The Geopolitics Of Lying

"A Measure Short of War

By Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth

Oxford, 304 pages, $29.99

It is not only politics that may be seen as war by other means. For centuries, governments have sought to demoralize and defeat their enemies without resorting to the battlefield.

In "A Measure Short of War," Jill Kastner and William Wohlforth give a well-researched account of the many ways in which nation-states have conducted information warfare aimed at "subversion" -- with lessons for democracies in our current, war-raging moment.

Ms. Kastner and Mr. Wohlforth -- an independent London-based scholar and a professor of government at Dartmouth, respectively -- distinguish subversion from other forms of covert action, such as sabotage and espionage. Subversion, they say, aims at "undermining accepted authority" in a rival state by reaching into its domestic politics and weakening it or causing it to alter its policies.

In different forms, subversion has long been a tool of statecraft and power competition. Under Louis XIV, the authors note, France spread "propaganda and disinformation" in Habsburg lands. In the 1870s, Otto von Bismarck -- worried that France would reconstitute itself as a monarchy after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War -- "engineered crises" to "spook French elites and citizens into believing that a monarchy in France meant war with Germany."

It's the advent of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and (one would argue) Communist China in the 20th century that raised the art of disrupting rival political systems to a dangerous new level. Governments adept at imposing the Big Lie on their own populations will hardly be averse to trying a similar sort of deception on the populations of other states.

Their ideological descendants play an outsize role in "A Measure Short of War," in part to show how America and other democracies have been slow to grasp the ways in which totalitarians take "active measures" (as they call them) against democratic legitimacy and governance.

The U.S. tried its own version of active measures during the Cold War, with the CIA working to manipulate the electoral defeats of Communist parties in France and Italy in the late 1940s. But America's biggest success at information warfare proved to be Radio Free Europe, though hardly a covert operation. The authors point out that RFE and its Soviet-focused partner, Radio Liberty, "came to be classed among the most effective elements of U.S. psychological warfare in the history of the Cold War." Even so, they acted more as a means of harassing the Soviets and their allied regimes -- by providing reliable news and information -- than actively shaping public opinion behind the Iron Curtain.

In fact, Americans were rank amateurs compared with the Soviets. In the mid-1960s, the Soviets launched a campaign -- using planted stories and forged letters -- aimed at convincing black Americans that Martin Luther King Jr. was a puppet of the U.S. government. The Soviets believed, as Ms. Kastner and Mr. Wohlforth explain, that the civil-rights movement had the potential to become more radical and deemed King not radical enough: a leader to be deposed.

The Soviets also supported the nuclear-freeze movement in the early 1980s and, a few years later, spread a rumor that the CIA had created the AIDS virus as part of a biowarfare program. The parallels of that effort with the recent efforts of the Chinese to present Covid-19 as a U.S. Army plot are striking -- and ironic, given that the evidence strongly suggests Covid to be itself a Chinese lab creation.

Strangely, the authors have little to say about China. They make no mention of China's meddling in the 1996 U.S. presidential contest, when operatives Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung helped supply money to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Nor do they mention the strong possibility of China using TikTok as a social-media vehicle for manipulating political and cultural perceptions among its roughly 150 million American users.

One wishes that Ms. Kastner and Mr. Wohlforth had discussed how advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, and large-scale quantum computers, may well increase the subversion threat through "deepfakes" and other forms of state-organized deception. All the same, "A Measure Short of War" is a valuable reminder that subversion is an inevitable part of geopolitics, where all's fair even (or especially) short of war.

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Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder."" [1]

1. The Geopolitics Of Lying. Herman, Arthur.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Jan 2025: A15.