​The war between Russia and Ukraine is a great example of what happens when you get narrative war wrong.  The biggest problem with narrative war is the semantic overload of the term narrative.  It gets used to mean a lot of different things and many of those meanings matriculate to the discussion of narrative war.  People think that narrative war is about words, or ideas, or story, or framing of a situation in a way that is advantageous for one side rather than the other.  These expressions of narrative have some value when discussing narrative war, but they are insufficient for appreciating the full concept of narrative war theory.  What I plan to do in this post is discuss the fundamental aspect of narrative war by using two examples coming from Ukraine.  The first is what Russia got wrong and the second is what the United States or the West got wrong.  I conclude with my thoughts on meaning.

It is important for me to state that I haven’t spoken with Vladimir Putin, and I have not had access to transcripts of his phone calls or any technical surveillance or intelligence on his personal communications.  My suppositions come from observations of open-source material since the Russian invasion of Ukraine that commenced on 24 February 2022.  With that statement made, let me begin.

Vladimir Putin misread the narrative space of Ukraine in that he seemed to have believed that the Ukrainian national government was weak, and that the president of Ukraine held a tenuous grasp on leadership that could be broken by a large Russian invasion oriented on the Ukrainian capital.  It also appears that the Russian leader perceived the West writ large, and NATO more specifically, to be weak and divided and that a strong and aggressive action, if objectives were accomplished quickly, would result in no effective action against Russia.

Putin had many reasons to believe such things.  CNN provided a poll on the day before the invasion that showed responses from Russians and Ukrainians on a range of questions regarding the issues associated with the anticipated invasion:

• Would it be right for Russia to use military force to “reunite Russia and Ukraine”?
• Would it be right for Russia to use military force if Russia feels threatened by foreign activity in former Soviet countries?
• Do you view Russians and Ukrainians as “one people?”
• Should Russia and Ukraine be one country?
• Do you consider the Soviet Union to have been a positive or a negative thing?
• Does this politician (Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden) embody each of the following characteristics? (Dangerous, Clever, Strong, Decisive, Pragmatic, Responsible, Friendly, Reliable, Trustworthy)

Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?The responses are interesting in that 50% of Russians believed that it would be right to use force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and if Russia felt threatened by foreign activity in former Soviet Countries.  Additionally, Ukrainians saw Putin as stronger, more decisive, and more dangerous than Zelensky.  Data from different Ukrainian political polls showed Zelensky with a 32% approval in November 2021 and 31% approval in December 2021.  That number soared to 91% by February 2022 (I believe that data came after the Russian invasion though the report challenges that reading).

In addition to the numbers, Ukraine was perceived by many people as a corrupt and poorly run country.  Readers may recall that accusations of Ukrainian government corruption were very close to the center of the first impeachment of U.S. president Donald J. Trump.  In addition to perception of Ukrainian corruption, the country had been successfully invaded with little effective resistance in 2014 and 2015, losing Crimea and portions of the Donbas region to Russian aligned or Russian forces.

In addition to perceptions of Ukrainian weakness, the world in early 2022 was just coming out of COVID lockdowns and much of the Western world was torn by political divisions within countries, regional associations like the European Union and NATO, and globally.  It seemed as if every country wanted to move forward and not deal with another tragedy.

Finally, in this regard, the American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan that concluded on 30 August 2021 tore the alliance and humiliated the superpower.  Members of the British parliament called out the United States leadership for abandoning its responsibilities to the Afghan people and to the alliance and debates raged within the United States about the embarrassing images and the ineffectual response to the Taliban regaining control of the country.

I give these points of data to explain why Vladimir Putin might be excused from misreading the narrative space terrain.  His reading seems to have been that Ukraine wouldn’t fight, the leadership of the country would flee, and the West would be too ineffective to stand up against his actions.  Most of that turned out to be wrong.  The Ukrainians have fought, the Ukrainian leadership has stood strong and gained in popularity as a result, and the West has opposed Russia’s actions, though not singularly or effectively.  What did Putin miss?

