Non-linear war

“The bear is loose!” President Obama has been saying, whenever he leaves the White House to visit Starbucks, or sandwich shops, or burger joints, or BBQ shacks, or neighborhood diners, in his increasingly rote and pathetic attempts to “connect” with “real people.” Obama, we have been told, is frustrated, “restless,” bored with the responsibilities and chores of office. He thinks of himself as the bear—intimidating, wild, untamed, roving—escaping his den. But he is flattering himself. 

Obama is not the bear. He is the cub: aimless, naïve, self-interested, self-indulgent, irresponsible, irresolute. The bear is in Moscow.

...I feel as though [the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton] are lost in the postmodern funhouse of the Kremlin’s “non-linear war,” as though they, too, are casualties of Russian Maskirovka, of deception, concealment, propaganda, and disinformation.

“Non-linear war is the means through which a geopolitical raider can leverage his relative weakness,” writes Peter Pomerantsev. “And this vision appeals to a very broad constituency across the world, to those full of resentment for the West and infused by the sense that the ‘global village’ model is a priori rigged.” Russian manipulation of narrative and image, of 
wishful thinking and gullibility, has been such a success that the Obama administration actually believes it has accomplished something. It hasn’t. On the contrary: President Obama has relinquished American standing, neglected America’s responsibilities as the guarantor of international security.

...Well, there is no getting around it now. “Obama contends with arc of instability unseen since ’70s,” says the Wall Street Journal. Militias and rogue generals in Libya, Hamas versus Israel, Hezbollah and Assad and Iran against Sunni rebels and the Caliphate, the prospect of an Iranian bomb, war in Ukraine, withdrawal from Afghanistan, China bullying its neighbors—such is the extent of global disorder today."