Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  Mediating an entente and gradually strengthening the relationship between South Korea and Japan should be a top priority for the United States. Their relationship is important not only to ensuring a cohesive approach to North Korea, but also to convincing China and Russia to play a more positive role. Chung, Yachi, and I pledged that every North Korean provocation would be seen as pushing Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington closer together. Because the old San Francisco System of alliances is the opposite of what Beijing and Moscow desire, Xi and Putin might conclude that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are no longer serving their interests. Expanded South Korean and Japanese defense capabilities, such as in missile defense and medium-range conventional ballistic missiles, might drive home the point that the United States and its allies are becoming stronger in response to the threat from North Korea.

  As always, information may be a more powerful instrument than even the best military or cyber capabilities. North Korea’s Ministry for the Protection of the State maintains a total blackout of all information other than state media and persecutes those suspected of ideological crimes. Policy debates over North Korea often revolve around whether to pursue opening up to DPRK or maximizing pressure. It is a false choice. South Korea in particular should build on previous efforts to reach the North Korean people through radio broadcasts, leaflets, CDs, and USB flash drives. We should also take advantage of new technology to penetrate the North’s information blockade. In 2015, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and scientists demonstrated such technological innovations, including compact satellite dishes designed by a pair of Korean American teenagers who partnered with a former Google engineer; smart balloons that can carry USBs to targeted areas; and a mesh network to distribute digital contraband through tiny, daisy-chained computers connected to peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.48

  And if we breach the North’s information defenses, what should our messages convey to the North Koreans? We might first counter the regime’s narrative and the Juche ideology. Deprivation is not a sign of virtue, and it has not been inflicted on North Koreans from the outside. North Korea’s neighbors and the United States are not hostile to the North Korean people; nor are they the cause of North Koreans’ poverty and isolation. There is an alternative to living in their physical and psychological gulag. To the “masters of money” surrounding Kim and living in Pyongyang, we might describe an alternative future in which they and their families could be forgiven for past crimes and thrive. But most important, content delivered to North Koreans should expose them to alternative views so they might regain their ability to form opinions other than those approved by the regime.49 President Moon prioritized the removal of guard posts and mines along the DMZ, but it may prove a much more difficult, yet worthy, endeavor to begin to erase the psychological and perceptual lines that divide the two very different systems.

  South Korea should take every opportunity to draw a stark contrast between its free and open society and the North’s failing, closed, authoritarian system. One way to do that is by publicizing the stories of North Korean escapees and ensuring that those escapees receive a warm welcome in the form of employment and educational opportunities. Those who flee North Korea may also form a cadre of experts whose knowledge would be vital to help North Korea transition after the collapse or transformation of the regime.50

  Many North Korea scholars believe that the regime is unsustainable. It is not clear, however, that it would collapse or transform before Kim Jong-un presented an unacceptable danger to the world. What the United States and its allies and partners can do is prepare for a range of scenarios. The period following regime collapse could be violent and difficult. Estimates are that reunification would cost upward of $3 trillion. The two Koreas have grown apart not only economically, but also culturally and intellectually. Thus, what may prove most important to a post-Kim Korea are initiatives in education and efforts to manage the psychological trauma and humiliation among the North Korean people once they are faced with a relative lack of skills and social standing compared to South Koreans, who have built a successful society over multiple generations. However, as North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs progress, there is no time to wait for the regime’s collapse. In the near term, the strategy of maximum pressure should endeavor to convince Kim that he is safer, from both external and internal threats, without them.

  Part VII

  Arenas

  China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! . . . A GENOCIDE INCITED ON FACEBOOK . . . The genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle . . . IS CHINA OUTSMARTING AMERICA IN A.I.? . . . We have to wake up to the fiery urgency of the now . . . CONGRESS MAD AT GOOGLE FOR DROPPING PROJECT MAVEN, KEEPING HUAWEI . . . the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it . . . AS PUTIN TOUTS HYPERSONIC WEAPONS, AMERICA PREPARES ITS OWN ARSENAL . . . China’s dominance of 5G networks puts U.S. economic future at stake . . . CHINA PLANS MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT TO KNOCK US FROM TOP SPOT IN FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER . . . The Islamic Republic of Iran and China are standing in a united front . . . SPACE FORCE OR SPACE CORPS? . . . Transform knowledge of ourselves, our planet, our solar system, our universe . . . We are almost as dependent on satellites as we are on the sun itself . . . TENCENT’S STARTUP INVESTMENT FRENZY NOW REACHES OUTER SPACE . . . There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate . . . TRUMP SERVES NOTICE TO QUIT PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT . . . We are the first generation to be able to end poverty, and the last generation that can take steps to avoid the worst impacts of climate change . . . AT U.N. CLIMATE SUMMIT, FEW COMMITMENTS AND U.S. SILENCE . . . India’s air pollution rivals China’s as the world’s deadliest . . . THE ARCTIC IS “NOT UP FOR GRABS,” SAYS NORWEGIAN AMBASSADOR . . . The United States is losing Latin America to China . . .“IT JUST ISN’T WORKING”: PISA TEST SCORES CAST DOUBT ON U.S. EDUCATION EFFORTS . . .

