How English fell from strength to weakness
The English language used to be an asset for the US and UK. Now it has become a weakness. Let’s zoom out from the Russian hacking of the US election. More broadly, hacking means extracting someone else’s information or inserting the hackers’ own data. English-speaking countries are easy to hack because their enemies understand what they are saying. Being an English-speaking society is like living in a glass house: it makes you transparent. Conversely, foreign countries are opaque to mostly monolingual Britons and people in the US. Foreigners know us much better than we know them.
The role of English has been changing fast. Until the 1990s Russia and China didn’t know much about what went on in western societies. Most Russian and Chinese anglophones had been killed or exiled after the communist revolutions, and were never replaced. Even the KGB was short of English speakers: much of the intelligence sent to Moscow by British spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess was never translated.
But from the mid-1980s, the opening of China, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of the internet all boosted English. Chinese and Russian elites sent their children to study in the US and UK. From 1990 through to about 2010, British and US media and films gained unprecedented global influence.
In this period, the asymmetry of knowledge between Englishspeaking countries and their rivals became extreme. “There are now millions of Russians who are essentially bilingual and intimately acquainted with anglo societies,” says Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, political scientist at Oxford university. By contrast, most anglos stopped bothering to learn foreign languages.
This first became a problem after September 11 2001. The US and UK found the Arab world opaque. John Nixon, the CIA's expert on Saddam Hussein, couldn’t interrogate him in Arabic. Nixon recounts in his memoir Debriefing the President that, during the interrogations, the CIA’s interpreter would quarrel with the military interpreter: “No, that’s not what he said!” Saddam took advantage, bonding with the interpreter.
WEAPON OF INFLUENCE
Just as English let down the anglophone powers in Iraq, so did their other weapon of influence: warfare. The US now spends $597bn a year on its military and still can’t stop Russian adventuring.
The new weapon is cyber warfare, but it works best for the US’s enemies. Hacking foreign files is worthwhile only if you can use the information. Russia and China have lots of wellinformed people who can sift English documents looking for intelligence, says Adam Segal, author of The Hacked World Order. If they find anything embarrassing, they can disseminate it through Englishlanguage social media or WikiLeaks. US media can then be relied on to amplify the story. Or foreigners can simply make up fake news in English.
“It’s harder to do it in the other direction,” says Segal. The US lacks linguists who understand which foreign information matters. Nor can it easily send the information back to ordinary Russians and Chinese, as China, in particular, censors the internet. The West’s old practice of “democracy promotion” has been superseded by the East’s “autocracy promotion”, says Soares de Oliveira. Englishlanguage newspapers and the BBC now face millions of new competitors on social media.
Britain has its own problems with English. Its twin centres of political power, Westminster and the tabloid newspapers, are almost entirely monolingual. Brits therefore voted for Brexit blithely unaware of how other European countries would respond.
Britain does have a coterie of multilingual experts (mostly diplomats) who knew this wouldn’t fly. But precisely because these people understand European thinking, they are distrusted by Westminster and the tabloids. A case in point is the resignation of Ivan Rogers, the UK’s EU representative.
Just as Donald Trump's people have ignored the US state department, the UK’s Foreign Office — the one bit of the British state packed with foreign knowledge — has been sidelined ahead of the Brexit negotiations.
The US has just been outsmarted by foreigners it didn’t understand. Britain may be next.