DISINFO: US military planners recommend an amplified psychological war against China
SUMMARY
US war planners are suggesting that the US should widely expand its own psychological operations against Beijing. A new report by the Financial Times details how high officials in Washington are developing strategies for a new Cold War with China. Military analyst David Maxwell called for a generalised cultural warfare that would include the Pentagon commissioning novels aiming to demonise China and demoralise its citizens, arguing that Washington should bomb the Chinese with stories of wartime deaths of their only children and, therefore, their bloodlines.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate distortion of an article published in the British newspaper Financial Times, which actually reported on a recent Special Operations Industry Conference and not on US officials “developing strategies for a new Cold War with China”. According to the article, most speakers warned that the US is ill-equipped to deal with cyber and hybrid warfare with China and Russia. While some of them talked about psy-ops, they mentioned them strictly in defensive terms, mostly as Western vulnerabilities, but none proposed psychological warfare against China. This is part of a recurrent Kremlin-led narrative to portray the US as an aggressive and destabilising power. You can see other examples of disinformation about US plans and actions worldwide, such as its attempts to cause a massive African migration wave to Europe, its experiments on people in Georgia, its promotion of jihadist terrorism and colour revolutions, its preparations for war with Russia and China or its alleged responsibility in the China coronavirus outbreak.