The Strategy Shelf

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  • On Xi’s Menu: Lame Duck Divisé

    On Xi’s Menu: Lame Duck Divisé

    Seizing the Gray: China leverages Donald Trump’s predictably divisive lame duck period at home to project itself as the responsible global leader in the world. China acted similarly when Donald Trump was in his fire and fury phase toward North Korea, later praising Kim Jong Un with no firm denuclearization commitments.

    Space Race: On December 1, China landed Chang’e-5, its third successful Moon mission in seven years, testing a small scale, unmanned mineral sampling and ferrying process between the Moon and Earth. It appeared as a small scale moon mining proof of concept as much as a foray into lunar geological or planetary science.

    West Pacific Resource Race: And last week, Beijing’s “Fendouzhe,” or Striver, joined the few manned submersible missions having set down on the bottom of the Mariana Trench at a depth exceeding the height of Mt. Everest under the Western Pacific Ocean. The mission, like that of Chang’e-5, was a precursor to mining extreme environments with few competitors (Moon and Mariana).

    Economic Competition: These followed Xi’s signature of the multilateral Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement, and days later his signaled support for joining his regional competitors’ treaty, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Meanwhile, the 2020 Q4 CNBC Global CFO Council Survey sees China’s economy leading the world’s recovery going into 2021.

    Technology & Infrastructure Leadership: The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center runs a data intensive website tracking Chinese technology corporation inroads, as reported on ASPI.org. The report’s data points are intensive but non-exhaustive, with this caveat about the 12 Chinese tech giants tracked: “China’s internet and technology companies have been reported to have the highest proportion of internal CCP party committees within the business sector,2 it’s clear these companies are not purely commercial actors.”

    Military Competitiveness: The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s annual report to the U.S. Congress puts China’s PLA on track to fight a large-scale war on “its maritime periphery” within five years; fighting limited wars in countries vested in its “Belt and Road Initiative” in the next 10-15 years; and to rapidly deploy military forces worldwide by 2050. While China’s military spending is about 1/6 that of U.S. military spending on paper, it is alone in second place and enjoys two key advantages that bely that comparison: (1) opacity in its military industrial output; and (2) purchasing power parity that multiplies its spending power so as to be able to buy about 87% of the Pentagon budget by 2017 numbers (see the link).

    Cold War Diplomacy: After Australia pushed back against aggressive Chinese influence and economic warfare operations against Australia, China reportedly “leaked” a list of grievances against Australia, with one Chinese official telling an Australian reporter: “China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy,” according to SMH. China has also reportedly stepped-up efforts to undermine U.N. sanctions against North Korea.

    Vaccine Leadership and Disinformation: In the race to provide working vaccines to thwart Covid19, China jumped ahead of the United States in providing vaccines to other nations. Whether its vaccine is as effective as that recently developed by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and others remains to be seen. In retrospect, China has also beat the Trump Administration at the vaccine disinformation game regarding Covid19, with the U.S. President appearing to take extreme, even contradictory positions toward China, ranging from ebullient praise to grave accusations. This as China and Russia push early vaccine supplies to emerging nations including those in Latin America.

  • Argument: Dynasties in U.S. Politics Present Security Vulnerabilities

    Argument: Dynasties in U.S. Politics Present Security Vulnerabilities

    Power families using their resources, names, and influence to repeatedly win or determine political offices can become de-facto dynasts to the detriment of U.S. national security. Much like software, firmware, or operating systems, such families are like programs running public offices with informational and other flaws that become well known and more vulnerable over time. Failure to update or patch these vulnerabilities subjects the entire system and all of its data to damage, takeover, and loss.

    Russia and China have teamed-up to use disinformation to try to ruin not only U.S. American presidential candidates and their families on both GOP and Democratic Party tickets, but to make these families’ troubles synonymous with the legitimacy of the United States Presidency and its foundational Constitution.

    Oppositional intelligence agencies have concentrated resources on predictable, well-studied incumbent power structures, dynasts, powerful families, and their wealth-supported networks to find and seize on their traumas, vulnerabilities, and situational factors. Using a combination of cyber and human intelligence, the work products are predictably turned over to gossip, gotcha, and conspiracy tabloids in the West, morphing from blackmail material into information weaponry. Sensationalist media make this easier, providing research on American celebrities and power families that give leads that adversaries can operationalize.

    Sophisticated autocrats hone-in on and contrasting western candidates’ personalities, families, friends, businesses, wealth-effects, and weaknesses and falsely impute their human (or sub-human) flaws to American governing and legal institutions.

    Too many western media concerns amplify it all, play by play, for the morbidity-ratings cash-haul, publishing “bombshells” with which American civilization could sooner bomb itself into a political stone age. These weaknesses then become information weapons exploding in chaotic loops. The psychological warfare effects are fatigue, cynicism, apathy, and division as the people throw-out all sources with the unhinged-negatives.

    One of RU-China’s boldest political objectives is to tempt the United States to embrace a one-party autocracy to stop the pain of the information warfare loop. This U.S. autocracy would be indebted to them, dysfunctional, and would seek advice on autocratic rule from them, becoming a client state over time. This would turn the U.S.A. into a strapped-down Gulliver, a shell of what once was, and an organ donor to the rise of global autocracy.

    Shall we stop the autocrats now, or leave it to future generations of formerly free Americans to struggle to overcome as might not be possible for a long time? America’s power families have a special responsibility to eschew the temptation to think that their own dynastic control or presence in political power is the best thing for the country. There are other ways to profit and give-back that do not damage buy-in from all Americans. We are a representative country based on the American dream of opportunity for all, not just a few.

