Looking for Collusion

Gerald Seib has a good analysis piece in the Wall Street Journal today that looks at collusion between Russia and China to disrupt democracies.  I’m sure he would say it isn’t that simple, but this article talks about something I have been looking at for the past few years - the Russians and Chinese are using different parts of Inforamtion Warfare to undermine democracies in the West.  More important than that, they are succeeding.

The Russians use Political Warfare and the Chinese use Economic Warfare to achieve their objectives.  Again, it is not all that simple, but if you want t a place to start analyzing what they are doing, that is the best place. In May, 2015, the Russians and Chinese announced they had signed 32 bilateral agreements that cover everything from military cooperation to cyber operations against each other.  Of course, since we have never seen all of these agreements, we can guess there are probably some that are state secrets.

These agreements do not benefit the rest of the world, particularly and I was a little surprised that they announced them at all.  Since then, we have had organized intrusions in almost every election in any country that does not favor the two of them.  None of those campaigns stopped when the election was over.  Germany is now in trouble;  Britain is not going quite as well as we thought;  the target on the back of President Trump is clear for all to see.  This is not a conspiracy theory, unless you believe that these political disruptions are caused by the rotting of democracy in every country that uses that form of government.

The sad truth is that democracies have within them a flaw not found in dictatorships like Russia and China - they allow conflicting views to be ironed out in public.  Minority parties seem more than willing to help them out by “resisting” a term used in other countries as well as the US, impeding and disrupting their own government.  If they have found the silver bullet of policial and economic domination we are in a lot of trouble.