Author: Mark Galeotti
ISBN No: Paperback, 9780300270419
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages: 235
Publisher: Yale
Publisher URL:
https://www.yalebooks.co.uk/page/detail/the-weaponisation-of-everything/?k=9780300270419
Year of publication: 30/04/2023
Brief:
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti
price
£9.99
Sub-titled, ‘A Field Guide to the New Way of War’, Mark Galeotti in his latest book welcomes us ‘to a potential world of permanent, sublimated conflict, of the political struggle of all against all’. If that sounds grim, he dates the finishing of the book to April 2021 – that is, very much writing during the covid pandemic, which already feels long ago; and before the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which showed that it was complacent to assume that war had gone from Europe (apart from civil war in Yugoslavia) after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.
Galeotti has written on organised crime in Russia, such as his 2019 book The Vory, on that country’s crime class: the vory v zakone, Russia’s ‘super mafia’. Besides Russia, he covers in Weaponisation China, North Korea and indeed much of the world; and he ranges over modern history, as if to prove that there’s nothing new under the sun, which may make the present less unsettling. For as Galeotti shows, everything is weaponisable by malicious nation states: disinformation through social media, corruption, smuggling. While the scenarios may be nightmarish (they’re helpfully in italics), as Galeotti says early on, from infrastructure hacks to murders, these tactics have already been used ‘in the undeclared shadow wars of the 21st century’.
We can now see that the world order of trade and the necessary laws around commerce have not made war a thing of the past. As ‘the pressures that led to wars never went away, so instead interdependence became the new battleground’. Galeotti takes us through ‘wars without warfare’. It’s unsettling because as he sets out, not only are the lines between peace and war blurred, which means that much is deniable or even dismissed as fake; that implies there’s no such thing as victory – that is, an end to it.
Private security readers may take particular interest in a middle chapter, on crime: “In the shadows of the post-Cold War global underworld, criminality, from recruiting gangsters and manipulating flows of drugs, guns and migrants through to simple corruption, has become increasingly significant in the new geopolitical conflicts.” Prime example given here is North Korea, though it’s not the only country ‘that has been able to bypass or minimise sanctions through criminality’.
On the cyber side, Galeotti sees a wider trend, ‘the rise of organised cyber-mercenaries who can do everything from cracking into secure communications networks to harassing individuals, and who market their services to whomever wants them’. While Galeotti rightly points out that crime like so much else has migrated to the internet, physical world crimes such as assassinations (Galeotti mentions Jamal Khashoggi and Sergei Skripal) happen too. The real impact of the ‘weaponisation of crime’, Galeotti asserts, is subtler – the criminals, hired by whoever, ‘eat away at the political and economic resources of a target state’.
The boundaries between crime and statecraft are blurring, Galeotti suggests; ‘law enforcers may need new or better laws – especially when it comes to ‘dark money’ – but generally require both the resources to do the job and also the space to do it’. By that he means investigations are lengthy and expensive; cases are tricky.
Galeotti doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable questions for the western world. The west has to truly fight corruption, and not just make ‘pious pledges’. The west is all for freedom, but in the Cold War ‘hot wars’ happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua – nicely distant from the west. We champion democracy, yet happily do business with undemocratic Saudi Arabia and China. If deep fakes and online toxicity are bad for society, politicians have got to resist conspiracy theory (although they mean clicks, ‘and clicks mean money’). Ultimately, it’s for each of us to be aware of how we click, and vote.
In his chapter on ‘information’, Galeotti goes as far as warning that we seem to have ‘a deep legitimacy crisis’, not only about our governments, but over who (if anyone any more) we can believe. As he tells in a story, once people believe in conspiracies, they are beyond reasoning with. If you believe covid was made in a lab (insert place here), if the accused place denies it – of course they would!? Galeotti has a neat phrase: “Old-style conflicts had war stories; modern ones are increasingly wars of stories.”
What I found most intriguing of all was in the chapter on ‘weaponised instability’; the idea that the very nature of the 21st century – online media and instant floods of stuff, just in time logistics, algorithms driving human activity – ‘have undermined old models of social, political and economic governance without putting anything in their place.’ States, family units, press barons are under pressure, even while they’re lapping up the ‘fly-by-wire’ modern world. In other words, disorder and ‘war without warfare’ are the other side of the coin to the fast-evolving, networked world of so many benefits.
Galeotti late on mentions the UK’s Integrated Review of security and defence published in 2021, which he credits as an effort to rethink things. Although the author does mention the Roman Empire, for ages the obvious point of comparison when you’re concerned that your society is going to the dogs, I came away with the impression that Galeotti was likening our age to the Renaissance – in many ways bloody and troubling, but also a time of progress in culture, and values. Significantly Galeotti ends with a quotation from a premier figure of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli, and warns that ‘one of the greatest vulnerabilities of many modern states is actually the mismatch between rhetoric and reality’.