I reference a poll that was published in The Kyiv Independent in December 2021; the same time as the lowest approval ratings for President Zelensky.  In this poll the Ukrainian people were asked “In the event of an armed intervention by Russia in your city or village, would you take any action and if so, which ones?”  The options included put up armed resistance, civil resistance, go to a safer region of Ukraine, go abroad, do nothing, do not know.  More than half of the respondents said that they would resist in one form or another.  Armed resistance was the single largest response for every region of the country (west, centre, south, east).
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Putin failed to grasp the narrative space of his opponent.  He missed the changes in Ukraine since 2015.  He failed to see that Russians and Ukrainians saw the issues associated with Ukraine and NATO from radically different perspectives.  This meant that his initial plan, as I understand it to have been, was doomed from the start.  That said, he wasn’t all wrong, which leads to the second example.

It is interesting to note that both sides got the same thing wrong.

I do not have a significant social media presence.  If I interact on social media, it is mostly through LinkedIn where I have a network of subject matter experts who often provide really informative material and recommendations.  As Russia invaded Ukraine, I immediately started to see on LinkedIn a lot of comments on the moral outrage of such an invasion and praise for the Ukrainian defenders and the leadership of President Zelensky.  Vladimir Putin was often characterized in many of these posts as a villain.  In addition, there were those who characterized his acts as doomed to failure.  They regularly pointed to the Russian military failures in maintenance, logistics, or tactical accomplishment covered by the media without taking the time to question media accuracy or sourcing.  I warned in those initial days and weeks that it was too early to predict how this would end up.  In response to one article that claimed that Putin’s actions would fail, I replied with the following:
While the author may be right, it is still possible, and maybe probable, that Putin does succeed. This campaign is just a week old and there is much of the story to be told.
My students believe that Americans are impatient for success and that they demand rapid, decisive victories. What this conflict is showing is that the media (of seemingly all nationalities) is impatient and seeking to predict final outcomes from limited data.

About three months later, I expressed the following in posting an excellent summary of the first 100 days of the fighting:
I am concerned that this war will end badly for Ukraine as it becomes the first “Virtue Signal War.” What I mean by the term virtue signal war is a war where people and states make bold pronouncements of support but do little with respect to action. I know that the United States has spent a lot of money on this war and that is a good thing, but nearly 32 years ago, we sent nearly three quarters of a million service members halfway around the world to defend and regain a small sheikhdom that few Americans had ever heard of.
The purpose of our commitment to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was to demonstrate to the world and global bullies that it is unacceptable for the Melian Dialogue to be enacted in the post-Cold War world.
It still amazes me that we haven’t properly stood up and committed ourselves to expelling an invader and reestablishing the borders of a state, not in the Middle East or Africa or Southeast Asia, but very much a part of Europe. This is the place about which we developed the UN charter that informs the world that aggressive war is illegal and not to be tolerated. And, here the world and the United Nations sit and tolerate it.

Russia has a narrative that includes national suffering.  The Great Patriotic War (World War II in America) saw the Soviet Union lose as many as twenty-seven million people (a significant number of which were inflicted by its own government).  The people in Leningrad (now St Petersburg again) were under siege for nearly two and a half years.  Many starved to death, and those who lived shared stories of surviving off roots and shoe leather.  Vladimir Putin was born to a family who lived through that siege.

George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat and historian who served as the deputy chief of mission in U.S. Embassy Moscow in 1947, wrote a long telegram to explain Soviet thinking that was later edited and published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X and with the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”  In that article Kennan gave one of the best expressions of then Soviet narrative space.  My interpretation of his writing is that the Soviet leader was paranoid because Russia, and later the Soviet Union, was always surrounded by enemies, but the Russian and Soviet people persevered through patient suffering.

My primary point is that the Russian narrative has built in a conception of the ability and need to endure suffering for the sake of the state.  Russians are narratively prepared for a war of attrition.  They believe they will win such wars, because they have won such wars.  The Russians defeated the will and the force of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 through drawing him into the heartland of Russia, wearing his army down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  The Soviet Union defeated the armies of the Third Reich Wehrmacht of Adolph Hitler by drawing them into the Soviet heartland, wearing the force down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  By 1945 dozens of Soviet armies were breaking through German units and attacking toward Berlin.

