Russian and Chinese Hybrid War Against Liberal Democracy

 

Recent bout about dangers of criminal migrants and refugees prompt me to write a detailed explanation of this problem. I was writing many times that government do not let in any dangerous or criminal refugees, such dangerous migrants are smuggled into the Western liberal democratic countries illegally. Russia is doing that using its special forces as well as affiliated mafia. They are doing it with one single person: to destroy western world from within.

Why is Russia doing it? Why does it need to destroy the West? What purpose and benefit there is in just wreaking havoc that costs Russia money and does not bring any material or financial gains?

The reason is survival. Russia and mainland Chinese regimes are very unpopular with their own people. They look at the West and see benefits western style liberal democracy brings. Then they look back and their own countries and see just how much worse Putin and Xi authoritarian system is by comparison.

Autocrats in both Moscow and Beijing are threatened by their own people and their increasingly radical and revolutionary mood. They clearly see that if they do nothing, they will one sunny afternoon will just be kicked out like Yanukovych, and his cronies were kicked out of Ukraine. For that they have a personal vendetta against Ukraine. Russian war in Ukraine is fundamentally about that. A revenge for Yanukovych and Euromaidan. Just like Napoleonic wars were revenge of then autocracies for French Revolution and beheading of Louis XVI.

However, destroying Ukraine in itself will not save autocracies in Moscow and Beijing. They know that and seek something that will actually prevent people from overthrowing them.

However, what something like that could be? What can possibly destroy an idea, an abstract concept? For the lack of any better ideas, Moscow and Beijing have settled on if not destroying every single democratic country in the world, then at least damaging and ruining them as much as possible.

Flooding democratic world with fake criminal refugees is but a part of such strategy. Such fakes refugees are there to make life of average Westerner as bad as possible, making Russian and Chinese autocracy better in comparison just because they do not have the same refugee problem.

However, this is not the only method autocratic alliance of Kremin and Beijing use. They use every trick they could possibly think of to damage or at least weaken the West and its prosperity.

Fake news, not just overt propaganda channels like Russia Today or Sputnik but also people Tucker Carson who are paid secretly. Rupert Murdoch may as well be on Kremlin's payroll as well. 

Russia has perfected clandestine methods of transferring money so payments from Kremlin will not appear in official ledgers. Instead, they will be disguised as some investments from anonymous funds or private donations.

Online trolls are another method Russia uses to attack the west; they pretend to be Westerners and spread contrarian radical messages, aimed at radicalising locals against liberal status quo.

Moscow deliberately makes these trolls to advocate illiberal solutions for alleged Western problems. Aim is to make Western societies more bigoted and less liberal and welcoming to migrants. Moscow war is on liberal democracy as well as rule of law. So, in Moscow's eyes every move away from rule of law or liberal society is a victory for Kremlin. 

Moscow wants Western societies to stop being liberal and replace rule of law with autocratic enforcement and abuse of power. If ICE officers will grab foreign looking people on the streets and forcefully repatriate them, it will look similar to how Russian riot police handles anti-Putin protesters. It will eliminate appeal, liberal democracy holds in Russian society, as people will question if government treats them any better if Russia was a democracy.

Final and the most ambitious angle of Russian attacks is directly sponsoring parties that advocate illiberal ideas and policies. Moscow certainly wants to see people like Geert Wielders, Le Pen and Alice Weidel in power as they will destroy all the appeal, Western way of life has among anti-Putin Russians. They will also destroy German economy and reduce French and Germans to a slave labor for building skyscrapers in Moscow.

In view of the above, it's pretty clear that Kremin has a comprehensive strategy for its unconventional hybrid war against Europe, the US and collective West. Moscow sees democracy and liberal way of living in itself as a threat to its existence, existence of its ruling class to be precise. Because of that they are willing to wage a war of utter destruction even if it harms both sides equally. Kremlin thinks all sacrifices are worth it if they can destroy liberal democracy or at least make it unappealing to an average Russian.

Because of Kremlin's extreme agenda, the West should develop a cohesive and decisive response to Kremlin's hybrid war. It should outsmart Putin, expose Kremlin's links to "patriotic" politicians in the West, disrupt its networks of paid client media, prevent these people from receiving money from Moscow, prevent trolls from flooding online spaces with paid messages and more. 

The response to Kremlin hybrid war should also be smart and hybrid. Acting recklessly will instead lead towards playing right into Kremlin's trap. West should stop Putin but not the cost of destroying freedom and democracy that made Western world great and appealing across the world in the first place.

Doing nothing is not an option either. Left unopposed, Le Pen and AfD may eventually take over the governments, and all will be lost.

Hopefully West will be able to prevail against Kremlin's hybrid warfare, and this time end autocratic rule in Russia for good.