In Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” the protagonist Vadim Baranov — a fictionalized version of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political technologist Vladislav Surkov — articulates a chilling doctrine that has become a defining geopolitical reality. Modern cyber conflict is not about sending a winning message to convince the other side that you are correct, he explains. Rather, it is about creating deep fissures in an adversary’s society, rendering it less cohesive, less unified and ultimately paralyzed by distrust.
As the world navigates geopolitical friction in 2026, this philosophy has been adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing, operating in strategic alignment with Moscow, is waging a sustained campaign of cyber-enabled disinformation against the United States, Japan and the broader Western alliance, as well as audiences in the Global South. The objective is not to promote authoritarianism directly, but to corrode the trust that sustains democratic societies and international cooperation grounded in rule of law, transparency, political accountability and a free civil society.
To understand this form of cognitive warfare, it is useful to revisit the work of 20th-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who diagnosed the mechanics of totalitarian deception with striking clarity. As Arendt famously observed, systematic and constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe the lies, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood, she argued, cannot distinguish between right and wrong and becomes vulnerable to manipulation.
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