So much for the ‘hot peace’ scenario of power relations in the post-post-Cold War era. In extremis, the Russia–Ukraine conflict spotlights the interwoven strategic and tactical issues associated with cybersecurity and disinformation campaigns, the virality of misinformation, and the anarchic realm of social media.

As we approach another election in Australia, it’s timely to reconsider the relationship between agencies of cybersecurity, diplomacy and political communication, including multiplatform international broadcasting. Although the Australian people face no imminent existential crisis, unlike the people of Ukraine (or Afghanistan or Yemen), the West’s ‘holiday from history’ is a fast-receding memory and, as the government argues, sharp power and grey-zone threats multiply with greater complexity and proximity.

The war in Ukraine has offered acute demonstrations of familiar verities and new complexities. Through clarity, resolve and authenticity of communication, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has personified core aspects of national power as identified by the realist scholar Hans Morgenthau: national character, morale, the quality of diplomacy and the quality of government. Also of note, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s scripted video message to the people of Russia offers a celebrity masterclass in delivering a counternarrative about the war’s causation and conduct.

The many participants in this information war have different allegiances, propagate contested narratives and, in numerous cases, operate outside state control. Even in outright war, these actors can be persuasive, act as force multipliers or heighten the risks of public alienation, panic and conflict escalation.

Public–private partnerships have been important in combating malware attacks targeted not only at critical infrastructure but also at social scaffolding. Writing in the New York Times, David Sanger likened the role of Microsoft in the Ukraine war to that of the Ford Motor Company in World War II when it converted automobile production lines to turn out Sherman tanks.

An onslaught of cyberattacks by swarms of volunteers from around the globe has blurred the boundaries between ‘patriotic amateurs’ and state-backed hackers. The volunteers acted in support of Ukraine or Russia, creating ‘widespread disruption, confusion and chaos’, with the risk of provoking further retaliation and an escalation of conflict.

The ubiquity of near real-time imagery of the Russian assault from among the three-quarters of the Ukrainian population equipped with smartphones makes this a war unlike any other. As The Economist observes, social networks not only spread information—and disinformation—but also encourage members to express their own views, ‘turning them more easily into participants’.

State-owned international broadcasters such as the BBC have recognised the imperative to reach audiences in Russia and Ukraine to counter Kremlin propaganda, no matter what barriers to entry there might be as a result of political censorship or technological disruption. Vatican Radio and the BBC boosted their long-distance shortwave radio transmissions to reach Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking audiences after the Kremlin blocked the British broadcaster’s online channels.

Even in the era of ostensibly secure virtual private networks, shortwave radio offers unique attributes: the ability to transmit free to air over thousands of kilometres without interference; the ability to be heard from cheap and widely available portable radio receivers with long-lasting battery capacity; and the guarantee of privacy because, unlike internet-based services and mobile telephony, the location of the radio receiver remains virtually untraceable.

Far from the theatre of physical conflict, pro-Russian narratives and lingering cynicism towards the US and its Western allies still figure in public discourse. The mixed reactions of Asian countries mean the West can’t assume that democracies and other like-minded countries are united over the Ukraine tragedy.

Even in less extreme circumstances, the contest to frame reality and promote rival visions of the international order takes on a complex multidimensional character. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged that the long struggle ahead is ideational as much as it is about the relativities of hard power and technological advantage. Among five areas requiring Australian ‘advocacy and agency’, Morrison includes support for open societies, open economies and the rules-based order; cooperation on global challenges; and demonstration that democracies work. Easier said than done.

Australian international relations expert Allan Gyngell writes that it’s difficult to fit values into foreign policy, especially when a nation is under stress. But one test of democratic legitimacy is the extent to which hypocrisy is kept within tolerable limits by striving to reconcile the state’s interests and its espoused values. This calls for both hard-power discipline and the modelling and projection of foundational democratic principles.

To that end, more is required for a joined-up national strategy that accommodates technology-focused and cybersecurity functions along with manifestations of social and discursive power. In defending against disinformation and contested narratives, we need to think comprehensively. An incoming government should consider establishing a forum for high-level strategic coordination, research and analysis, with eyes on the whole gameboard. It would be informed by but separate from high-security government institutions and able to liaise across the government and non-government sectors.

We need at once to focus on the hard business of cyber defence as well as activities of long-term trust-building and real-time information interventions. I have a particular interest in multiplatform international broadcasting. It remains a statutory function of the ABC but survives in a greatly diminished state compared with its politically influential past as a multilingual regional force in Asia and the Pacific. Elsewhere I have lamented the loss of institutional memory over recent decades and advocated a reappraisal of the latent institutional capacity of the ABC to help shape Australia’s international environment.

What yesterday appeared to be ‘so Cold War’ has become ‘so now’.