  • Brief Discussion: Is It Treason for High Officers to Aid Nazism, Neo or Otherwise?

    Brief Discussion: Is It Treason for High Officers to Aid Nazism, Neo or Otherwise?

    Listen Instead…

    The answer to the question of whether it is chargeable treason for U.S. high officers to aid Neo-Nazis in any form acting with hostility toward the United States in loyalty to the historic Nazi regime, I don’t know. A case could be made. Here are some preliminary thoughts worthy of discussion and further research.

    From the Act of Military Surrender German High Command, paragraph 5 provides the following:

    “5. In the event of the German High Command or any of the forces under their control failing to act in accordance with this Act of Surrender, the Supreme Commander,  Allied Expeditionary Force and the Soviet High Command will take such punitive or other action as they deem appropriate.

    Signed at Rheims at 0241 France on the 7th day of May, 1945.

     

    On behalf of the German High Command. Alfred Jodl”

    As then-President Doenitz, Hitler’s successor, had authorized Gen. Jodl to sign the surrender on behalf of the Nazi High Command and it was done on May 7th, 1945, the unconditional surrender had a binding effect, as did its exception under paragraph 5. Neither at any time thereafter was the Act of Military Surrender abrogated, cancelled, or rescinded, including enumerated paragraph 5.

    An interesting question for today is whether paragraph 5 above, by the words,  “or any of the forces under their control failing to act in accordance with this Act of Surrender,” includes future forces that proclaim, hail, or otherwise act in loyalty to the Nazi Party, Third Reich, German High Command, or any of its past or future leaders, officers, and/or Adolf Hitler himself, yet engage in hostilities toward Allied nations?

    The words leading off paragraph 5, “In the event” anticipate any future failure to honor the unconditional surrender, and would include “any of the forces” under the German High Command’s control so failing the terms of unconditional surrender.

    Neither is there a distinction in paragraph 5 as to whether such forces may be “under their control,” by acting in post-humous service to the Nazi High Command of their own volition without respect to time or the kind of forces they may be: military, paramilitary, militia, proxies, or civilian agents. This is especially significant as it would seem to consider Hitler’s cultic, fanatical concept of the 1,000 year Reich with religious and deific features designed for permanency.

    The disjunctive word “or” in the phrase “In the event of the German High Command or any of the forces under their control” seems to anticipate that forces that continue to fight whether or not the German High Command ordered them to, may still be deemed under the German High Command’s control yet not “acting in accordance” with the Act of Surrender.

    Consequently, it would seem that the current successor(s) to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, without respect to time, title, or circumstances could then exact “such punitive or other action as they deem appropriate” against any future forces of any kind loyal to the Nazi regime and its German High Command failing to honor the unconditional surrender of 1945 by any acts of violence, insurrection, sabotage, murder, subversion, spying or the like against the United States and or its Allies.

    Neo-Nazis pursuing hostile actions against Allied nations would, under Paragraph 5 of the Act of Military Surrender, impliedly remain enemies under the authority of the December 11, 1941 House Declaration of War against Nazi Germany to the extent they kept Nazi Germany alive as “forces” loyal to same, and this is implied in the future remedy and open language of paragraph 5 of the Act of Surrender executed at Reims, France on May 7, 1945. This would seem to control without respect to when such future forces put themselves under the Third Reich’s control via loyalty oaths, actions, implication, or the like.

    Finally, any person giving aid, comfort, encouragement, or an imprimatur of authority in an official capacity to such Neo-Nazi elements would thereby be chargeable with treason or high treason by giving aid to forces against which a past U.S. declaration of war was still applicable by paragraph 5’s exception to an otherwise complied-with Act of Surrender.

    The matter is open for discussion, of course, and theoretically, the Allied Control Council, not the United Nations, handled governance, denazification, and other key tasks in pacifying post-war Germany. Therefore, it is arguable that if the U.N. never superseded the Act of Military Surrender signed by the German High Command on May 7, 1945 and mirrored in Berlin shortly thereafter, the terms of that Act of Military surrender stand, especially that of the forward looking paragraph 5.

  • Breaking the Divisiveness Pickle

    “The Social Dilemma” documentary offers a pithy insiders’ look at social media’s and search engine roles in the ‘divisiveness pickle’ felt by U.S. Americans, to use the baseball term also known as a “rundown” between bases. The false dichotomies in demagogic, agitation propaganda, and partisan narratives make “the pickle” an apt analogy.

    The Social Dilemma answers in part the question: would we have so many social divisions when engaging with others in person if social media and internet search social engineering were not core business practices? Or is our division worsened by exposures from overspent human life time online, using isolating devices? The passive, attention-divisive precursor was likely television, with its loud ads. Yet on the internet, we feel more in control and so are more easily deceived. As such, the effects of the personal bubbles of our cars during commutes should have been a preview of how the solitary act of internet surfing might affect our relationships with self and others.

    Not only do we find ourselves in a pickle-rundown between the autocrats fighting cyber and information warfare online to influence, divide, and use us, but we are rundown between the real and virtual worlds, dividing our time between virtual and personal experience.

    This first division is a dual structural premise that drives multi-tasking, and adds tasks and statuses by which we are providing value for others without understanding how, how much, or whether it is a fair exchange. Arguably, online activity is high-concept, uncompensated, part-unconscious servitude rooted in adhesion contracts that acquire rights to our civil liberties in exchange for speech platforms among others for work, convenience, less costly social connection, and entertainment.