Russians endure and Russians persevere because they must.  It is a core element of their societal narrative.
The West lacks a similar societal narrative.  American military doctrine calls for decisive operations.  The NATO alliance is designed to deter aggression, not to stand up to a military hegemon with control of continental energy supplies and global food security.  This is what the West got wrong.  It misread its own narrative space as it signaled support for a war that it wasn’t willing to actually fight: only support.  All of the media personalities, pundits, and early proclaimers of Putin’s folly and Russian defeat failed to understand the power of power.  Military commitment means something.  The willingness to inflict violence month after month and year after year means something.

If the West wants to defeat Vladimir Putin and see Ukraine as a viable and capable part of Europe, then it will require more than virtue signals.  It will require troops on the ground, aircraft in the air, and ships opening and controlling the free flow of grain and energy.  It will also require the disentangling of European energy resources from a single oppositional provider.  Is the West actually willing to do that or will it simply continue to virtue signal its support for Ukraine until Ukraine is attritted and/or exhausted?

Narrative isn’t just about words and stories.  It is about understanding the narrative space terrain on which one operates.  Who are we and who is our opponent?  What is our narrative regarding war?  How much are we willing to suffer for what we say we want?  Understanding yourself and your opponent is why narrative matters.  If narrative space terrain is understood, it can inform us how we will behave and how our opponents will behave.

Narrative war is about shaping and changing the narrative space terrain.  China and Russia have waged a seventy- and hundred-year war, respectively, to change the American narrative space terrain.  They have been successful in achieving some significant gains.  I cite two different Quinnipiac polls.  One that showed shortly after the beginning of the invasion that only 70% of Americans said that U.S. troops should get involved if Russia invaded a NATO country.  While that number may seem high, it should be much closer to 100% given that this is a treaty obligation.  The other poll, taken more than a week later, showed that number had risen to 80% when the question reminded participants of NATO obligations, but it also showed that 38% of the American respondents would leave the country rather than stay and fight if the United States were invaded.  It is important to compare that with the fact that two-thirds of the U.S. military in the Vietnam War era (1964-1973) were volunteers and only one third were conscripts which often contradicts what most people think about the military draft during the Vietnam War.  The questioning of defending an allied country or fighting for one’s own country shows the success of transforming the American narrative space terrain.

A proper understanding of narrative space terrain is crucial for any conflict that will involve suffering whether that suffering is economic, emotional, or physical.  This is why a proper understanding of one’s own society matters.  Who are we?  The answer to that question matters.  If you believe that your country is corrupt and systemically flawed, then why would you be willing to suffer for it?  On the other hand, if you believe that your country is the bastion of freedom, the arsenal of democracy, the shining city on a hill, then you will probably be willing to make those sacrifices.
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Vladimir Putin didn’t understand his opponent’s narrative, but he did understand his own.  Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity has risen, but so has Putin’s.  Can Zelensky rely on a Ukrainian narrative of long-term suffering for success?  Putin knows that he can rely on Russia’s narrative of stolid perseverance.

The year 2020 has been a great year for me personally and professionally, but it has also been a tremendously disappointing and frustrating year for me as a citizen of the United States of America.  I have been studying ISIS and related extremist ideologies for many years now.  I recently completed a doctoral dissertation on how weaker actors like ISIS use narrative to achieve their objectives: narrative war.  As I have watched the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests and riots associated with controversial police actions, and the presidential campaign, I have been both shocked and profoundly disappointed by the obvious presence of narrative war actions in all of these events and I have been a bit taken aback by the lack of understanding of these very techniques by many of the smartest commentators on news and politics.  Each of these people use the word narrative a lot and they talk about “the narrative” or “a narrative” and yet like in the movie The Princess Bride, I cannot help but say to myself, “You use that word a lot.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  I want to provide my observations of how narrative war is playing out in America in 2020 and how we should expect to see it play out in the future.

I truly hate that I have to say this, but I believe that I do have to say this.  I am not making a political statement in favor of one narrative or another.  I hope that I am conveying the nature of each narrative honestly and openly and doing so without putting my finger too heavily on the scale.  I clearly have an opinion and bias.  I know the narrative to which I adhere; however, I am still trying to present each narrative so that people who ascribe to the other two can better understand what they are hearing and seeing.  More importantly, I want people to know why we cannot seem to talk across these narratives and why each group sees the others as either stupid or evil.

