, trading much more with itself than it has with other countries. Shipbuilding policies have long been much more focused on sheltering the industry from competition rather than driving to make it successful. Shipbuilding unions have often resisted dramatic changes in shipping and shipbuilding technology. Best practice transfer efforts often appear half-hearted. A Japanese shipbuilding executive noted that if ships were behind schedule, American yards were inclined to throw more labor at the problem, where Japanese yards would ask for the reason behind the delays and resolve the fundamental issues. A recurring theme in The Abandoned Ocean, a history of U.S. maritime policy, is that the U.S. has never been able to marshall the political will to remake its industry along more competitive lines.”
7. Why Europe is taking a page from America’s economic playbook
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal columnist Jon Sindreu looks at the report on European competitiveness authored by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi and finds it’s a lot closer to America’s recent economic policies than the European Union’s own.
“The bloc’s politics were shaken last week after Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president credited with saving the eurozone in 2012, published his long-awaited report on how to stop an economic stagnation that has been worsened by the competition posed by Chinese exports and the end of cheap Russian energy… The crucial point of the report is that ‘the EU should aim to move closer to the U.S. example in terms of productivity growth and innovation,’ highlighting that no listed European company valued at more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $111 billion, has been created in the past 50 years. In America, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon.com, Alphabet and Meta Platforms all surpass $1 trillion.
“What does moving closer to the U.S. mean, though? Draghi emphasized the importance of the technology sector, saying it is responsible for almost all of the U.S. productivity outperformance over the past 20 years… This ‘vertical’ emphasis on a single sector is a big departure from the post-1980s status quo, which has exhorted free markets, entrepreneurship and ‘horizontal’ policies meant to boost the entire European economy such as educating the labor force and building up infrastructure… The takeaway is that firms will only make big productivity-enhancing investments if they operate in growth sectors where it makes sense. This is why Europe has a gap in nonconstruction investment rates relative to the U.S.: Its top-three research spenders in recent times have consistently been petrol-car companies. In the U.S., by contrast, big R&D spenders were in automobiles and pharmaceuticals in the 2000s, then in software and hardware in the 2010s and more recently in digital applications.”
Why it matters: “But the EU has failed to react to the same extent [as the United States], paralyzed by fractured governance, Germany’s corporatist interests in China and Russia and an acute case of believing its own free-market propaganda… Draghi’s image as the ultimate technocrat gives him a shot at changing this, while avoiding a destructively protectionist turn. To do so, the 400-page document proposes a trade policy based on ‘a case-by-case analysis’ of what will enhance productivity growth, and an industrial strategy based on picking sectors, rather than specific winners… The so-called Washington consensus of the late 20th century preached free trade and laissez-faire economic management. Today, being Team USA means targeted protectionism and aggressive subsidies for high-tech sectors.”
8. How the sale of U.S. Steel became a lose-lose proposition
Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki attacks the industrial policy stupidity of blocking Japanese firm Nippon Steel’s attempt to buy out U.S. Steel, noting that many of the mooted objections have already been addressed.
“Purely on the merits, blocking the deal makes little sense. After U.S. Steel put itself up for auction last year, Nippon’s bid proved substantially higher than the next highest, from the American steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs (several other domestic and foreign buyers were said to be in the running). And in contrast to U.S. Steel’s own record of doing little to upgrade its older plants and facilities, Nippon has promised to spend billions to modernize the American firm’s aging blast-furnace plants in Pennsylvania and at Gary, Indiana… Nippon has gone to considerable lengths to address [United Steelworkers leader David] McCall’s concerns, promising that it will honor all of U.S. Steel’s contractual commitments to its workers, and committing to a $2.7 billion investment in those blast-furnace plants. But McCall has, if anything, become more intransigent, with the union declaring, ‘We can’t trust in what USS and Nippon are telling us.’”
“Even so, the Committee on Foreign Investment—created by Gerald Ford in 1975 to provide analysis of inward investment, and later given formal authority by Congress—is supposed to evaluate deals not with an eye toward politics, but purely according to their implications for national security… The committee has tried to manufacture a national-security rationale for killing the deal. But its argument that a Nippon acquisition would make America less safe is implausible at best. The U.S. defense industry’s demand for steel is small; only about 3 percent of domestic production is purchased by the Pentagon. As for Nippon’s foreign ownership, Japan is no hostile power but one of America’s closest and most loyal allies. Rolling metal is not making microchips, and U.S. Steel is no technological pioneer—if anything, it’s become something of an industry also-ran. The deal will not move American steel production abroad; more likely, it would lead to more manufacturing at home. In a letter that the committee sent to Nippon and U.S. Steel, officials expressed concern that Nippon might try to import steel from India, where it has plants. But if the Japanese company could competitively ship steel from India to the U.S., Nippon would hardly be spending almost $15 billion to make steel in the U.S. and avoid tariffs.”
Why it matters: “The upshot of all this interference from politically motivated interests is that U.S. Steel could be left without a buyer at all. The hope for any deal is always that every side can call it a win. Blocking Nippon’s acquisition on a bogus national-security pretext might well ensure that everybody loses.”