    As to who should own the benefits of our activity, recall the related 5th Amendment question of who should own our data, content, original thoughts, and the profits from them.

    Foreign adversaries have learned enough about how all of this works and affects U.S. Americans that they have been using the virtual and real worlds to create useful, differentiated silos among us (confirmation bias, distrust, fear, and hardened attitudes) on the baited hook of faux individualism inherent in the internet search. That search premise falsely insinuates to the user: ‘You found it on the internet, so you must have found it by thinking for yourself.’

    There are mirages of critical or free thinking inherent in the felt form of freedom to search the unseen order of the internet that is better understood by those with the KSAs to be in the know, as seen in The Social Dilemma. That is not most Americans, and indeed, increasingly consists of non-Americans with work visas (not necessarily a subversive element, yet not necessarily not, either) depending on whether there is autocratic or terrorist leverage with loved ones in their homelands. And so autocracy works to reach beyond its borders to poison the freedom its refugees and emigrants to the USA would otherwise enjoy. With the Oompahs in the story of Willy Wonka, I don’t like the look of it.

    It is possible to break a pickle in baseball but more often the runner is run down and tagged out. The odds are against the runner with two basemen who can throw the ball faster than that runner. Yet fortunately, this analogy breaks down.

    The analogy breaks down because in the real and virtual pickles, we are a nation of runners. Although we face two or more well funded autocratic basemen, their workforces, and lesser state subs on the bench, we still greatly outnumber them. Without greater awareness, however, it does not matter. Savvy internet actors use the wild west of relatively free and accessible social or business networking media as a weapon of influence (fielding, shaping, and active measures tradecraft). Until U.S. Americans learn how this works in practice, they are vulnerable to constantly changing exploits. 

    In the balance of power between still relatively-free, semi-thinking Americans and social engineers from nation states, companies, and non-state groups, the balance is unstable where experts use the majority’s weight against the majority demographic for online control of offline behavior. Add artificial intelligence and the speed of the computing, and we see a tipping-point weapon either for freedom or totalitarianism, depending on how centralized the control of such programs and algorithms is. While A.I. is not the only future factor, it is heavily funded (some unknowingly by you and me).

    The U.S.A.’s recent population estimate based on the latest census data is around 332,000,000+/- people. Yet we are victims of our predecessors’ success, which makes us less aware of the implications of it. We take too many luxuries as necessities, and then, as dependencies. When that scares a certain cross-section of Americans susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is even distrust for real and virtual combined dimensions of supply chains, instant communication, efficient resolutions, and automation. These benefits from technology but their excessive central control with few alternatives drives fear among those who read and believe conspiracies and apocalyptic prophecies as applicable to today.

    Unfortunately, driven by primal fear, too many careen to some opposite mental extreme assuming that at some point they must become survivalists, collect outsized firearms caches, and take control over their lives by force against others. While there may be a season for that, education and application by hard work can get done efficiently what warfare would waste and self-defeat at massive costs in human loss and suffering.  Obviously, mass extremes weigh against freedom, life, and future thriving. What are some ways out of this?

    That is a consultancy topic that Stratpass Corporation is working on, among others. For now, consider the Center for Humane Technology as an informed starting point for reversing the negative effects of technology on human beings. A worthy goal, and good start.

  • Covid19 Vaccine Influence in Latin America

    Covid19 Vaccine Influence in Latin America

    Followup: This note adds context to discussions of ways to meet challenges to U.S. policies reversing autocratic digital influence in Latin America.

    Reports: Andres Oppenheimer wrote in the Miami Herald that the Trump Administration, as recently as late July, was not planning to supply Latin America with U.S.-developed vaccines while Russia and China have entered agreements to do just that. In the Philippines, there has been a similar outcome, as in Cambodia.

     

  • First Debate: Draining the Swamp to Waterboard America with the Firehose of Falsehood

    First Debate: Draining the Swamp to Waterboard America with the Firehose of Falsehood

    The anti-George Washington seeks another term. The incumbent in the White House is ‘draining the Swamp,’ with his “Firehose of Falsehood” plumbed in reverse and directed out his mouth at our eyes, ears, noses, and throats, waterboarding us with the bacterial corruption of the Swamp. ‘Toxic waste dump’ is a more apt term, yet we are all-in with the Allegory of the Swamp by now.

    This incumbent demagogue occupying the Presidency is the anti-George Washington because with each false choice he assumes, he divides his audiences, provoking strife inside them. This, so the demagogue may rise over the fallen.

    The Swamp does not break the laws, crass, lawless people do that, lie about it, and then turn their surroundings into a stagnant wasteland unfit for human habitation. It is where the oxbows of craven, stupid plans drain. Once done, they move on to bring ruination elsewhere. It is how some do real estate. It is how womanizers do women and abandon or abort children. It is how frauds run schemes, leaving investors broke. It is how dictators do satellites.  It is how genocidal rulers do humanity.

    To believe that Donald Trump is a genius playing 3-dimensional chess instead of a faux-king with a radioactive, inner-tomb for a mind, leaking like Chernobyl, emitting Moscow’s lethal narratives and suggesting moves for his acting-pawns; once evangelical bishops; misguided knights; and rooked-rooks; is to devolve oneself into a Q-follower. To believe that the Firehose of Falsehood implantee is a genius requires a belief that Vladimir Putin would make a criminal genius his mark in controlling the United States Executive branch.

    Putin, possessor of secrets from a criminally-informed KGB, would not cultivate a savvy competitor to subvert and sabotage the United States, but a controllable mark with the right combination of compromises to make him an obeisant, willing weapon.

