Since Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016, the topic of information warfare has dominated strategic conversations in the United States and Europe. New research programs focused on countering disinformation and identifying propaganda and bot networks have sprung up; congressional and parliamentary hearings and working groups have been convened on the topic; and news and social media companies have been refining their policies on dissemination of hacked and possibly fraudulent materials.
The expectation, clearly, is that we are now in an era of permanent infowar. And with U.S. intelligence agencies having firmly pointed the finger at Russia for its role in the 2016 election, the question has frequently been: Will other authoritarian countries follow the same playbook? Though the question has been raised with respect to any number of countries — Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea — the most pressing object of Western concern is China, whose resources are substantially greater than Russia’s and which has many more points of leverage thanks to its much higher degree of embeddedness in the global economy.
And yet there are reasons to be skeptical that the particular genre of information warfare that led to this upsurge of attention will be a defining feature of modern intrastate conflict.
To be clear: The evidence that the Russian military intelligence service did perpetrate the hack-and-dump operation targeting the Democratic Party using WikiLeaks as a front is very strong. The evidence that it affected the election is less so. That’s not to s ..
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