I will briefly describe narrative and story and then I will discuss how various parties use story and narrative to move toward their intended objectives.

The U.S. Military describes narrative in its manual titled Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency (2018) as “an organizing framework expressed in story-like form.  Narratives are central to representing identity, particularly the collective identity of religious sects, ethnic groupings, and tribal elements.  They provide a basis for interpreting information, experiences, and the behavior and intentions of other individuals and communities.”  In essence, a narrative is how a person or group interprets events: it is the filter through which we see or understand the world.  Dr Ajit Maan regularly emphasizes that narratives are not about facts or truths, but about how we interpret those facts and truths.

Most people intuitively grasp the meaning of the word story.  We have heard, read, and seen them portrayed our entire lives.  We regularly tell ourselves stories inside our own minds.  The five parts of story come from Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives (1969): actor, action, goal or intention, scene, and instrument.  We use stories to make sense of the world and most importantly they are used to solve for problems of dissonance between what we expect from the world and what actually happens.  Some people call versions of these stories excuses and maybe they are, but they are also our internal means of solving for dissonance.

Each society has a narrative.  As I will explain in a few paragraphs, the United States of America has three such dominant narratives in 2020.  The expansion of important narratives contributes to the problems we see on our streets.  Each governing person, party, or ideology offers a story for how that person, party or ideology will solve the dissonance for the various voters, citizens, or subjects and help them to achieve what seems to be the objective of the societal narrative.

In narrative war, a narrative entrepreneur also recognizes the dissonance that exists between the societal narrative and the governing story and seeks to further disrupt that story and by so doing weaken the connection between governor and governed.  An objective of such disruption is displacement – moving the governing entity from a given place, service, or function.

What about America?  An American narrative might be the American Dream.  That narrative could be simply defined as America is a land of opportunity where average people can make of themselves whatever they want through hard work and great ideas.  This is a narrative that has been created over generations with numerous stories and experiences as support.  It is promulgated with millions of testimonials of hardworking women and men who achieved more than their parents through dedicated commitment.  Every weekend, millions of people watch sports events where they hear stories of disadvantaged youth with bad family situations whom they watch as elite stars with large salaries and lucrative product endorsements.  Every political candidate in America, either through a personal story, or by attacking the story of the opposing candidate seeks to connect with this narrative.  I think there are currently three powerful versions of this American Dream narrative: America is Awesome, I Have a Dream, and 1619.

I will explain each of these narratives, but first I want to address the meaning of powerful or dominant narrative.  Every country, nation, or state has multiple societal narratives.  Like in linguistics where every language is made up of multiple dialects; however, there is usually a dominant or standard dialect that the majority or plurality of speakers use, the same is true of narratives.  Every society has a dominant or standard narrative that seems to be common.  For most of American history there tended to be a dominant and subordinate narrative.  In 2020, I believe there are three narratives that have some level of equal significance.
America is Awesome is a play on the song title from The Lego Movie, but I also think it captures the meaning of the narrative.  The narrative is based on a premise of opportunity.  This is the belief of America’s divine founding, inspiration, and destiny.  Phrases like manifest destiny, a city on a hill, the indispensable nation, an arsenal of democracy, and others capture the gist of this narrative.  America is blessed.  People come from all over the world and in America these people can achieve and enjoy their greatest possibilities.

I Have a Dream comes from the famous speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr on 28 August 1963.  This speech captures the heart of the narrative which is a vision yet unfulfilled.  The foundations of America are good, but the realization of that original vision is yet to be.  The foundations may need some repair or amendment and the structure needs to be made true, plumb, and square and then that dream may be realized.  It is the dream of achieving America is Awesome for all Americans, because if America is Awesome, it hasn’t yet been awesome for everyone, but it can be.

