China and Cognitive Warfare: Why Is the West Losing?

Curator note

In recent years, we have seen the return of competition between the great powers. To counter the United States in particular and the West in general, the Chinese are applying hybrid warfare. Even though no direct military confrontation with the West has occurred in the 21st century, China and other contesters use hybrid means such as guerrilla, terrorism, economic pressure, cognitive warfare, cyber-attacks, paramilitarization, lawfare (reinterpretation of norms and standards), to weaken the West.
In doing so, they remain below the threshold of actual war in order to produce their strategic effect while preventing the activation of jus ad bellum. This strategy blurs the threshold between peace and war that we have come to adopt as basic understanding of interstate relations. The West must thus expect that potential adversaries will increasingly resort to this form of warfare, which is accessible and not expensive, either in support of more conventional military operations or autonomously to defend their interests. One of the components of the hybrid warfare is the understudied cognitive warfare. The latter is defined by Bernal et al. as “the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of 1) influencing public and governmental policy and 2) destabilizing public institutions. Destabilization and influence are the fundamental goals of cognitive warfare” (Bernal et al., 2020). Cognitive warfare is moreover continuous: the Israelis are even talking about cognitive campaigns between wars (Kuperwasser and Siman-Tov, 2019).