Neville Bolt
Dr., Founder & Director
Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications
UK
Editor-in-Chief
NATO Defence Strategic Communications Journal
Visiting Scholar
St Edmund’s College
University of Cambridge
UK
Visiting Professor
Tokyo College
University of Tokyo
Japan
War is an act of communication––an intention to influence through force when all persuasion is abandoned. In the global turbulence of the early 21st century, geopolitics defies easy understanding, shunning the shorthand metaphors of the Cold War. As three major conflicts become increasingly triangulated––the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Gaza tragedy, and China’s irredentist claims to Taiwan––making sense of developments eludes the sharpest minds.
NATO’s 2030 Reflection Group recently identified a perplexing array of threats in today’s world: Russia, China, disruptive technologies, and terrorism, to climate change, pandemics, and hybrid and cyber threats. How should the world’s largest security alliance communicate across these primary but predominantly secondary and tertiary fields of effects? What could be the Leitmotif ? As NATO reaches its 75th anniversary, confronting an existential moment in the history of democracy, it seems appropriate to weigh a key tension inside Western geopolitical communications.
Strategic communications is the new buzzword in the corridors of power, an instant panacea to the world’s woes. Its claim to ‘see over the horizon’ captures ‘a holistic approach to communication based on values and interests that encompasses everything an actor does to achieve objectives in a contested environment’. So concluded NATO StratCom’s Terminology Working Group. But this concept has struggled in its brief lifetime in geopolitics. Since the late 1990s when a new Secretary General, Kofi Annan, sought to restore confidence in a failing United Nations, making it less preachy and more sensitive to communities’ needs around the world, strategic communications has struggled to find its soul.
NATO members have since played host to debates around two competing strands of thought. The empirical and would-be scientific––‘messaging’ campaigns to change how people think, tactically targeted, adjusted and measured for effect. And by contrast, the long-term, less tangible vision to shape enduring discourses in societies. The first pursued through government spending with short attention spans and short-term changes of direction; the second, a leap of faith, demanding long-term commitment to communities culturally and geographically distant. Instrumentalist tactics versus normative belief. The problem rests on the need for political communicators to deliver tangible outcomes so that political masters can account to taxpayers and voters, while open-ended commitments to change may be condemned as a bottomless spending pit.
Time is the enemy of democratic governance. Four-year cycles for electing politicians militate against long-term planning and meaningful change. Autocracies enjoy the luxury of surviving decades in office, employing guile and force.
This dilemma resonates at a time when Russia’s invasion is intent on destroying the state and people of Ukraine. Or, as an icy wind blows from further east where China’s President Xi has declared democracy unfit to administer complex societies and their economies. If today’s menace from Moscow recalls the dark days of the Berlin airlift and Marshall Plan, it is no surprise that NATO’s strategic communicators are reasserting the Alliance’s founding values. In the 1940s, these were to be consistent with the United Nations Charter, safeguarding the security and freedoms of Europe’s citizens. Franklin Roosevelt had famously declared the four freedoms in 1941. And NATO’s Washington Treaty in 1949 had captured the same spirit, bookending a decade of world war. Today the same freedoms are under threat. And citizens stand in the line of fire.
In 2022, Western governments sought to win support for their democracy-versus-autocracy framing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The existential claim fell largely on deaf ears across the African continent, reflected in how its leaders subsequently voted at the United Nations. Neither was it their war, nor was democracy their concern. Russia’s systematic disinformation and hybrid campaigns continue on an industrial scale, aimed at repositioning the perception of this aggression while fuelling fragmentation and uncertainty in Western societies. All in an unprecedented election year in democracies and electoral autocracies when half the world's population is going to the polls. Exploring democracy’s inevitable differences and diversity is democracy’s glass half-full; exploiting its cracks and divisions also reveals a glass half-empty.
Ask communications practitioners in the private sector whether freedoms drive their motivation. Their answer rarely exceeds the ambition to deliver efficacy to client governments and value for money. Which begs another question––whether at certain times in history all are forced to choose. Particularly given geopolitics’ rush towards transactional dealmaking, which may be further accelerated by this year’s newly elected leaders. But at a time of existential survival for many, should strategic communicators not aspire to a higher vision consistent with liberal values that respect individual freedoms and preserve a law-based global order?
The opinions expressed are entirely the author’s.