    Putin would sooner compromise a delusional shapeshifter with international branding synonymous with what is ugly about America to Europeans (new money, no class, exploitative), and, a man whose mouth and soul are cavernous enough to fit commands to incarcerate migrant men, women, and children in detention camps. Whose actions put a clanky Berlin Wall on the U.S. border with defense dollars; whose inactions leave the Arctic ice in the hands of a KGB regime and totalitarian partner with icebreakers and nuclear submarines gunning for first strike advantage.

    Putin would want a mark with a history of vindictiveness toward those who he perceived had wronged him, whether ex-wives, ex-friends, ex-business partners, ex-paramours, ex-employees, ex-appointees, ex-lawyers, ex-presidents, or ex-party buddies. And don’t wait for it, American citizens of all backgrounds who disagree with his master.

    All that toxic water comes from a symbolic, analogical Swamp, sure, but which would be the best symbol today? Not the Everglades, which is really a great, slow moving river wilderness, according to scientists. There is a more aptly named swamp for this symbolism crossing from North Carolina to Virginia called “The Great Dismal Swamp.” It has a history that better describes the symbolic strain of ideology added to the ‘swamp water’ as it passes through the abomination of Donald Trump’s mouth and into the fire-blackened skies, the “abomination of desolation,” if you will.

    The Great Dismal Swamp was once the refuge for fugitive slaves during America’s white supremacy era, according to Smithsonian Magazine, and it seems a time-warped symbol by which, if Trump could, like his KKK-rally attending father, he would go back in time to seize that last refuge of black American slaves and return them to their masters.

    In the Smithsonian, British journalist Richard Grant wrote beautifully of his journey through the Great Dismal Swamp with Archaeologist Dan Sayers of American University in Washington DC, “Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.” Just like the colonies, once.

    Interestingly, Grant’s piece was published in September 2016, in symbolic timing with Donald Trump’s promises to drain the sedimentary, manmade conflicts of interest of the smaller DC swamp that by comparison of corruption makes the Great Dismal Swamp more like a basecamp in the foothills of the heavens where increasingly powerful people live hard-knock freedom from the hell of slavery.

    And it seems Purgatory is not an inapt symbol for what the nation now goes through, in which we can hear the chaotic din of hell behind and before us as the election approaches. Yes, today the 50 states and the stalwart Americans manning the election processes stand against that chaotic pursuit of dictatorship over the U.S.A. from the past, roaming the earth for the United States it would possess.

    Channeling hell’s chaos and speaking it as law and order, one presidential power the incumbent exercises with seeming executive dispatch are appointments. As did King George III, whose early reign was “turbulent, with frequent changes of ministers.” Incumbent Trump, appoints sacrificial lambs to save his Oval Office occupancy frequently, as in the chaos of one-thousand revolving doors opening under Washington DC at any given time, like a scene from Disney-Marvel’s Dr. Strange; with prematurely elevated political acolytes popping-up to exercise unseasoned, unwise power in service to an alien villain that (surprise) seeks to dominate. There it is again: dominance, autocracy, mastery, then slavery.

    You can’t make this up because you don’t have to – it is right in front of us slithering, smiling, biting, and poisoning in the darkness. Grant continues, “In the awful heat and humidity of summer, Sayers assures me, the swamp teems with water moccasins and rattlesnakes. The mosquitoes get so thick that they can blur the outlines of a person standing 12 feet away.”

    Yes: but for the smoke and mirrors, the people could perceive that the blood suckers in power are blurring their reality that they may forget who they are and enslave themselves willingly. In the newer American words of Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote “Hamilton”:

    Foes oppose us, we take an honest stand

    We roll like Moses, claimin’ our promised land

    And? If we win our independence?

    Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?

    Yes it is. It is if we rise up and vote, refusing to throw away our vote. Just for a day, with your ballot, be young scrappy and hungry just like your country, and don’t throw away your vote. If you’re in the electoral college, that goes for you too.

  • The Covid-Digital Storm: Authoritarian Influence on Latin America’s Digital Demographic

    The Covid-Digital Storm: Authoritarian Influence on Latin America’s Digital Demographic

    Purpose: To explore the digital demographic connection to reversing Russian and Chinese subversion of democracy and liberty in Latin America.

    Background

    Before Covid19 spawned a pandemic, Russia and China had been plying influence operations and digital authoritarianism to pressure Latin America’s governments, elections, nationalists, businesses, security biases, attitudes toward democracy, and relations with the United States.

    As Robert Gates pointed out in his recent book, The Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World, China has overtly offered the world an authoritarian capitalist alternative to U.S.-style democracy. It has used a subtle and shifting mass suasion strategy around its Belt and Road Initiative extending China’s mercantilist, imperial power, for example, at the Davos World Economic Forum.

    Russia, dismissed and downplayed at peril to democracies in Europe, has prosecuted its own overt and covert agenda for geopolitical expansion of its power in Latin America in a pragmatic partnership with China. It is part of the axial threat to hemispheric security.

    Then came Covid19, interrupting routines, systems and courses of life and commerce on every continent. The virus was also a catalyst for Russia’s early Covid19 information warfare aimed at driving the United States and China toward conflict and corroding trust in public health in the United States.

    Yet Covid19 may have also checked great autocratic powers’ information warfare progress, due to the chaos and uncertainty that its origins, nature, and future imposed on the credibility of propagandistic narratives, and its motivation of popular focus on more tactile concerns. This interruption is temporary, yet also an opportunity for democracies to reverse losses to the respect for liberty in the Western Hemisphere.

