World War III is a Series of Domestic And International Hybrid Wars
Could we just do one of these at a time please
You can get the status of the Ukraine war, and where that’s going to go - or, at least where it will turn - in about two screenshots, I think, one from Jomini of the West, today:
and the other from the Institute for the Study of War’s most recent summary:
The key part I’ve underlined in red: I think Russian media and, by extension, Russian high command are correct: we are in, effectively, World War III by any measure.
World War III is a hybrid war - or, rather, a series of internecine and international hybrid wars.
I find myself being annoyed at the new wars cropping up as part of it. In the past 48 hours:
Russia announced integration of Kherson into a rubles-only economic zone, which rings all kinds of alarm bells given that is very likely, in my analysis, going to be how they finance the war
there is, of course, the insane Alito opinion and a bona fide Presidential announcement with regard to same
and, now a developing police riot (let’s call it what it is) in Los Angeles, which declared a city-wide "tactical alert" a few hours ago.
These are all, at some level, the same war. We're all on the same side, at least in this audience, in all of these wars, which is why I tend to think it's insane to quibble right now.
Russian support for the international far-right is a well-known fact at this point; their alignment with the Republican Party is a matter of public record, thanks to the Mueller Report. There's a through-line you can draw between extremists five years ago chanting "Russia is our friend!" years ago at Charlottesville, through the Ukraine impeachment and Hunter Biden disinformation, and elected extremists today saying some fairly inadvisable or just plain stupid things about the Ukraine war.
None of this is very controversial, I think, in pieces, in isolation. The struggle is to see it as a whole without simplifying it to a single efficient or final cause; seeing this as all about Russia, for instance, which is not only somewhat unhelpful (what's the upshot, "maybe we should sanction Russia, has anyone thought of this?") but also unrevealing as to the whole, and ultimately obscuring some aspects of it.
There are a series of frames through which you can see the entire thing that make more or less sense of it. You could see it as that long moral arc of history, as it were, bending towards justice; you could see it as a rather pessimistic oligarch-on-oligarch struggle in which we’re all pawns. There is a point of view in which you could see this as some kind of invalidation of the concept of the liberal state, as such, or the concept of elections and the ever-distant hope of “getting the bad guys out of office” that politics seems to be boiling down to. I wouldn’t invalidate any of that; I do think that each one has its place and time where it’s maximally right, though, and I don’t know that right now is the time.
We find ourselves as citizens in a series of ongoing influence operations meant at subverting the basis of our rational choices. This is why it’s intentional “disinformation”, and not simply factually mistaken “misinformation” - it’s intentional, and the intention is destabilizing people’s sense of truth in order to make them more pliant to being manipulated by influence narratives which are calculated to achieve specific complex political outcomes when taken up by susceptible populations. As the historian of fascism Tim Snyder wrote, “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”
In the context of pervasive, nearly ubiquitous disinformation both at home and abroad - in some cases like Russia, entire nation-states that appear to be driven by disinformational narratives - I don’t think standard answers apply, not ones about moral arcs of history, or nihilistic critiques of capitalism, or Manichean narratives of good and bad.
I think we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle to achieve certain complex policy outcomes by means other than good-faith participation in our systems of governance which subverts most of the basic philosophical systems that underpins a lot of those frames of view, actually, because no one from Hayek to Marx seems to assume for pervasive, ubiquitous disinformation as a basic condition of politics.
In that context, the simplest frame to identify ourselves in, I’d argue, is one which our enemy is teaching us, a whole-of-society method of inter- and intra-state conflict resolution, as Gerasimov, now reportedly wounded in combat in Ukraine, put it.
It’s “politics by other means”, as Clausewitz might put it, but “other means” here includes diplomacy, lawfare, sanctions, alliance-building, cyber-war, preemptive disclosures of intelligence, and just about anything else (short of directly shooting at Russians) that we can apply to the situation.
Experientially, it feels like, between May 1st and May 3rd, something like a full week happened.
And it’s Tuesday.
I suppose this is the way of things now.