Russian rhetoric on a military confrontation with Ukraine has ratcheted up this week, with President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu continuing to develop justifications for an invasion. According to some analysts, the pace of Russia’s military build-up on its border with Ukraine means that Moscow could be ready to invade as soon as next month.

But for Russia specialist Mark Galeotti, war is not Putin’s Plan A or even Plan B, although he agrees that the current massing of Russian forces far surpasses the more theatrical build-ups of the past.

‘He’s clearly giving himself the option of military invasion. But this is a high-stakes attempt to intimidate Kyiv and the West to give him what he’s been looking for for the 20-odd years of his presidency.’

Galeotti says Putin wants a kind of ‘Yalta 2.0’, referring to the 1945 conference at which the Allies discussed the post-war division of Europe. Extracting such a grand bargain from the West would give Russia the security and respect that Putin thinks it deserves and control over a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.

But, he says, ‘it feels like the last throw of the dice from an ageing president who thinks history might not be on his side’.

Galeotti scorns notions advanced by some analysts that Putin is a grandmaster of geopolitical chess, able to checkmate opponents in just a few moves.

He believes that judo—which Putin has a black belt in—provides a much better metaphor for understanding how he operates.

‘He’s a judoka. You go into the ring, circle around your opponent and, as soon as you see an opportunity, you strike. And that is very much Putin’s approach to foreign policy—to create instability in which he will have a variety of different options.’

Escalatory rhetoric is a key part of this strategy; the aim is to create panic, division and misjudgement in Western capitals. Last week, for example, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov introduced an atomic element to rising tensions when he threatened to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the Ukraine border.

Galeotti says that’s essentially a meaningless statement, since Russia already has tactical nuclear weapons stationed along most of its land border. Still, it’s an example of what he terms as the classic art of Russian ‘heavy metal diplomacy’, where Moscow uses its military as an instrument of coercive statecraft.

‘The Kremlin is saying to the West that Russia is serious, and that it has the least to lose from a conflict.’

Galeotti maintains that the situation is most likely to be resolved by non-military means. ‘But there is an asterisk here,’ he says. ‘What might seem to us like common sense might not seem so to the old and paranoid men in the Kremlin.’

People like Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Russian Security Council who’s effectively Putin’s national security adviser, almost certainly believe that the West aims to isolate and dismember Russia, he says.

‘So it’s not that Putin is insane or a zealot or an ideologist, just that we don’t know what he’s being told and what this rational, pragmatic man may think is a pragmatic move.’

Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leader Leonid Brezhnev was famously told by his defence minister, Dmitry Ustinov, that it would be over in six months. Similarly, there are a lot of assessments coming out of Russia right now claiming that a war in Ukraine would be over in a week.

But Galeotti notes that Ustinov, who was not a military man, actually sat on detailed planning from the general staff, blocking the right information from getting to Brezhnev.

In the current context, Shoigu is a different man, who will probably be considering sober military calculations of costs and options. ‘When I was in Russia a month ago, I got the sense from military contacts that he’s sound, not just a placemat,’ Galeotti says.

And many of the other assessments rolling around the Russian media landscape can be dismissed.

‘These are not from serious people in the national security community, but rather from toxic TV commentors—geopolitical shock jocks who compete with each other to say extreme things but have no traction on political process.’

But if Putin did decide to go to war, what would the battle plan look like? Galeotti argues that Moscow is probably not interested in taking terrain in Ukraine. It would more likely mount a punitive attack, a blitzkrieg involving missiles, artillery and air power.

‘The aim would be to force Kyiv to capitulate and to accept political guarantees that would lock Ukraine into Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia could then withdraw without getting bogged down fighting in major cities in eastern Ukraine.’

But the problem for Russia, says Galeotti, is that the neatness of this plan may not survive on-the-ground realities. Ukraine has built up its territorial defences, training local militias to fight for their villages and towns.

And the political part of an invasion is a gamble for Russia. If Kyiv refuses to surrender and fights on, what then?

‘At this point it becomes difficult for Russia, because how does it avoid getting bogged down in fighting street by street? That’s why people don’t think there will be a war: because it will be hard for Russia to translate it into political gains.’

Galeotti also notes that a war is unlikely to be popular domestically, at a time when Putin’s popularity is at an all-time low of 32%. Kremlin officials will have a sense of this, he says, because they are the most assiduous pollsters in Russia.

‘There’s no enthusiasm in Russia for some kind of grand imperial adventure, even though Russian media will pump out the same old rhetoric about Ukrainian neo-fascists and genocide against Russian speakers.’

Support is likely to evaporate further if the US follows through on the crippling sanctions it has been considering in response to an attack on Ukraine.

So, what would it take for Putin to climb down from escalatory rhetoric to some kind of political solution? Galeotti argues that there needs to be something on the table that Putin can spin as a victory of some kind. The challenge will be finding the sweet spot without delivering any substantive gains to Russia.