  Chapter 13

  Entering the Arena

  What is required is a holistic approach that does not seek to isolate open systems from their environment, but apprehends their profound interconnectedness.

  —ANTOINE BOUSQUET, THE SCIENTIFIC WAY OF WARFARE, 2009

  ONLY SIX months after I visited the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia to discuss the army’s study of Russia new-generation warfare, the NSC staff and I became objects of a new facet of the Kremlin’s sustained campaign of political subversion. Building on the vitriolic political discourse on social media surrounding Donald Trump and his new administration, Russian intelligence agents employed many of the same bots, trolls, and American accomplices it had used during the 2016 presidential election in an effort to undermine the effectiveness of the U.S. government. Members of the NSC staff, especially those who did not possess last names of northern European origin, were slandered and harassed on social media. The emphasis was on reinforcing the “deep state” narrative, which asserts that disloyal civil servants were actively undermining President Trump’s agenda. The Kremlin apparently saw me and a well-functioning NSC staff as impediments to its foreign policy agenda, from Syria to Ukraine to Afghanistan, and to its efforts to secure relief of U.S. and European Union sanctions. The Russians accordingly took advantage of what the Atlantic Council’s digital forensics laboratory described at the time as “the most well-organized campaign in the history of the alt-right” to remove me from the White House and undermine the confidence of and confidence in the NSC staff. The alt-right, like the Russians, saw me as an obstacle to advancing its agenda, so it collaborated using social media under the #FireMcMaster campaign.

  Consistent with the Russian “firehose of falsehood,” the conspiracy theories and slanderous, bigoted content of the Fire McMaster campaign were often inconsistent. For example, one caricature on social media portrayed me as a puppet of billionaire George Soros and the Rothschild family (both of whom are frequent targets of anti-Semitic conspira
cy theories), while articles in the pseudo-media charged me and others on the NSC staff with being “anti-Israel” and soft on Iran. Because I believed that calling terrorists “Islamic” masked their perversion of the religion and reinforced the terrorist narrative of fighting infidels to establish the caliphate, I was, despite having fought directly against terrorist organizations for many years, portrayed as soft on jihadist terrorism as well.1

  Although I was concerned for the targeted members of the NSC staff, I paid scant attention to the attacks because there was work to do. But the experience amplified the urgency of entering new arenas of competition. The cyber-enabled effort to erode the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy through disparagement and dissension would, with the advent of deep fakes and other new technologies, become only more prevalent and more dangerous. We would have to understand better these emerging technologies and how adversaries were likely to employ them against us.

  In February 2017, the NSC staff worked with the president’s cabinet to identify crucial challenges to national security. Some were geostrategic. Others centered on functional competitions, such as those in space or cyberspace. As we developed integrated strategies for those challenges, it became clear that the same elements of strategic narcissism that had disadvantaged the United States in competitions with revisionist powers, jihadist terrorists, and hostile states had also put us behind in technological and economic contests important to future security and prosperity.

  Our team prioritized the competitive domains of cyberspace and space, but we also worked with colleagues on the National Economic Council to determine how to promote American security and prosperity in areas such as energy and trade and across what we labeled the National Security Innovation Base (NSIB). We defined the NSIB—every initiative in government seems to require initials—as the network of knowledge, capabilities, and people, including academia, National Laboratories, and the private sector, that turns ideas into innovations, transforms discoveries into successful commercial products and companies, and protects and enhances the American way of life. We recognized that technologies (such as those associated with fifth-generation communications (5G), artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biogenetics) would be vital to maintaining America’s advantages in defense and in the global economy. But staying competitive did not mean foreclosing on cooperation, especially with the private sector and other free and open societies. We would even have to find new ways to cooperate with adversaries and rivals, especially on preventing the proliferation of the most destructive weapons on earth and tackling the interconnected problems of climate change, pollution, health, and food and water security. Competing effectively while fostering cooperation required a conscious effort to overcome narcissistic tendencies, in particular by rejecting optimism bias and wishful thinking.