    Covid19 Effect on the Digital War for Latin American Hearts and Minds

    After Covid19 won the West, retailers closed or restricted operations to slow the pandemic, inaugurating waves of new digital consumers ordering food, goods and services via internet. Such increases in digital commerce likely also occurred in parts of Latin America to adapt to Covid19, augmenting cash exchange as the majority transaction. Each increase in digital commerce reliance broadens digital reach for external nations using the internet for influence operations.

    Yet Covid19 will also impose itself as a modifying, delaying factor in the reading of human behavior data, including information about digital consumption, governance, trade, and security, key areas over which China and Russia desire influence or control in Latin America.

    As Western analysts and health officials suspend conclusory thoughts on Covid19 digital market behavior and vaccines, autocracies in China and Russia are adapting rapidly to use their fast-tracked (or pre-existing?) Covid19 vaccines to win influence with emerging nation populations, including young Latin Americans. Russia is supplying Brazil and Mexico, while China supplies the Middle East with mass produced vaccines not yet out of large scale, Phase 3 human trials. Meanwhile, U.S. health authorities are reluctant to rush a vaccine before large scale, 3rd phase human trials are done, and results in. The geopolitics of vaccine evangelism and reticence involve a scary dose of gambling.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. Trump Administration reportedly plans not to share an American vaccine with Latin Americans while China has stepped-up negotiations with Latin American leaders to do just that.

    If the Chinese and Russian vaccines prove efficacious without safety failures, it could influence increased faith in the efficiency of autocracies for Latin Americans even as they gradually reduce exposure to the United States in the age of tariffs and immigration insults. How might this happen via digital influence operations? Pre-Covid19 findings by Euromonitor International yielded some insights into the thinking and preferences among Latin America’s digitally savvy consumers, and some, likely future leaders.

    Pre-Covid19: Rising Digital Class of Latin America

    In 2017, two years before the publicly known inception of the covid19 outbreak, Michele Evans of Euromonitor International mined for key “characteristics, motivations, and preferences” of digitally savvy Latin American consumers, finding the greatest concentration between 25-34 years old, with incomes triple that of their non-digital counterparts. This group could theoretically supply tomorrow’s leadership in Latin America, and Russia and China would be interested in cultivating influence in this group.

    These young, comparatively wealthy Latin American respondents shared three characteristics, according to Evans: (1) they preferred social media to email communication; (2) two-thirds did not see targeted ads and their implied personal data issues as a privacy concern; and (3) most, especially Brazilian respondents, were motivated by simplicity in navigation during digital shopping to save time and money.

    Evans concluded that companies supporting high quality online experiences, simple navigation, and strong social media presence would more successfully cultivate influence with Latin America’s young digital demographic. And these lessons could apply not only for businesses marketing to Latin Americans, but to foreign governments seeking to reach, sway, influence, and in some cases, control them.

    Analysis and Preliminary Recommendations

    Russia has demonstrated its power and acumen with social media active measures, and if Evans’ findings that digitally savvy Latin Americans prefer social media are accurate, this demographic trait will play to the advantage of Russian intelligence agencies pushing social media content.

    For democracies’ efforts at influencing Latin American audiences, picking social media platforms with elegant site navigation will help balance the autocrats’ troll army onslaughts with more credible-feeling content to counter their agitation and negativity. We recommend appealing to the aspirations to liberty and freedom with one’s prosperity in the 23-37 year old age group, expanding the freedom message with long term investment in culturally intelligent media in Latin American markets. This assumes also a diplomatic capability to appreciate the wry wit and unique intelligence of curious, well-read Latin American audiences pursuing digital information.

    Young Latin Americans, two-thirds of whose representative respondents downplayed privacy risks in targeted advertising, present a theoretical susceptibility to gradual increases in authoritarian government spying, intrusion, and personal data manipulation. This advantages China, which has developed intensive social control and monitoring technologies and services for sale to Latin Americans, to their governments, companies, and proxies.

    Democracies seeking to counter digital authoritarianism while American companies do similar things for government will find it difficult to take moral high ground on liberty and privacy grounds, and will need to focus on the divergent, limited policymaker use of such information from that of the Chinese communist government and the People’s Liberation Army.

    As Covid19 comes under control, influence operations will shift to a post-Covid19 Latin America. Approaches to the information battle that will follow for Latin Americans’ hearts and minds will turn in part on the outcome of Russian and Chinese vaccines; and on whether the United States reestablishes a dedicated, friendly diplomatic posture toward Latin America to end an era of “benign neglect”.

    Neither will democracies reaching out to Latin Americans wish to underestimate the value of “respeto” (literally “respect,”yet a cultural value set beyond a single word) in hemispheric engagements. To fail to meet our hemisphere’s neighbors halfway, and to get to know values that are important to future digital consumers risks losing the Western Hemisphere to chauvinism and national socialistic tendencies in societies and governments.

  • “Toronto Today” New Disinformation Site in Larger War of Destabilization

    “Toronto Today” New Disinformation Site in Larger War of Destabilization

    The website “TorontoToday.net” posted disinformation that U.S. officials reassessed the cause of the 2020 wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest from lightening to “coordinated arson” by Antifa. The 2020 wildfires started when storms generated severe lightening, igniting forests and woodlands under dry, hot, and windy conditions, as widely reported by weather services.

