Creating Chaos
by Larry Hancock
(O/R Books, £13)

 FROM the 19th century Great Game, through the cold war and into this century's information warfare, great powers have engaged in a range of activities to influence and undermine their enemies.

[[{"type":"media","fid":"8490","view_mode":"inlineright","instance_fields":"override","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""}]]Since the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, we've heard a great deal about the tactics employed by Russia to allegedly influence elections and support divisive nationalism in the Western world.

But, as Larry Hancock's Creating Chaos shows, the toolkit of information warfare was developed by the US 70 years ago in its cold war "active measures" campaign to prevent developing nations breaking free of neocolonialism and Western dominance.

The US national security journalist provides an in-depth as well as historically broad survey of the methods of political destabilisation deployed by the US during the cold war to prevent large parts of the post-colonial world “falling to communism.” Such strategies have to some extent now come back to haunt us in the shape of Russian information warfare, he argues.

While his sympathies with the West are clear, Hancock is very critical of the approach taken by the US, particularly through the CIA, in its determination to halt what it perceived as Soviet aspirations to global domination from the late 1940s to the 1980s.

Hancock explains how the US moved rapidly into the “dark side” of violent destabilisation and regime change, as seen in Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia.

He argues that the US failed to distinguish between Soviet actions in its new sphere of influence in eastern Europe after the defeat of the nazis, culminating in the seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in May 1948, with what was happening in Asia and Latin America.

Yet the author does not always convey the full extent of US involvement in the bloodiest episodes of cold -war interventions, an example being the Indonesia coup of 1965 in which up to 1 million people were slaughtered by the new military regime.

He insists that the US was not the prime mover in the anti-communist bloodbath but recent archive papers unearthed by the Atlantic magazine show that this is not true. The US was actively engaged in the operation and believed the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party to have been a great success.

In the 1980s, due to increased Congressional scrutiny of CIA operations, President Reagan began privatising them, using non-state corporate and foreign forces to achieve US imperial goals. This was done both in Nicaragua during the Contra terror campaign against the Sandinista revolution and against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan after 1979.

In the latter case, the US franchised out its battle against Moscow to Pakistan and Arab Gulf-backed militants fighting a “holy jihad” against the godless communists. Both these bloody operations were ultimately successful, although in the case of Afghanistan the blowback would prove to be catastrophic and ongoing.

Post-1990, Hancock advances an interesting thesis that Russia and the US swapped roles, with the latter now backing popular protest movements and “revolution” in former Soviet client states, while Russia became the defender of the existing order in the way the US had been from the 1950s through to the 1970s.

Hancock devotes several chapters at the end to Russian influence-seeking and information activities online, using social media to influence US elections and the Brexit vote.

He admits that the rise in nationalist and Islamophobic politics in the US and Europe has internal causes and is not simply due to Russian operations, but he nevertheless seems to be making the same mistake that the cold war warriors did in the 1950s, when they saw Soviet communism at work where in fact there was popular resistance to neocolonialism.

Now Russian Facebook posts and political influence are seen in Western media as a primary cause of the West's current political polarisation, rather than recognising it as a crisis of failed neoliberalism.

Fundamentally, Trump is made in the US and Brexit in Britain, notwithstanding the bots of Moscow.