West is losing ideas war, and losing public trust
Canadians — to whom all this talk in America and Europe about Russian-inspired fake news seems a rather paranoid fantasy that has nothing to do with us — are about to get a rude awakening.
We are preparing to send Canadian troops to Latvia as part of a NATO tripwire mission to warn off the Kremlin from expanding its destabilizing efforts from Ukraine to the Baltics and beyond. That will put us directly in the Russians’ crosshairs and we should be preparing for an onslaught of Russian fake news about appalling criminal misbehaviour by our troops (as already has happened to the Germans leading a similar mission in Lithuania) and a wholly imaginary “public outcry” by Latvians who allegedly will want no part of NATO “warmongering.”
Nor will our military presence be the only target: Russian disinformation aims to undermine trust in all institutions, including business.
Since the end of the Cold War, we have forgotten the power of ideas to inspire people to action. Russia did not. As Estonian-Canadian documentary filmmaker and author Marcus Kolga says, what the Kremlin does best is sow doubt. It does that by undermining facts with conspiratorial theories rooted in antiZionism, homophobia, xenophobia and a general mistrust of our established institutions, political, social and economic.
By corroding trust, Putin breaks down established relationships and gains the upper hand. The West’s solidarity — which ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR — was based on trust in each other and the values we collectively represent. The most potent weapon the Kremlin possesses is the ability to sow doubt among the populations of the West about who is doing what to whom and why.
The Americans are playing right into the Kremlin’s hands with their reaction to Vladmir Putin’s clear attempts at manipulation of the U.S. election via hacked emails, hacking claims the Russian government does not deny. By making the issue one of Russian influence over President Donald Trump and his advisers, rather than the Kremlin’s malevolent intentions, the U.S. political class is helping to fertilize the very seeds of mistrust that the Kremlin is trying to sow.
People in business cannot afford to be indifferent to this phenomenon, as undermining confidence in the trustworthiness of our economic institutions is every bit as much grist to the Kremlin’s mill as attacking our politics. A 2014 story about explosions at Columbia Chemicals’ plant in the U.S. proved to be a fake story planted by a Kremlin troll farm dubbed The Internet Research Agency. Russia, a major energy producer, is alarmed about the fracking revolution that has increased oil and gas production and lowered costs in the West. According to a U.S. intelligence report, the Kremlin is running an extensive campaign about the health, environmental and other dangers of fracking. Also in their sights: LNG and oilsands.
Countering Kremlin dezinformatia will not be easy.
In a world where conspiracy theories targeting business and political leaders and institutions are hugely popular and no one seems interested in any philosophy that cannot be printed on a T-shirt, trust will become increasingly scarce. Yet trust, and especially trust in institutions, is the foundation on which market economies are based. Indeed, according to one economist, “If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia.” If we do not defend it, who will?