    In Southern Oregon, Ashland Police Chief Tighe O’Meara had to bat down the rumors of arson by Antifa diverting resources from the actual arson investigation at the origins of the still-active Almeda wildfire that wiped out two towns, and threatened Medford, Oregon.

    Snopes.com, recently fact-checked the ostensible Canadian “TorontoToday.net” on recent false claims that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had been arrested:

    TorontoToday.net is a relatively new website, but it has already been responsible for at least two viral hoaxes. Shortly after Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman died from colon cancer, the website published a false report claiming that he had been poisoned. The website was also responsible for the false rumor that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughter had died from a COVID-19 vaccine.

    The wildfire disinformation article used the contributor name “The Red Panther,” a cynical reference to the past false post about the late Chadwick Boseman, a suggestion of Russian authorship, and perhaps alluding to the color of fire.

    While Toronto Today may not really be in Canada, Ottawa, Canada is the hub for disinformation outlet “Global Research” or “The Centre for Research on Globalization,” (RationalWiki link) run by University of Ottawa academic, Michele Chossudovsky. Michele is the son of the late, former Soviet diplomat to the UN Eugene Chossudovsky, who was most certainly a KGB “rezident.”

    Eugene Chossudovsky had busied himself with Soviet work in post-Soviet times, publishing YouTube talks in which he accused NATO of a conspiracy to destroy Russia and asserted that it was obsolete. Those claims were central to Moscow’s disinformation war leading up to the annexation of Crimea and its aggressions in Eastern Ukraine.

    In 2017, Canada Broadcasting Corp, reported on 10 disinformation media sites claiming to be Canadian and were not:

    “By doing an internet search for the ID code on the Sherbrooke Times website, Radio-Canada discovered the QuebecTelegram, the Stopru, the Quebec Post, the Quebec Times, the Siver Times, the Siver Telegram and Vtabloid (which is now offline) all sharing the same ID code, a similar layout and similar badly translated content.

    The Sherbrooke Times is hosted on Russian servers, as is the Stopru. The Quebec Times and the Quebec Telegram are hosted in Kiev, Ukraine.

    A person using the same AdSense ID also created at least six other fake newspaper sites in Russia and in Ukraine.”

    Like Anti-Vaxx disinformation (think measles), wildfire disinformation adds extra complexity for first responders and national security personnel in two ways: (1) tempting violence during wildfires against those implicated by the propaganda, and (2) shrouding awareness and alertness to warnings about real arson threats by state and non-state terrorists as published in 2010, 2012, 2019, and 2020.

    Converging disinformation security risks require enhanced funding with allied unity and resolve among targeted democracies. More federal government funding for effective wildfire prevention and forest management is needed after cuts by the Trump Administration between 2018-20, as reported by the Sacramento Bee:

    The Trump administration’s own budget request for the current fiscal year and the coming one proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Interior and U.S. Forest Service budgets dedicated to the kind of tree clearing and other forest management work experts say is needed.

    The subsequent blame leveled by the Administration at Western states could also constitute disinformation, which had to be corrected by firefighter organizations and officials in 2018, yet was followed by Administration threats to cut-off FEMA funding to those states based on the official disinformation. These events aligned the Administration with the foreign disinformation outlets pushing destabilization propaganda regarding the wildfires and other risks affecting Western states.
  • Moscow Utilizes the Whipsaw

    Moscow Utilizes the Whipsaw

    “They’ll send 80 million ballots to people — they have no idea where they’re going,” Mr. Trump said during his 94-minute speech. “Actually, they probably do have a pretty good idea where they’re going, and that’s our problem. They send 80 million ballots out, where are they going? Who do they send them to? Are they sending them to certain areas, and not other areas?”

    –CBS News, Trump claims at Nevada rally that Democrats are “trying to rig the election”

    The operative words of division are “they” and “them” and the rest are smoke and mirrors to sow doubt in the 50 states’ election processes. It would seem a nearly symmetrical revenge for Vladimir Putin for when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioned the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin’s 2012 elections. 

    Here, the incumbent Mr. Trump, who assiduously avoids disagreeing or speaking against Putin, employs a demagogue’s distrust of over half of fellow Americans merely exercising their freedom to belong to different political parties. His premise is that those not in the party he is currently in must be conspiring to rig the election against him. It is a one-party premise wrapped in a stream of accusations mutating across speeches and tweets in flimflam fashion.

    Trump’s premise mirrors Hillary Clinton’s infamous speculation about “a vast right wing conspiracy” aimed at her husband and then-President Bill Clinton before his impeachment. Hillary’s words turned a growing mass of internet and radio media influence by rightist pundits into a conspiracy theory in a left-version of the current “MSM” conspiracy theorizing. Such rhetoric, later reversed against her own party’s influence by today’s populists who doubt most news as fake, has ripened into a destabilizing disconnection between the public and professional fact-reporting as found on news pages. This, without realizing that the internet moves Op-Ed to the top of “stories,” or “news,” when Op-Ed is argument on emphasized reported facts, not an informational briefing on all professionally vetted facts.

    Trump now implies there is a vast left wing conspiracy to rig the 2020 campaign against him.  Both Clinton and Trump supporters have cited “hate” or “derangement” as the only real motive of those opposing each, respectively. It is as if they deemed their words and conduct above consideration by the people they swore to serve.

    Mass information weapons keep whipsawing the United States no matter who wins the White House. Both political families have assumed some level of family succession rights to the White House, qualified or not, in governing work. Historically, the dynastic premise in the American Presidency has not worked well for the United States, and itself can become a division point.

