“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times,
good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
Michael Hopf. Those Who Remain
The West (Global North) is clearly in a state of relative decline: the 500 years of global domination is all but over, and the absolute hegemony it once enjoyed is now no more than a relative hegemony in select regions. Yet the imperial cognitive reflex persists. Unwilling to relinquish the benefits of global dominance, the U.S.-led West is increasingly lacking hard power and the capacity to enforce its will on sovereign states. In the face of political subversion, it is becoming more problematic to employ the diminishing capability of its hard power in geopolitics, so consent in the West and effectiveness of the decision-making process in the Global South are now engineered through the use of intangible tools from the information and cognitive realms.
The title of this short essay was prompted partly by the exploits and eventually the undoing of Lord Timothy Bell, a renown propagandist of some of the world’s most malignant dictatorships. An investigative journalist testified about Bell’s role in a sting operation: “They said they’d represent me, that they had dark arts PR and that they’d manipulate the truth on my behalf. This was the man’s work.”
This reminds me of the increasingly standard practice of Western anti-diplomacy, Donald Trump’s empty bluster, and poker players’ bluffing of having a strong hand of cards (as a leverage over a counterpart).
One particularly cogent observation noted: “What emerges is not influence but illusion—driven by theatrical posturing, improvised authority and leaders performing roles the Treaties never defined. This apparatus speaks for a Union it cannot command, confronts adversaries it cannot deter, and preaches values it fails to apply—notably at home. The result is a simulation of geopolitics without the means to shape it.”
Black propaganda aims to conceal the origin and intention of this political technology by manipulating and deceiving the audience. It attempts to operationalize deception at the level of international relations through foreign policy rhetoric designed to cognitively overwhelm and overbalance the designated target of Western subversion. In some regards, it can be characterized within the conceptual framework of asymmetrical geopolitics as a bluff and pretence of the weak Global North against the increasingly strong Global South. Anti-diplomacy suggests the undermining of agreed international norms and institutions by a powerful actor in pursuit of self-interest; it is a form of card stacking used to reshape a geopolitical environment to gain advantage by putting the opponent/target at a disadvantage.
The conceptual tools of psychological operations and political warfare are employed in concert to achieve a cumulative effect on the defending government’s decision-making and its defensive capacity in the face of the emerging security threat, and to break the consensus of the Global South while engineering societal consent in the Global North. Colour revolutions and the Arab Spring are just some the examples of such operationalization of foreign policy by the Global North. Such events (the cards) are primarily played in the human-oriented information and cognitive realms through the so-called fifth dimension of strategy (knowledge and information). The four other (tangible) dimensions―land, water, air, and space―can potentially be dominated by effective operationalization of the intangibles―information and knowledge. The latter can be used to define the physical space and how audiences react to its geopolitically constructed representation, which generates a misleading and inaccurate perception benefiting the communicator defining the geopolitical environment.
The U.S.-led Global North is an empire that is declining together with its system of vassal and client states. One of the first manifestations of a declining empire or civilization is the deterioration of its cognitive capacity and the capability of its leadership, which is accompanied by their physical and moral degradation.
One of the consequences is the lack of the West’s capability for an effective and pro-active geopolitics. Hence, rather than take an active and competitive position in foreign policy, the West chooses a reactive obstructive foreign policy. It aims to restrict and ultimately deny the Global South countries the ability to realize their geopolitical goals and interests, and to maintain some form of relative hegemony for itself.
As noted above, anti-diplomacy is not strategic in nature, it is at best operational or even tactical. The façade is that this is an instrument associated with plausible deniability that creates the potential context for justifying and legitimizing a reckless foreign policy. This is done to provoke a target government into a miscalculation or an error that can be subsequently exploited via the information realm. The deception is that anti-diplomacy is used as an excuse to declare that other policy options are exhausted and the Global North is “forced” to take―reluctantly―a risky action as the last resort, while this was the intention in the first instance.
Anti-diplomacy is part the political technology toolset of the Information Operations and Influence Activity (IOIA). Essentially, it is intended to support the U.S.’s geopolitical program by justifying and legitimizing its actions by defining how the physical operational environment is perceived. It is linked with U.S. geostrategic imperatives: keeping vassal states obedient and dependent; keeping client states obedient and protected; and preventing the rise of powers or blocs of powers capable of challenging U.S. hegemony. This has become more difficult to achieve in the context of the Global North’s accelerating decline, accompanied by its physical and cognitive degradation and reduced capability to effectively coerce the Global South to submission. Objectively speaking, the Global North has no strong cards to play, which is why it resorts to bluff and bamboozles the Global South with defunct historical reputation and bluster that are no longer valid. The sun is setting in the West, but it is unlikely to go quietly into the night with any sense of dignity as it does not seem to realize that its decline terminates its hegemonic ambitions and pretensions.
