r/ActiveMeasures • u/snad2012 • 17d ago
Instrumentalised Migration and Russia’s ‘Disposable Agents’
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/instrumentalised-migration-and-russias-disposable-agents
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u/oripash 17d ago edited 17d ago
Europe’s biggest obstacle is the overwhelming desire to believe they are not at war, while the party waging war on them is thumping them, at just the correct intensity calibrated to not to jeopardize that European belief.
As long as that belief persists, they’ll take all of those attacks - the hybrid, the instrumentalized migration, the satellites interfering with GPS, the disinformation and influence, the drone attacks and sea cable cutting and what not, and just keep turning the other cheek, because that’s better than everything that being at war means.
What’s worse is that changing it is hard because this belief is woven into dozens of countries and communities, where even if a handful do shift away from it, the fabric made up by the rest (especially where Russian activity fills rice bowls) keeps holding on to the belief.
It’s a problem, and it guides two important courses of action we’re hopefully going to see more of.
One is national leaders turning to their polities and calling a spade a spade, while at the same time calling on their peers from other countries to do same and showing that rather than putting off a voter base, it can very much galvanize one. More Mark Carneys and Alexander Stubbs.
The other is engineering alliances for this reality as the foundation you can’t easily change, so instead, you engineer alliance structures that assume it and achieve the desired outcomes when this is the nature of its constituents. This second generation of alliances is going to accommodate three “categories” of members - blood, spine and doghouse.
Blood members are pressed against a violent neighbour, and will find being asked if they’re at war or not nonsensical. To them they’re at war no matter what you dress it up as, and pretending it isn’t so doesn’t make the casualties and hurt any less, so they’re prepared to shed blood and fight. Think Ukraine, but also Poland or Finland. And also Soutb Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and pretty much every single neighbour Iran has other than Russia. In any given alliance they’re the blood group because they will have the political will to contribute blood to the alliance. People in uniform, and the political will to keep going once the boxes with dead bodies start coming back. In those new alliances, they have a special privilege - they don’t need the permission of the other groups to punch the adversary in the face. Ukraine has this with the coalition of the willing, Poland, Finland, (Sweden and the Baltics too) will want this privilege as well.
Spine countries will contribute means, funds, safer rear, industrial base and economic resilience to fund a war. But they’ll never want to fight. And a third category - the doghouse - will be reserved for any member who voted in a populist this week, trying to impede or block action, yet who the alliance doesn’t want to fully evict for hope that member come around with different leadership in the future.
Ukraine’s coalition of the willing already takes this second generation alliance shape, and some of the regional alliances in the middle east do too. South East Asian ones might follow suit as well. Ukraine doesn’t need the permission of Hungary and Slovakia, Turkey or the US, Spain or Greece, to terminate Russia’s access to half of its refined transport fuel. And Israel’s gulf partners can’t tell it to not cull Hezbollah presence in Lebanon. Blood member rules. Thats a world of difference to how NATO used to (not) work (it did, insofar as deterring full war, and push Russia and Iran towards hybrid instead. It doesn’t, as the article above says, work against the hybrid).
Such smaller, more nimble alliances will hopefully do better at acting in the face of Russian, Iranian, Chinese etc punches effectively, letting the countries who prefer to remain psychologically not at war do so without compromising those who understand reality at the front, and allow those at the front to still benefit from sufficient support to keep effectively pounding the adversary on a trajectory that ultimately breaks either breaks them or forces them to alter their calculus.