    FBI Director Christopher Wray said of the Russian intelligence services:

    “They identify an issue that they know that the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides and spin them up so they pit us against each other,” Wray said. “And then they combine that with an effort to weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions, which has been a pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in … information warfare.”

    Moscow’s information weapons target American unity as dictators pursue successful global expansion to isolate the United States. The United States is unlikely to successfully thwart Moscow and Beijing from establishing influence, real estate leverage, and strategic military superiority in the world while divided at home.

    Moscow’s FSB has been under Vladimir Putin’s implied mandate since at least 1998 as Putin and his spy services watched the 2000 Presidential election end in litigation pitting George W. Bush versus Al Gore. Partisanship in the United States had reached such a level after the Clinton years and impeachment that the GOP and Democrats pushed it a step further, embroiling the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2000 Presidential Election. This threatened the separation of powers and rule of law rooted in the imperfect yet best practice of leaving constitutional law interpretation to a life-tenured Supreme Court.

    The Court’s handling of polarizing political questions that both sides insist cannot be resolved via election tempts the loser to assert independent rights to interpret and act on the Constitution as Rep. Chip Roy, R-TX encouraged Trump to do to avoid unfavorable Supreme Court decisions. Yet as long as Supreme Court decisions are observed as the law of the land by the majority of Americans and their parties, the separation of powers will survive.

    KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov highlighted four phases of ideological subversion used by the Soviet KGB against the West: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. The latter describes dictatorial action to solve for repetitive gridlock between relatively even factions. Rep. Roy’s advice to Trump to violate separation of powers by disregarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings is a form of “normalization” condemned by constitutional scholars and commentators. Bezmenov described kinetic “normalization” occurring when the Soviets crushed the Czech Prague Spring of 1968 with tanks and bullets.

    Bezmenov’s description of KGB ideological subversion is now used by partisan groups affiliated with both main US parties against each other. This, despite that the former Soviet Union’s and later Russian Federation’s subversion operations have marched in continuity with each other against the USA with joint effects on the American right and left into the present day.

    The GOP’s libertarian, populist, and extremist members have adopted Bezmenov’s stages of ideological subversion to accuse the Democratic Party of the four phases in service to “Marxism” or “Communism.” Yet this ‘conservative’ camp remains silent and or denies that the Russian Federation’s active measures under Vladimir Putin are a continuation of the Soviet active measures program. Also, left-wing media analyze Bezmenov’s stages of ideological subversion to apply to the Trump campaign and Administration.

    Putin’s active measures warfare is directed at both parties, if possible, to bring them into repetitive conflict until democracy breaks and one side or the other ushers in “normalization” a.k.a. dictatorship. Putin or his successors would then work on turning the winner into Moscow’s satellite or proxy if they were not already groomed for it.

    As November approaches, Americans will benefit from reading-up on this and related topics. The key is to review, filter, and think through the historical context of the candidates’ behaviors, policies, words, and to be fair, those judged according to their actual decision making power.

  • Germany’s Choice Shines a Light on Moscow’s Strategy

    Germany’s Choice Shines a Light on Moscow’s Strategy

    The Nord Stream gas pipeline deal between Russia and Germany could enter its own coma along with Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, in whose system German military physicians found the Soviet nerve agent Novichok.

    In light of Moscow’s continuing willingness to use state terror to get its way, Berlin should question what authoritarian strings will be attached to the Nord Stream project. While some say putting-off Nord Stream is an issue of not rewarding Putin’s lawlessness, the more urgent issue is preventing Moscow from treating the Nord Stream project as a future investment in gas supply lines for Russian troops moving West.

    If such a strategy is on the table, Moscow would likely expect Donald Trump to help Moscow get there. That is the more likely reason for Moscow’s high-stakes active measures surrounding the Executive branch of government, police forces, and fringe elements in the United States.

    Putin’s GRU operatives Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin had poisoned former Soviet GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last year by applying Novichok to Skripal’s front door knob in Salisbury, U.K. They discarded a perfume bottle used to smuggle the Novichok into the U.K. at a park. Weeks later it caused the chemical warfare death of an innocent British citizen.

    In 2006, former KGB/FSB operatives Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun poisoned former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko’s tea with Polonium-210, a radioactive element causing him a slow, torturous death. These are high profile samples on a longer list of Moscow’s acts of state terror without borders.

    When Moscow terrorizes people with chemical, radiologic, and other poisons it mirrors Stalin’s and Hitler’s state terror campaigns against opponents. It also desensitizes Russian security forces to killing civilians. For Hitler and Stalin, desensitization in killing hundreds was a precursor to genocide and democide.

    Capt. Chace A. Nelson, USMC, reviewing Aleksandr Dugin’s book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia for the Strategy Bridge, wrote that Dugin “provides bold steps to regain Russia’s position of dominance lost at the end of the Cold War..” including “the invasion of Georgia, the annexation of Ukraine, the separation of Britain from the rest of Europe, and the sowing of divisive seeds in the United States, each of which should sound quite familiar.”

    Moscow’s increased ruthlessness in killing and damaging civilians while seizing former Soviet real estate dovetails with Putin’s obvious activation of Aleksandr Dugin’s fascistic imperial vision for Russian foreign policy), and within that plan, tacitly facilitating, hosting, and enabling race nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other extremists.

    The Kremlin has distanced itself from Aleksandr Dugin in recent years, possibly to take credit for his strategies while doing PR damage control after a 2014 lecture at Moscow State University in which Dugin delivered “a rant in support of separatists in Ukraine in which he said, “kill, kill, kill..” leading to his removal by petition for suggesting genocide.

