The internet has changed how political wars are fought by extending the disruptive capabilities of technology and tactics previously reserved for intelligence operations to broader events. The resulting epidemic of propaganda, performative lunacy and means-to-an-end public manipulation has redefined crisis management by redefining crisis. As longtime Washington columnist Lisa Van Dusen writes, that challenge has defined Joe Biden’s presidency. 

Lisa Van Dusen

In her excellent 2018 study of presidents under pressure, Leadership in Turbulent Times, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin imparts a to-do list gleaned from the similarities in approach of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to governing in times of crisis. “Anticipate contending viewpoints,” “Shield colleagues from blame,” “Rally support around a strategic target” and “Give stakeholders a chance to shape measures from the start,” are the keys to leading through turmoil, per the examples of four titans of American history.

Those entirely sensible pro tips are in our current context what “Always look both ways before crossing the street” would be in a zombie apocalypse, which is less a reflection on the wisdom of Doris Kearns Goodwin — an international treasure — than on the often ghoulish environment in which today’s leaders function. 

There is a temptation these days to attribute the trend in especially wicked, intractable problems that has defined our political and policy realm during the post-Obama period to an unprecedented, disharmonious convergence of scary words depicting mysterious phenomena conspiring to baffle all the usual analytical metrics — radical unpredictability, volatile disruption, disruptive volatility, fugitive tranquility. The previously imponderable assault on our cognitive assonance by horrifying presidencies, ruthless pandemics, treasonous chaos actors and commodified thuggery has been attributed to more metaphysical vandalism than were the crop circles of the 1990s before scientists concluded that their confounding appearance in Gloucestershire corn fields fell “within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes.”

The military manifestation of the global war on democracy and battle for an illiberal world order currently playing out kinetically in Ukraine — unjustified by any rational casus belli and accompanied by a cavalcade of lies from the Kremlin — is just the most violent version of a form warfare the likes of which history hadn’t witnessed until our post-internet era, and which makes President Joe Biden’s turbulence the first of its kind. 

In his first State of the Union address on March 1st, delivered amid the waning catastrophe of the COVID pandemic, the ongoing problem of inflation and the most aggressive power grab against European democracy since WWII, Biden said, “When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.”

Unlike his immediate predecessor (and some previous presidents not profiled in Leadership in Turbulent Times), the current president of the United States is a good man governing in bad times. Not just geopolitical conflict, not just a pandemic, or economic uncertainty or other cataclysms, but a moment in history when any and all events can be amplified, distorted, leveraged and politicized to generate mayhem and undermine the status quo balance of power.

The famous Harold MacMillan response to what constitutes the greatest leadership challenge — “Events, dear boy, events” — has become terribly ironic based on the anti-reality reality that events are not what they used to be. We are now more than 20 years into a century that has seen a shift from analog, organic partisan warfare and geopolitical competition to technologically enabled narrative warfare in which practices previously the purview of intelligence operations — misinformation, misdirection, industrialized mendacity, propaganda posing as journalism, psyops including deception- and spoiler operations — have been mobilized toward the borderless operational goal of discrediting and destroying democracy. That campaign has now segued into the first war in Europe since Slobodan Milosevic waged his bloodbath across the former Yugoslavia through the 1990s.

The war on democracy is, by necessity, also a war on reality because democracy is an inherently attractive option to human beings based on its unparalleled promise of self-government, freedom, quality control, freedom, accountability, freedom and peace. It has taken a global village of bad actors the two decades since the internet changed everything to make something so compellingly appealing that countless people have died for it seem dysfunctional and dangerous. Leadership in turmoil is no longer just about managing events, it’s about recognizing that turmoil itself is now a weapon.

When geopolitical players behave in ways that defy all the norms and reasonable expectations related to un-corrupted choice architecture — incentives and disincentives, power dynamics, observable self-interest and overt probability calculations — it could be that they’re operating within a context of motives, intentions, pressures and affiliations that’s more complex than the face-value one informing diplomacy.

When political players behave in ways that flout all accepted notions of electability, reputation, common sense, and — in some  cases — sanity, they may be acting according to risk-benefit calculations skewed by interests other than the ones to which they’re publicly accountable.

When protests claiming to be peaceful involve the deployment of heavy machinery to paralyze a G7 capital and the use of viral reprehensibility to harass its residents and disseminate a portrayal of democracy as a dystopian circus, crisis management takes on whole new dimensions. When so-called protesters defy rational strategy for public engagement by enraging the public; when they abrogate all standard media relations practices by attacking reporters and raiding homeless shelters, either the protest in question has been infiltrated by agents provocateurs or was never legitimate in the first place. When disruption operations are funded through the transfer of millions of dollars in anonymous foreign money during a global war on democracy, chances are peaceful protest is not the point.

This operationalization of events — a trend in domination most horrendously apparent during the entirety of the Trump presidency, which was clearly a symptom, not the cause, or we wouldn’t still be dealing with this phenomenon — has created a leadership context in which character, judgment, temperament and wisdom are meant to be deluged into irrelevance by narrative warfare and propaganda. As the most powerful, vocal advocate for democracy, Biden has served as a piñata for those tactics in unprecedented levels of manufactured hostility, intractability and obstruction. 

Biden’s presidency, since the first six months of successful, back-to-normal governance ended with the approval-tanking cocktail of inflation, Afghanistan and Omicron, has felt and looked like a daily siege that amounts to the reverse of the one his predecessor waged against the dignity of the office he held, the peace of mind of his fellow citizens and the credibility of the nation he represented on the world stage.

Public opinion polls, which seem to have ceased reflecting remotely plausible collective sentiment sometime after the seesaw of unsavouriness that was the 2016 presidential campaign, remain an asymmetrical power determinant. That surely must make them the single element left miraculously un-hacked by an orgy of anti-democracy corruption capture that has transformed every other source of power in the world’s flagship democracy from the Republican Party to the media to the Supreme Court, and every source of democratic legitimacy from electoral infrastructure to voting rights. 

The resulting vortex of toxic absurdity creates a layer of manufactured nonsense between the president of the United States and the reality in which he must govern. Over the past six years, that alternative, performative “reality” of viral set pieces, crackpot conspiracy theories and tactical intractability has been called “post-truth”, “manufactured crisis”, “Trumpism”, “narrative warfare” (my preferred term) and, in defence and security terms, “hybrid warfare”.  That other great conflict quote — attributed to everyone from lexicographer Samuel Johnson to Senator Hiram Johnson — that the first casualty of war is truth, has also become ironic. For the first time in history, truth isn’t just a casualty of war, but a relentlessly marginalized, misrepresented and maligned target. 

No president in history has had to govern in such avoidably onerous political and policy battlefield conditions. When Abraham Lincoln was faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of ending slavery and reconciling America in the wake of the war required to disengage the country from systemic evil, he was functioning in an information environment that — with apologies to Doris Kearns Goodwin for rounding off — was probably 20 percent lies and 80 percent truth, not the reverse that applies today. What we are living through is not inexplicable, it’s just unprecedented. There’s a difference.

This is not the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War or the Vietnam War. Like Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this turmoil is manufactured to rationalize a pre-ordained outcome, which is a whole new kind of war. And one that redefines the meaning of leadership in turbulent times.     

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.