In April of 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but in anticipation of a predictable phenomena, Christoph Laucht and Susan T. Jackson posted a great piece at the History and Policy website on the militarization of pandemic response rhetoric. They noted that “the dominant feature of the novel coronavirus pandemic is the many uncertainties that it creates for national governments and their publics.” In the face of that uncertainty, policymakers start “securitizing” and thus militarizing everything. Language begins to change as “leaders, journalists and the general public alike . . . draw on a highly militarized—often nationalistic —rhetoric” in talking about how to respond to threats. This militaristic language, Laucht and Jackson write, is zero-sum, predicated on “dangerous competition between and within states over what are now scarce resources (for example, medical piracy).” It’s how society responds to uncertainty, but it normalizes militaristic solutions. Laucht and Jackson give plenty of examples: “front-line healthcare staff,” “deployment” of equipment, the Mayor of New York calling a particularly bad day in the city “D-Day,” news organizations narrating the actual presence of the military, showing up to support civil leaders in the “battle” against Covid. The language normalises the militarisation of society, whether or not that militarization is as obvious as the military showing up in person.

I think NATO’s recent promise to retaliate against cyber-attacks as if they were military attacks represents the culmination of this kind of rhetoric, particularly when it can be identified with a targetable antagonist. This geopolitical development is a great case study in the power of political communication. Securitization becomes militarization—militarization that begins linguistically and culminates with actual “boots on the ground.” 

We often think of political communication as speeches and rallies, or even online communication and organising (like that facilitated by data appending and enhancement services, as provided by my client Accurate Append). But geopolitically, political communication is much about displays of power and efforts at intimidation. The Western bloc is responding to Russian cyber-hacking by using its power to define certain actions as acts of war, and intimidating potential adversaries by threatening overwhelming military—and even nuclear—retaliation in response to cyber-attacks. 

NATO formed in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, as the Western bloc nations tried to counter the Warsaw Pact nations and the constructed threat of the Soviet Union. There is no longer either a Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact; in fact, nations in the Warsaw Pact are now in NATO. NATO still exists, and has deployed forces in decidedly non-European geographies like the now virtually stateless Libyan entity and the lost U.S. cause in Afghanistan. 

This past history is important to keep in mind when discussing NATO’s recent aggressive rhetoric concerning cybersecurity. It’s true that Russian and Russia-adjacent activity targeting the U.S. and Europe is hostile and exploitative. This is part of a ubiquitous, multidirectional state of hostility and brinkmanship around communication and information technology, intellectual property, information warfare. 

In June of this year, NATO member states met in Brussels to communicate amongst themselves and send a series of messages to the world. NATO is in full expansion mode and unapologetically sees itself as a global military machine—not just a military force, but a cultural and political force, a facilitator of technology and R&D, part of the solution to climate change and more. During the summit, “NATO Leaders agreed to launch a Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) to boost transatlantic cooperation on critical technologies and to establish a NATO Innovation Fund to invest in start-ups working on emerging and disruptive technologies.”

All of this falls under broad meta-communicative messaging around underlying purposes. In this case, NATO’s purpose is “safeguarding the rules-based international order,” which the organization openly interpreted as hostile to Russia and China, doing so alongside responding to “the security implications of climate change.” Since the end of the Cold War, there’s been a drive to expand the meaning of “security” in order to justify the continued existence of various military juggernauts and a continued military economy. Of course, things like climate change do threaten us, but grouping it as an adversary alongside two traditional rival nations is more than just a simplification—it’s a sophisticated political argument, a communicative (and communicated) position. 

And cyber-security is another lodestone of the general mission—a potentially calamitous battlefield on which NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has said that increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks against its member nations could trigger an alliance response. He further reported that, as a concrete action, the alliance has established a “cyber domain center” in Estonia, which will monitor attacks and share best practices with NATO members. Cyber is now considered “an operational military domain,” triggering a “collective response based on NATO’s Article 5.” Stoltenberg called Russia “aggressive” and mentioned malware attacks on the German parliament and other incidents. 

The idea of an overwhelming military response to cyber-attacks isn’t new. In 2018, perhaps emboldened by the unhinged president’s attitude and rhetoric, the Pentagon suggested using nuclear weapons to answer serious cyber-attacks. Of course cyber-attacks themselves could destabilize nuclear weapons through increasing the likelihood of miscalculation or accidental launches. If cyber-antagonists knew the U.S. or NATO would strike back by starting the apocalypse, would those antagonists be deterred? Or would they rush to hack weapons systems in the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany? 

As a result of all of this brinkmanship and toxic Wario masculinity, we are now potentially at the brink of nuclear war over cyberattacks. It’s important to see this situation as the culmination of acts of political communication; and, which is being met by political communication in turn—communication that is expressing that a cyberattack by a party hostile to any NATO member state will be treated as a “military” attack on all NATO member states. The syllogism is based on Article 5 of the NATO charter, providing that if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, that attack is treated as an attack on every other member of the alliance, justifying necessary actions in response. 

Ultimately, lubricated by militaristic language and securitized rhetoric, NATO has expanded not only its identity in geopolitics, but the authority by which it can destroy nations and people.