by Raphael Machado, Strategic Culture:
In the contemporary world, as we all know, conflicts have lost the linear character of kinetic clashes between opposing armies. This phenomenon hasn’t disappeared, but it has ceased to constitute the primary part of confrontations between opposing forces. In fifth-generation conflicts, even when there are clashes between armed forces, they are always preceded and accompanied by a myriad of other types of operations—psychological, cyber, and others—which facilitate the achievement of objectives by conventional forces. These other operations can even replace conventional forces when psychological operations achieve absolute success.
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The U.S. would not be the unipolar hegemon if it had not long since mastered the subtleties of these forms of confrontation, which only in recent years have been better understood by counter-hegemonic forces.
This is why it is extremely curious when U.S. authorities indignantly denounce the “psyops” carried out by “malicious actors like Russia and China” against the U.S. population. Yet, it is a remarkable phenomenon, because, in fact, initiatives, projects, and departments focused on “combating disinformation by malicious actors” have been growing in recent years.
Here, it may be appropriate to give a personal example (which also gives me more grounds to reflect on the topic of “psyops” and “anti-psyops”): In 2023, I (along with SCF columnist Lucas Leiroz) was named in a report produced by the U.S. Department of State as one of the leaders of a “Russian disinformation network” of a “quasi-paramilitary” nature that “threatens democracy” in Brazil. The report was specifically produced by a team from the Global Engagement Center, a branch of the U.S. Department of State’s Global Public Affairs Office, created in 2016 to supposedly “combat disinformation” directed by foreign state and non-state actors that could threaten U.S. and allied policies, security, and stability.
Beneath the sanitized terminology, however, what we have is an Orwellian propaganda apparatus that, besides determining the “official truth” about events, seeks to discredit journalists, activists, and intellectuals who stray from the established parameters. The fact that this is not seen as merely a “public relations” activity, but rather as part of a military strategy, is indicated by a French report called Information Manipulation, which points out that almost all the employees of this agency are from the Pentagon. A practical effect of the aforementioned report is that it is common for “bots” on social networks to post the link to the State Department’s accusations in the comments of my posts.
In this sense, the U.S.’s “fight against disinformation” involves the production of disinformation to discredit the issuer of inconvenient narratives—namely, theses that contradict the disinformation produced in Washington. At the end of the day, “disinformation” ends up being redefined to mean “everything the enemy says,” while the U.S. side produces “science” and performs “fact-checking.”
One can clearly see how this entire discourse on “disinformation” is permeated with double standards. Take, for example, the case of the myth of “Russian interference in U.S. elections.” This psy-op, directed primarily at the domestic audience, was designed to make the U.S. electorate believe that Putin was behind Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and that he tried to “steal” the 2020 election for him, and is trying again now.
This specific psy-op involved coordination between the Democratic Party, the mass media, U.S. intelligence agencies, and private cybersecurity companies (such as Crowdstrike) with the aim of appealing to a “patriotic sentiment” against a candidate supposedly colluding with “foreign” interests. There’s also a certain trace of McCarthyism here.
In this procedure, a supposed “hacker attack” on Hillary Clinton’s emails is analyzed by a private cybersecurity company, with authorization from the intelligence services, and the conclusions are widely spread by the mass media as a “closed case” in which no doubts remain. All this has been part of an endless “Russiagate,” with its most recent branches being the accusations against “Tenet Media.”
China has also been targeted by similar operations. In September 2023, for instance, the same Global Engagement Center of the State Department published a report titled “How the People’s Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment,” accusing China of spending billions acquiring shares in foreign media and promoting influencers to manipulate information about China. Among the Chinese tools mentioned by the State Department is censorship. This is quite curious. After all, part of the West’s psychoinformational war involves fighting to censor TikTok, which some accuse of “dumbing down” U.S. youth (and making them more promiscuous), while others accuse it of promoting anti-U.S. narratives through mysterious secret algorithms.
And, of course, we also know that the U.S. widely uses censorship against its adversaries in all spaces controlled by corporations tied to the Deep State, like Meta and Google, for instance. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen the censorship of RT on Meta networks. Meanwhile, on YouTube, this week, several important channels offering a counter-hegemonic view of events in Ukraine were deleted.
Thus, we can clearly analyze U.S. disinformation and psyops strategies based on what they accuse other countries of doing. Censorship eliminates the inconvenient presence of counter-narratives so that the West can freely promote the narratives of its choosing.
To make this even clearer, we can pay attention to a recent project involving some of the actors already mentioned. Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Countering the People’s Republic of China Malign Influence Fund Authorization Act.” This project, as its name explicitly states, aims to guarantee resources (more than $300 million a year) to finance informational initiatives (i.e., psyops) aimed at undermining the confidence of Indo-Pacific, and particularly African, countries in collaboration with China and in their integration into the Belt & Road Initiative. In relation to this, it is also important to note the document A Vision for 2021 and Beyond, produced by the U.S. Army’s First Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, as a simulation of the integration of psyops and geopolitical objectives in the context of “countering” Chinese influence in Africa.
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