  * * *

  THE ADVENT of the internet initially generated tremendous optimism. It transformed the global economy and accelerated communications and the transfer of data. But it also had unanticipated political implications. The internet was supposed to make autocracy untenable. At the turn of the twenty-first century, U.S. President Bill Clinton scoffed at the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the internet. “Good luck,” he said in a speech to students at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” He predicted that, in the new century, “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.”2 Clinton was not alone in assuming that the internet would change China. It would have been difficult to imagine at the time the extent to which the CCP and other authoritarian regimes would change the internet. But like all technologies, the internet was neutral. What mattered most was how people would use it. In China and elsewhere, rather than foster political empowerment and freedom, the exponential increase in internet usage and smartphones actually gave authoritarian regimes new tools for repression and controlling their populations.3

  In democratic societies, the free and universal internet was supposed to be liberating and empowering. And in many ways, it was, unleashing dramatic change through instant access to an endless supply of information and connecting people electronically in a way that had profound and positive effects on social interaction, productivity, and education. But it was not an unmitigated good. Social media companies lured citizens into forfeiting their privacy as those companies mined personal information to manipulate behavior for profit. Internet platforms proved ideal for amplifying hate speech, fomenting division, and even inciting violence, as in the case of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar starting in 2016.4 Moreover, as people became better connected than ever electronically, they disconnected from each other socially and emotionally. The internet was supposed to foster humaneness, but terrorist propaganda and other distressing content glorified the murder of innocents and desensitized people to violence. A significant number of young people abandoned playgrounds and athletic fields for their game controllers and smartphones.5

  By 2020 it was clear that the cyber warfare threats to us and other democracies extended far beyond Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For example, in 2017, Iran began using its state media to pose as independent news outlets to promote anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian sentiment in the United States.6 North Korea launched disinformation campaigns to influence international negotiations, such as the inter-Korean dialogue and denuclearization talks with the United States.7 Beginning in 2019, the CCP initiated campaigns to discredit Hong Kong protesters on the mainland as well as a failed operation to influence the outcome of the presidential election in Taiwan.8

  But it is not only dictators who exploit personal data and violate privacy. So do internet companies who sell that data or use it for highly lucrative advertising. The United States and like-minded countries should demand standards and develop technologies that preserve privacy and prevent the misuse of personal data. Europe and the state of California have passed laws to protect personal data, but those should be refined and expanded to other governments that value privacy and due process of law. Improvements like protecting data through encryption and defaults to privacy are vital to protecting citizens from external as well as internal cyber-related threats to freedom. They are also vital for individual and societal health.

  Viewing the internet and social media as an arena of competition rather than an unmitigated good is a mind-set we need in order to take advantage of the free exchange of information while protecting against dangers. In addition to the defensive measures identified in chapter 2, defense against cyber-enabled information warfare should also have an offensive component, to introduce information into closed systems, counter disinformation, and challenge government-approved narratives. Democracies should develop the means to bypass control mechanisms such as China’s Great Firewall or Iran’s internet restrictions. Technologies such as space-based broadband communication may make it harder for dictators to shut off access to information.

  Perhaps most important, citizens should not wait for political leaders or the media to counter cyber-enabled information warfare. Individuals can decide to reject the toxicity and disinformation in the social media ecosystem and reintroduce civility into the discussions important to a thriving democracy. Engaging with those who think differently should be valued as part of a vibrant civic life, not only in cyberspace, but also in classrooms, cafés, town halls, basketball courts, and rugby pitches. As people argue about the issues that divide them, they might devote equal time to celebrate what they have in common. Citizens of free and open societies might cherish the freedoms and opportunities their forbears bequeathed to them while acknowledging that no democracy or free-market economy is perfect and that all are works in progress. And all might take an interest in self-education concerning the crucial challenges to their security, health, and prosperity as a means of inoculating themselves against disinformation.

  * * *

  THE CYBER warfare threat will only get worse due to advances in a
rtificial intelligence. AI technologies allow systems to perform tasks usually reserved for humans. Machines will learn from data and use algorithms to make decisions free from human intervention. Combined with high-speed mobile communications networks such as 5G, supercomputers, and the “internet of things” (i.e., the internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects), this could affect everything from power grids to public transportation to financial transactions to global logistics to driverless cars to home appliances.

  AI technologies could make cyber attacks easier as more of the physical world becomes connected to cyberspace and the malicious actors who operate within it. In December 2019 alone, ransomware attacks (attacks that present the victim with a choice of either paying to regain access to their network and data or incurring millions of dollars in costs to restore them) crippled America’s largest wire and cable manufacturer in Georgia, a health network in New Jersey, and the city governments of Riviera Beach, Florida, and New Orleans, Louisiana.9 In 2019, the city of Baltimore chose not to pay a ransom of $75,000 and incurred an estimated cost of $18 million.