The Weaponisation of Everything Quotes

“Beijing’s real advantages are foreign greed, short-termism and naivety.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“historian Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Profile, 2020)”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Larger countries that seek to cover every base may well find that it doesn’t matter if you have the latest fighters or even lots of soft power if your infrastructure is especially vulnerable to hackers or your political elite is susceptible to unchecked bribe-taking and foreign influence.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“If the parallel is the Renaissance, then we ought to remember Orson Welles’s possibly unfair but undoubtedly memorable line in The Third Man (1949): ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ These are definitely not cuckoo clock times.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Our very vocabulary is outdated: war, enemy, victory, all these concepts need to be re-thought. Welcome to a potential world of permanent, sublimated conflict, of the political struggle of all against all.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“It would be nice to think that the genuinely global threats that face us – not least climate change – would likewise mean a new, global mindset. The trouble is that human beings are complex beasts, able to cooperate wholeheartedly for one cause while still completing fiercely on another.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Don’t think you can sell yourself as the good guys, or the plucky upstart? Then maybe it’s worth turning, as it seems Putin’s Russia has, to what is in many ways the counterpoint to soft power, the ‘dark power’ of presenting yourself as too dangerous to be worth messing with. After all, making yourself look like the biggest, baddest bully in the schoolyard is another narrative victory of sorts, and can be mobilised to deter resistance and leverage concessions.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Media literacy is as vital a survival skill in the new age as sex education and first aid.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Electorates, though, cannot claim to be the innocent victims here: we have too often and for too long indulged the mountebanks and elected the tricksters. We get the governments if not that we deserve, then certainly that we choose, and in the process we lay ourselves open also to manipulation and disruption from abroad.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“The aim of what the Russians call infoshum, ‘info-noise’, is not so much to persuade people of one line or another as to raise a fog of falsehood, to make it seem impossible to know what is true and what is false. In the process, it becomes all the easier to disrupt other countries and to undermine their will and ability to act with decisiveness.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“During the Second World War, Winston Churchill memorably said that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’. These days, inconvenient truths can also be mobbed by a hit squad of lies, generated and propagated by state media, online trolls and proxies alike.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Indeed, while the age of the mercenary soldiers may or may not be returning, the age of the ‘media mercenary’ is definitely here. Diplomats, spin-doctors, journalists, pundits and writers, lobbyists, scholars, think tanks, NGOs and GONGOs (government-organised NGOs), these are the infowarriors. Thanks to them, we are bombarded with information – news, opinion, gossip, rumour, lies and revelations – at an ever-greater rate.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian who went on to work at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, asked ‘what if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call, telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off — permanently?’ Her view was that this would be an energising wake-up call, forcing countries rapidly to pivot to increase trade and attractiveness to foreign investment. Of course, the risk is that some countries would spread their wings and fly, others crash and burn. And, of course, that China would buy all of the ones in between. Such provocative ideas likely work better on the page than in the field, but they do challenge us all to recognise that current aid strategies have too often been ineffective.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“There is truth in the cliché ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. But as the Somalis learned, there’s little value in knowing how to fish if all your fish stocks have been raided. And as many other marginal communities around the world have discovered, if the fish you catch are then seized by warlords, kleptocrats or other exploiters, then you’re still going hungry. Few Western countries really want to get seriously into the nation-building business, identifying it with the seemingly endless and fruitless US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“If smugglers are crossing your borders with impunity, if hackers seem to be able to make sport of your critical systems without trouble, if gangs are brawling and killing in your streets without fear, then how credible does your state appear, and how likely is it that people will start looking for alternative, radical solutions to their worries?”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Ultimately, though, governments can only be expected to keep up the pressure, and police their own donors, allies and friends, if they are forced to. That is the job of public vigilance. We get the governments we deserve, and if we as voters fail to require our political representatives to protect our national autonomy, then we have no one else to blame.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“So what can we do about it, in this age of what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call ‘weaponised interdependence’? We all need to trade, to invest, to travel and to connect, so the answer cannot be autarky, an attempt to create hermetically sealed economies. The use of economic warfare and positive and negative influence is likely only to increase. The liberal credo that all trade is good and that nations which trade do not war is increasingly unsustainable, as these are no longer binary alternatives.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Maybe the world has become too complex, too knowing for outright imperialism, whether by gun or by chequebook. Yet that hardly means that money does not buy power – arguably quite the opposite. Instead, the plausible goal has to be not rule, but domestication. When nations try and impose their will bluntly, through such instruments as sanctions, they typically fail. Instead, the subtler weaponisation of economic power is through conditioning the target towards useful habits, something the Russians call ‘reflexive control’.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Yet who does much of the bribery in the poorer countries? And where does most of that money end up? Italian supercars, French yachts, London penthouses, Scandinavian money laundries, shell corporations in Delaware and bank accounts in Liechtenstein. Corrupt is in many ways a racket that transfers assets from the poorer Global South to the richer North, but that’s a whole other book.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“The day after delivering an elegant and eloquent defence of sanctions against Russia because of its annexation of Crimea, a British diplomat privately admitted to me ‘of course they are not going to change the situation on the ground. But politicians want to do something, and this is something. Sanctions are . . . public, straightforward. The government can look tough.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, which channelled so many other rivalries and tensions into a single confrontation, one could argue that a post-ideological age is also a deeply conflicted one. Close allies compete viciously for trade deals and a technological edge, for precedence and prestige. If now we have no real enemies, the sad corollary is that we have no real friends, either.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“Every war can be framed as a just one, if left to the warriors.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“According to the Cost of War programme at Brown University’s Watson Institute, in the first 20 years of the twenty-first century, the US’s ‘War on Terror’ – including invading Afghanistan and Iraq – cost the country $6.4 trillion through direct and indirect costs. By contrast, the decade-long Vietnam War cost an estimated $168 billion, or $1 trillion in today’s money. As for the 12 years of the Napoleonic Wars, they cost Britain £831 million in the coin of the day, or £75 billion ($93 billion) in modern terms. Wars aren’t what they used to be; they are rather more expensive.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War

“every war since one gang of cavemen squared off against another over possession of the driest cave has been ‘hybrid’. Only in video games do you win a war by killing every one of the enemy. Instead, wars are an extreme form of coercive diplomacy, intrinsically political acts, ways of imposing your will on another by degrading their ability to resist. Skewering their soldiers and levelling their cities is just a means to an end and is only likely to work when combined with efforts to undermine their fighting spirit.”
― Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War