The war of state-sponsored harassment that we do not believe in

Hybrid warfare has something grotesque about it; it appears as a form of harassment targeting those who whinge, who are reluctant to be on their guard, who do not believe in the possibility of full-scale, traditional warfare even when they are subjected to it at their borders, and therefore do not practise deterrence, do not heed warnings even when they are issued by serious, composed officials and politicians – not braggarts – They thus expose themselves to provocative schemes—both minor and major—concerning train arrival and departure boards, cash machines, flight alerts, supermarket fridges and, occasionally—this finally terrifies you, though not enough to prompt a response—the cold chains used to store blood. It falls outside so-called international law, has no direct humanitarian implications, and does not even appear to be a breach of the peace; hybrid warfare is the gangster-style variation on the use of force in relations between nations, a dirty practice by definition that makes even the obscenity of armoured assaults and aerial bombardment – whether by drone or artillery – seem clean by comparison.

Traditional war punishes, restricts, makes you a prisoner of an inexorable logic of power, terrorises and humiliates; it would impose a clear framework for defence and counter-attack strategies, rearmament, funding for weapons systems, cooperation, related foreign policies, and military pacts impervious to the enemy’s offensive. Hybrid war, on the other hand, intimidates, brings you to your knees; it is the insidious, creeping preparation for your loss of sovereignty and freedom; it proceeds in fits and starts, strikes at habits, at the certainties of consumption, mobility and daily care; it seeks to bring down the mechanisms of finance, investment and the certainty of the functioning of essential services – those that underpin the opulent, or at any rate secure and certified, operation of the public and private systems upon which our so-called ‘everyday life’, our ‘ordinariness’, relies. And yet, as if truly intoxicated by this systematic use of harassment between states, the manipulation of data and the assault on the complex systems that underpin our world—even in its simplest aspects of life—we believe even less in this than we do in the possibility that the order of peace, founded on balance, might be shattered by the chaos and brutality of war, despite nearly five years of proven evidence of the possibility of all this in Ukraine, on the doorstep of democratic Europe, and in the artery of world power that is the Middle East following the endless nihilistic crime of 7 October 2023.

The position of Guido Crosetto, Boris Pistorius, NATO commanders and the heads of the intelligence services is not an enviable one; they must fight, through words and persuasion, against the worst prejudice there is – the prejudice of fear, the inclination towards submission, the mad desire to flee from political reality, with all the threats and unease it invariably contains. We have experienced the terrible events that afflicted generations of the twentieth century and, through hereditary transmission, have crept into the millennial transition to the postmodern era; now we believe in everything, even artificial intelligence, and we prepare ourselves for everything – but not for the war of old, nor for the new, hybrid kind: state harassment designed to frighten the timid, whom we foolishly place in quotation marks.