1619 comes from the name of the 1619 Project of The New York Times that began publication in August 2019.  The root of this narrative is that the founding of America was flawed.  This is an argument of power relationships.  White European settlers and colonists established a system where non-white, non-European, and non-Protestant Christians were at a disadvantage.  The very systems established are flawed and need correction.  Every person, organization, and institution attached to such systems are corrupted by association.  To move forward, the structure must be remade with a complete and proper foundation otherwise whatever structure built on such a foundation is flawed.

I want to emphasize that I am not explaining these narratives to express why people are different, but why for each person his or her narrative is right.  She is correct for her.  It is only once we realize this that some level of productive discourse can begin.  A person who holds that America is Awesome needs to see that a 1619 person is right and try to see the world from that perspective.  The 1619 person is not being cynical and manipulative when he says that there is systemic injustice.  He really believes it to be true and from the 1619 perspective, he is right.  The same holds true for the 1619 person looking at the America is Awesome person.  She is also right.  Now to use politics as an explanation of what happened this year.

I believe that most presidential campaigns prior to 2008 were discussions over which candidate’s story best solved for the America is Awesome narrative.  Even the 1860 campaign was about who could best solve for the greatness of America and make sure most Americans could enjoy that greatness.  We could debate president for president, but most presidential candidates held to the greatness of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and then later Abraham Lincoln.  In 2008 and 2012, I believe the narrative shifted, but it shifted for both candidates.  Both candidates crafted stories of how they could solve the dissonance between experience and the I Have a Dream narrative.  Maybe this was primarily generated by the candidacy of Barack Obama, but I believe that many Americans, and especially the media and academic institutions, came to believe that there were numerous flaws in the America is Awesome narrative.

The 2016 campaign was probably the first campaign where the two presidential candidates had stories solving for dissonance in two different narratives.  Donald Trump returned to the America is Awesome narrative with his catchy Make America Great Again slogan.  It was simple and attractive to many who still believe in the America is Awesome narrative.  Hillary Clinton sought to develop a story that connected to the I Have a Dream narrative as did Barack Obama.  The attempt to solve for two different narratives is part of the tremendous division following the 2016 election.  Because the two different camps addressed two different narratives neither side believed the other’s explanations for events.  The two groups are not from two different worlds, they were and are from two different narrative worlds.  This is like the 6 October 1967 Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” where the Enterprise crew interacts with a parallel universe.  Neither side fully understands the other.

The 2020 campaign has faced an even greater divide.  If seen on a spectrum, America is Awesome is on one side and 1619 is on the other with I Have A Dream in the middle.  Though I don’t believe that Joe Biden fully embraces the 1619 narrative, many of his surrogates do and many of the various media outlets do.  In this sense, the narrative divide in this current election is even greater and the cognitive dissonance following the election will be more significant as a result.

What does this have to do with narrative war?  As the year unfolded, each side sought to disrupt the story-narrative resonance of the other.  1619 sought to disrupt the America is Awesome story-narrative resonance by expressing loudly and clearly the problems with America as various police events unfolded.  In most cases, these efforts were peaceful; however, more aggressive elements expanded the disruption into literal displacement through acts of aggression that led to the actual displacement of police precincts or police action in some cities or parts of cities.  1619 adherents displaced certain article, voices, and organizations from social media platforms.  America is Awesome adherents sought to disrupt the 1619 story-narrative resonance by implying or stating that such acts made the individuals involved outside the definition of Americans and thereby displacing them from conversations.

My concern is that neither side effectively accomplished their goals as neither side actually understands the other.  The efforts at the disruptions and displacements worked primarily from the perspective of the actor and not the audience.  People who rioted did not displace those who believed America is Awesome and those who chastised and called out looters did not actually reach those who believe that the entire system is corrupt.  At best, these actions served to polarize those of the I Have a Dream narrative and further separate the two camps.

Regardless of who wins on 3 November 2020, the incredulity of the other side will be greater than in 2016.  Both sides will claim that the winning side cheated, was corrupt, manipulated the process, etc.  Both sides will continue to seek to disrupt the story-narrative resonance and there may be greater efforts at displacement whether that is through social media, mainstream media, protests, riots, or worse.
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I believe that for America to become one country we need to have a single dominant narrative, one that both parties agree to solve for.  I believe that the effort to reclaim such a position must begin with every person seeking to understand the correctness of the narrative of others.