    Putin’s KGB career in East Germany is also consistent with his activation and facilitation of national socialists and extremists. According to interviews of retired Stasi Officer Klaus Zuchold by the German media site Correctiv, Putin’s KGB career in Dresden included running the notorious Neo-Nazi Rainer Sonntag, with whom his East German police handler and Putin protege “George S.” shared a nihilistic depravity. Correctiv noted that East German archival documents corroborated important points in Zuchold’s account.

    Unsurprisingly, Putin burned documentation of his Dresden operations. BBC reported that in Fall 1989, Putin confirmed he and colleagues at the KGB headquarters in Dresden burned voluminous evidence of his intelligence work: “I personally burned a huge amount of material,” Putin recalled in First Person. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”

    Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1991, Rainer Sonntag was murdered. Reuters’ archival footage of Sonntag’s funeral revealed the chilling size and mood of the Neo-Nazi movement attending Sonntag’s burial rites in Dresden. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Soviet power was waning, and Sonntag’s followers were dedicated.

    Then-KGB Major Vladimir Putin, whose approval or indifference allowed Sonntag to build a following, had to know the depth and dedication to Nazism that Sonntag was cultivating among his East German following. His employee and Sonntag’s handler Georg S., whose lack of conscience Putin reportedly admired, had been loyal yet loose with information.

    If Dugin had become a liability to President Putin after Dugin’s 2014 rant at Moscow State University, much more would Sonntag’s activities, if tied to the Dresden KGB, have devastating political effect on Putin’s chain of command and Putin himself.

    In a worst-case scenario, Putin’s global support for Neo-Nazi, old-Nazi, or Nazi-like extremist groups, militias, and organizations could mean Putin “went native” during his East German KGB experience with respect to the Stasi’s inherited Nazi elements, practices, and fanaticism.

    Putin’s unique KGB access would enable him to know more about the Nazi legacy in East Germany, as recent reports reveal that historical Nazi records of Hitler’s “Final Solution” had been confiscated by Soviet intelligence after its march on Hitler’s stronghold.

    Historian Henry Leide studied the careers of 35 former Nazi officers that the East German Stasi (secret police) , recruited, protected, and used for intelligence purposes contrary to publicized GDR socialist ideals. According to his book “NS-Verbrecher und Staatssicherheit: Die geheime Vergangenheitspolitik der DDR,” (“Nazi Criminals and the Secret Service: The German Democratic Republic’s Secret Ways of Dealing With the Past,”):

    “The Stasi deliberately and systematically recruited Nazi criminals, sometimes those who orchestrated massacres, as informers and agents both in the east and the west,” Leide said..[and] “The presence of some former National Socialists in the new state party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), was really just the tip of the iceberg,” Leide writes. “Where qualifications were needed and there was strong competition from the West, they could be found in high concentrations.”

    As for Putin’s work record in Dresden, defectors and former Stasi related extraordinary KGB control at the top during the Cold War, even as the GDR’s famed spymaster Markus Wolf downplayed Putin’s early importance during his Dresden years. Such output could have been intended to conceal Putin’s importance in utilizing former Nazis as agents training state and non-state terrorist organizations in West Germany, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and elsewhere. Exploration of Putin’s early role could implicate Wolf himself, who had sought to distance himself from the GDR’s use of Nazi agents.

    According to Correctiv, KGB officer Putin had sought information on traceless poisons for assassinations, a technique much used against Putin’s later opponents and the catalyst putting the Nord Stream project in doubt today.

    Given the actions taken under his extremely concentrated power since, Putin appears to have appropriated Nazi methods, ruthlessness, and tactical variations as an ace up his sleeve against opponents who could not imagine his secret affinity. And, even if the world awakens to his affinities, he has the UN Security Council veto and nuclear weapons as backup powers.

    Whether Putin’s inhumanity is more like Stalin’s, more like that of the Nazis, or a customization of both, his use of national socialist and nativist extremists against European governments seems directed at getting them in power to withdraw their respective countries from NATO. Once done, such extremists would be expendable for Moscow’s purposes, and the door opened to left-leaning parties and malleable leaders to lend legitimacy to Moscow’s denials of supporting the extremists on the right, putting a false cloak of humanity on Putin’s legacy.

    If rightists failed to yield power over Europe, however, Putin’s Russia would likely justify invading Europe to “liberate” post-NATO Europe from the extremists and Neo-Nazis he once had supported. Putin would deny that Russia ever supported the fascists and would back leftists who would invite a substantial Russian military presence to keep the right at bay. Meanwhile, Putin would count on Trump standing down to let NATO thus collapse and the “New Russian Century” proceed.

    Part of Putin’s implied plan is visible in his information warfare machine’s false accusation against the United States Army for spreading Covid19 to China early this year, implying that his strategy would preoccupy the U.S. and China in a conflict that cleared the way for Moscow’s war to retake former Soviet territory and parts of Eastern Europe.

    The United States is past due for leadership that can and will reverse what appear to be growing risk factors for major regional wars, if not world war. Strong action is necessary to cure gaps at home and deepen support within NATO to check Putin’s demoralization, destabilization, and destruction of European and U.S. democracies. Such would prevent the United States from being isolated and cut-off from world economies as a militant Russia and China fill the power vacuum.

    To have friends America must be a friend among free nations. The 2020’s are not a time to fight cultural wars and election litigation in the United States, Europe, or the U.K., but a time to innovate policy solutions that fix the underlying problems causing persistent, wasteful issue-conflict.