9. How Russia gets high on its own supply of disinformation
Why you should read it: Disinformation expert Thomas Rid analyzes a cache of document leaked from one of Russia’s top disinformation clearinghouses in Foreign Affairs and finds that Moscow often deceives itself at the same time it seeks to deceive others.
“Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency. But the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents… The information revealed not only tactical insights but deeper ones—insights that observers had not expected and that, to date, have not yet been properly understood by intelligence analysts and investigative reporters. A close analysis of the leaked files suggests that although Russia is using new technological methods to disseminate disinformation, many of the country’s core methods and goals remain familiar from the Cold War. They show how the SDA’s efforts to trick Western audiences may well have deceived the company’s own leadership—and the Russian government—about the effectiveness of the Doppelganger campaigns. And perhaps most important, the documents reveal that the biggest boost the Doppelganger campaigners got was from the West’s own anxious coverage of the project. That revelation, in turn, demonstrates that those who wish to fight disinformation—whether it originates from Russia or elsewhere—need to start thinking very differently about how to counter campaigns.”
“A close read of these leaked documents, as well as of the FBI’s September affidavit, reveals, first, how central forgery is to Russia’s disinformation strategy. Fabrication and misrepresentation—forging documents, counterfeiting letters, making up sources, creating false identities, inventing front organizations, and deceiving audiences—were, for a century, a prominent part of the Soviet Union’s political warfare. The Doppelganger documents reveal the degree to which Russian political actors still rely on tools from Soviet so-called active measures, albeit abetted by new technologies and given new names… The documents also reveal that the SDA not only deceived its targets but also deceived itself. Historians of active measures have catalogued how the Soviet Union took advantage of existing frictions, conflicts, and contradictions in the societies they targeted, and the SDA sought to do the same with Doppelganger. The newly disclosed documents illustrate that the SDA begins its influence efforts by surveying the landscape of organic friction points and real frustrations within its target societies. But such a method incorporates a wicked risk for disinformation operators. Because their goal is to accelerate trends that are already advancing, there is no definitive way for them to know just how much their own interventions contributed to driving these trends… The SDA’s executives, writers, and artists may not have believed its own internal propaganda, of course. Disinformation operators’ main target audience has always been their funders and their own governments. Thus is the bureaucratic logic of large-scale, long-term disinformation efforts: they tend to eventually persuade even the organizers that aspects of their falsehoods are true, and thus they become a form of institutionalized conspiracy theory.”
Why it matters: “The recent document disclosures—and particularly the information about how the SDA gauged its own impact—hold potent lessons for how to counter disinformation. Democracies must vigorously counter foreign influence operations, because leaks and fakes can, indeed, deepen divisions and weaken open societies. And the documents do reveal that efforts by social media companies to identify and remove disinformation work. Meta’s vigilant internal intelligence teams and relentless takedowns blunted the project’s overall reach: after Meta kept shutting down Doppelganger-associated accounts on Facebook and Instagram, the SDA appears to have dialed down its efforts to sow disinformation on Meta’s platforms, although some abuse continues… The newly disclosed documents show that reporting on run-of-the-mill influence operations with negligible or no effect—or even exaggerating that effect—simply helps disinformation agents generate more convincing marketing material. Instead, governments, companies, and investigative organizations and media outlets that wish to counter disinformation must focus more sharply on efforts that translate into tangible consequences for the perpetrators: taking down infrastructure and accounts from social media platforms and barring their reentry as well as exposing disinformation entrepreneurs personally, sanctioning them, and indicting them. If the SDA documents were not leaked to the press by Western intelligence agencies, they should have been.”
Odds and Ends
Americans have a favorable opinion of ancient Rome, with 49 percent of the public saying in a recent survey that the Roman Empire had a positive impact on the world…
A timeline of the deterioration of the Titanic wreck from its discovery in 1985 to the digital recreation of the site in 2023…
Prehistoric Earth was much hotter than previously assumed, one recent scientific study argues, with high levels of carbon dioxide shouldering most of the blame…
Was King Charles II too horny to rule? The BBC investigates…
A preview of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch to the Jovian moon next month…
What I’m Listening To
A live rendition of Cream’s “White Room” by Sheryl Crow, featuring a scorching Eric Clapton guitar solo, from Crow’s fall 1999 concert in Central Park.
“You Wreck Me,” a cover of a Tom Petty number by the War on Drugs for the Bad Monkey soundtrack.
“Bad/40/Where the Streets Have No Name,” a live medley of U2 classics from the band’s recently released Electrical Storm EP.
What I’m Streaming
The podcasting, crime-solving odd throuple of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez returns for a fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, this time investigating the murder of Martin’s long-time stunt double Sazz (Jane Lynch) while navigating Hollywood’s attempt to bring their true crime podcast to the silver screen.
Agatha All Along, the sequel to 2021’s WandaVision that finds Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) seeking to regain her arcane and mystical powers after being stripped of them by the Scarlet Witch—all while dodging the vengeance of fellow witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza).
Twisters, this summer’s highly entertaining quasi-sequel to the 1996 weather thriller, starring Glen Powell as a rogue storm-chaser and Daisy Edgar-Jones as his straight-laced scientific counterpart.
Image of the Month
