Non-kinetic warfare

Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Economic warfare, cultural warfare, information warfare, technological/infrastructural warfare, etc. Things that certainly have impacts on bodies and minds, but less directly and less viscerally than kinetic/armed warfare.

Just heard about the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and found a little snippet of it that I think is worth highlighting here. Seems to be about establishing a basis for the president to issue sanctions against state actors who violate human rights or demonstrate corruption to certain extents. By presidential decree:

I therefore determine that serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

I hereby determine and order:

Section 1. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in:

(i) the persons listed in the Annex to this order;

(ii) any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General:

(A) to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse;

[...]
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Goes on to list other qualifying grounds for imposing sanctions, although I'm still not sure precisely what category of actors can be sanctioned, although the semantics are explicitly broad:

Sec. 6. For the purposes of this order:

(a) the term “person” means an individual or entity;

(b) the term “entity” means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.
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Also not quite sure explicitly and concretely what this allows the president to do re: "blocking" the "property" and/or "interests" of a given person. Again it seems pretty broad by intention.

Here's another interesting bit, seemingly saying that due process, if I understand that term correctly, may be bypassed if it is deemed deleterious to the effort of the sanction:

Sec. 7. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render those measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in this order, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to this order.
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Goes on to grant to the Secretary of the Treasury some of the abilities bestowed by this act, as well as the ability of further delegation.

This final bit I don't understand:

Sec. 13. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
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Anyway, this would be just one non-kinetic means of inflicting damage to some target actor - or even by extension a population, intentionally or otherwise.

Other examples of non-kinetic warfare are provided by the Russian intelligence agencies behind IRA, presumably some of the pseudonymous hacker/hacktivist groups at play, including those targeting critical infrastructure, etc.

So I guess the point is this: If there is a widespread enough consensus, implicit or explicit, that all-out kinetic war in such an integrated world is worth avoiding, there would seem to be an increased pressure put on other means of coercion and damage infliction.

Not familiar enough with proxy wars and private military companies to really comment on the state of kinetic war today, but it does seem like kinetic war is no longer the primary medium of international conflict, seeing as it too readily threatens to compromise the whole hyper-integrated global system, which isn't to say that none of the other types of warfare don't.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Do you see any promise in a good-cop/bad-cop approach of [economic] cooperation/sanction, in ostensible efforts of the U.S. to build up a unipolar liberal democratic world order, without having to regularly exercise military force?

Which isn't to ask if you think there should be a unipolar liberal democratic world order. I'd personally rather see a multipolar one, but that seems even more difficult to comprehend.

edit: bracketed text. Economic cooperation in general.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
I think there's a whole spectrum of influence ranging from moral imperative to violent coercion under war and conquest, and that they have been at least somewhat effective, since theyve brought us to where we are today.
 
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