‘If gains are made, then the message for Russia and perhaps China is that this is the new world order in which the West will keep buying you off if you become too inconvenient.’

Witnesses appearing before the US House of Representatives’ impeachment hearings have regularly connected Russian aggression in Ukraine with US national security. The overwhelming international consensus is that Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in hostilities in Donbas are contrary to international law and norms. The US’s military and diplomatic support of Ukraine against Russia is clearly crucial to the Ukrainians. But just how is Ukraine important to the national security of the United States?

Fiona Hill said that Ukraine ‘plays an important role in our national security’. David Holmes declared that ‘it is critical to our national security that we stand in strong support of our Ukrainian partners’. Those judgements are consistent with other witness testimony. It seems so obvious! However, Ukraine is mentioned only once in the 2017 US national security strategy, as evidence of Russia’s ‘willingness to violate the sovereignty of states in the region’.

The Russian threat to Europe is seemingly palpable. Russia maintains a massive conventional military presence, particularly ground forces, just across the shared border and is actively seeking to disrupt the enlargement of the EU and NATO and to weaken the position of the US in Europe. The employment of military force in Ukraine carries an unambiguous message to Europeans that Russia is prepared to defend its interests and security militarily.

But it’s also at least plausible that Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Crimean annexation are defensive actions designed to warn Eastern European states against becoming a source of security threats. Crimea’s annexation can be viewed as a pre-emptive move to counter encirclement and containment and prevent the loss of strategically important Black Sea bases and access to the Mediterranean.

European and US security have been regarded as indivisible for at least a century. While Russian aggression in Ukraine could be intended to destabilise Europe, the Europeans themselves don’t seem that alarmed. Breaches of international law by invasion and annexation are a concern, but they don’t regard it as a direct threat. As Tormod Heier has observed, even after Crimea few NATO members ‘perceive Russia as an existential threat’.

Nuclear weapons aside, Russia doesn’t pose a direct military threat to US territory in the same way it does to Europe. The US’s nominal GDP is 13 times Russia’s and its military expenditure is more than 10 times greater than that of Russia. Russia’s power-projection capabilities, by sea or air, don’t compare to those of the US. So the US’s national security interest in Ukraine cannot rationally arise from the perception of a genuine conventional threat to American territory.

For the witnesses at the impeachment inquiry, the threat therefore must be indirect. The US has evinced a concern that Russia presents a general threat to the rules-based international order. If the world were actually governed by a set of universally observed rules, particularly relating to the use of military force and the conduct of war, a breakdown of such rules could be said to indirectly affect US security.

Military adventurism and disregard for national sovereignty in Europe dragged America into two world wars. It could be argued that enforcing bans on such behaviour is in the US’s national security interest. Except the US has consistently undermined the rules set out in the UN declaration specifically addressing those matters and ignored the Security Council resolutions that are the consensus application of those rules. Its actions with respect to Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, sovereignty over the settlements, and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital are not only the stand-out examples, but they also draw obvious comparisons with Russia and Crimea.

The ideological struggle of the Cold War was perceived as a zero-sum game; the loss or gain of distant territory by a third party through military action or subversion was regarded as a weakening of national security.

The phrase ‘national security interest’ still carries the automatic weight of that era, although the original substantive context that gave it a global application has vanished. The term today is used reflexively and uncritically to justify an increasing range of actions.

In his 1941 work The impact of war, distinguished Harvard political scientist E. Pendleton Herring identified the American tendency to treat peace and war as distinct situations as the reason the US was never prepared for the next major war. It was an important insight. Herring popularised the term ‘national security’ and pioneered thinking on a greater emphasis on military preparations in peacetime.

Emily S. Rosenberg points out that a number of historians since have observed that after 1945 ‘national security’ became the ‘commanding idea’ supplanting ‘national interest’ and ‘collective security’. The concept was institutionalised in President Harry Truman’s National Security Act of 1947.

Following this, ‘advocates of almost everything and anything scrambled to affix the popular label of national security to particular postwar agendas’. The testimony from officials at the impeachment hearings indicates that it remains irremovable from international relations language.

This is only a problem if it leads to unexamined and lazy, reflexive analysis in strategic policy. There are a number of credible foreign policy and geopolitical reasons that justify the US’s support for Ukraine—like support for human rights, support for humanitarian efforts to end the carnage, or support for the principle of sovereignty. Limiting the spread of Russian influence in Eastern Europe to reassure allies might be another. But to simply use the phrase ‘national security’ repeatedly to enhance the importance and priority of an issue dilutes the concept.

It is commonplace nowadays to observe that the world is becoming more complex and, perhaps, more dangerous as economic and military power relativities continue to shift. In such circumstances it seems prudent to have clarity around national interests and to avoid shorthand terms that tend to discourage analysis and articulation of those interests. National security is one of those terms.