Irregular: Flooding the Zone
An antidote to news saturation
Hello from Sydney,
In today’s Irregular column, I would like to touch on a few themes that have been top of mind for us at Geopolitical Strategy — the nature of the news, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, and increasing policy uncertainty.
And, more specifically, how trends in all these areas are making it more and more difficult to stay informed about geopolitics without feeling overwhelmed, losing faith in the truth, or missing the forest for the trees.
If it bleeds, it leads
Starting with the media. It’s hardly breaking news to announce that the news is not the best source of geopolitical insights. Publishing deadlines, fierce competition for eyeballs, tight margins, most mastheads taking an implicit if not overtly political line, and incentives for gossip, sensationalism and outrage all make mainstream media an imperfect source of sober, thoughtful and non-partisan analysis.
This is not to say the media is unimportant. It is vitally important. For informing citizens, holding governments accountable, creating common conversations and — let’s be honest — entertaining us, the media matters greatly.
Nor is it to say that the media is inherently superficial, always partisan or any more biased than any other individual or group of people putting pen to paper. There is an extraordinary amount of outstanding reporting, analysis and opinion — we know because we consume enormous volumes of it every day to produce our Daily Dispatches.
But there is something lacking, at least when it comes to geopolitical analysis. In our view, newspapers often emphasise the things that don’t matter and de-emphasise or miss entirely the things that really do matter. Headlines (and body copy) more often than not focus on the new, literal and outrageous comments of world leaders rather than search for more subtle, contextual and nuanced interpretations of events.
This makes sense. It’s much easier to sell a newspaper, have someone click on an article or like a post if you pick out the most outlandish moments of the day’s events. And it’s much quicker to get to print if you don’t take the time to sit, reflect and do the hard work of analysis rather than just reporting.
“Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here”
No-one understands this better than president Trump. The ultimate marketing man who lives the mantra “all publicity is good publicity”, Trump has worked out how to manipulate the media possibly better than any leader in history.
Steve Bannon, who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign, explained the strategy five years ago. “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never - will never be able to recover. But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.”
Bannon also said “the media is the enemy”. More like a frenemy perhaps. Or at least an enemy in the Godfather sense of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
Either way, the overall result of the media intrinsically incentivised to focus on “noise” combined with a US President actively “flooding the zone” is that we are all going to be drowning in American political news for at least the next three years and eleven months. We know who’s going to be in the headlines. And we know it’s a deliberate strategy of distraction at “muzzle velocity”.
This poses important challenges both for staying informed and, more important, staying wise.
The more Trump dominates the news, the harder it is to separate signal from noise. All politicians are prone to exaggeration, hyperbole and stretching the truth, but Trump goes further than most. Trump is a master of stirring controversy. His foreign policy strategy rests largely on putting pressure on foreign countries, not through stern words from ambassadors in private but via the media (and social media) megaphone. And he deliberately throws out ambit claims, changes course, and backflips to keep enemies on their toes.
In combination, this means the next four years will be dominated by an unprecedented number of foreign policy announcements, many of which will be difficult to decode. And, by “flooding the zone”, much less print space will be devoted to the rest of the world, save for their reactions to the United States.
Interesting times
If we were living in less serious times or if Trump were not proposing such fundamental changes not only to American foreign policy but to the whole operation of the international system, this may not matter much. More news, more crazy stories, more entertainment, so be it.
But the world is not a reality TV show. International relations are probably in their most precarious state since the Second World War. The old order is collapsing and a new one is only now coming into view. The world’s two biggest superpowers are locked in strategic competition that has already caused much economic pain and always carries with it the threat of military confrontation. And the “rest of the world” — so ignored by the media — is increasing in economic and political heft and quite rightly demanding a greater say in international affairs.
Just as one era closes and a new one emerges defined by struggle, competition and war, we risk being completely distracted.
Then throw artificial intelligence into the mix. It’s not just Trump “flooding the zone”. More and more content, including geopolitical analysis, is being generated by robots, rather than humans. While undoubtedly impressive — who cannot but marvel at ChatGPT or resist asking it to make sense of the world or one’s romantic travails — artificial intelligence will always struggle with geopolitical analysis.
Artificial intelligence will certainly get smarter and smarter. But I doubt it will get wiser. Robots may be able to read the world’s books but they will never be able to read body language, read the room, or read between the lines — fundamental skills in interpreting the words, actions and psychological drivers of world leaders and nation states. And even if they could, how could you really trust an algorithm to interpret human affairs?
This essence of this challenge is that geopolitical change is occurring at a pace and scale that makes understanding more important than ever just as sifting signal from noise is becoming harder than ever.
Press released
Our solution is actually quite simple.
We approach geopolitical monitoring and analysis in the same way that diplomatic services and intelligence agencies do. We adopt a similar “realist” worldview, use the same structured analytic techniques, and write with the same pithiness, precision and pragmatism. And we take to heart Secretary of State George Marshall’s advice to George Kennan upon becoming the State Department’s first director of policy planning after the Second World War: “Avoid trivia”.
Our Daily Dispatches are modelled on how intelligence agencies brief world leaders every morning: global, strategic, succinct, able to be read in ten minutes, and focused not only on the “what happened” but the “why it matters”. We read tons of newspapers from around the world every day so you don’t have to. And we infuse our analysis with insights we pick up from our ongoing conversations with diplomats, policymakers and corporate clients in all the major geopolitical and financial hubs.
But while intelligence agencies brief leaders on what matters most for a nation, we filter for what matters to business leaders and investors. Although, to be honest, the scope of what geopolitical issues affect business is growing. It goes without saying that trade wars (real, threatened or paused) have direct impacts on companies’ bottom lines and valuations as well as broader market sentiment. Last week’s panicked sell offs proved that beyond any reasonable doubt. But today there are many more traditional geopolitical matters — international security, strategic rivalries and military-industrial competition — that are affecting the entire global economy in ways unimaginable during the recently departed era of globalisation undergirded by American unipolar dominance.
To use the title of a Michel Houellebecq book, there is an inexorable “extension of the domain of the fight”. Great power politics, fracturing alliances, hollowing of international organisations, and every country fending for themselves in a more anarchic system has caused a return to protectionism, with its industrial winners and losers, stock market volatility, and potential to crimp economic growth.
Citizens, corporations and investors alike accordingly are in a bind — they have both a greater stake in geopolitics and yet fewer ways to stay not just informed but wise.
The full story
Many of you are now reading the free version of Geopolitical Dispatch, receiving the first of our five analyses of each weekday’s most important geopolitical events that matter.
This is a wonderful start but it is not the full story. Without upgrading, you only get 20% of the value, miss out on our analyses of important developments across the world (and not just the US), and fail to see the bigger picture. After all, the world is so interconnected that developments on one continent can have direct and serious repercussions on the other side of the planet.
Right now, we are offering full access to Geopolitical Dispatch at 50% off the ordinary price — $95 rather than $190 per year for an annual subscription. And for those who would prefer to try before committing for a whole year, there is always the option of $19 per month.
I would suggest that it is very difficult to get more value for the equivalent of 25 cents per day. You’ll get five analyses every weekday strictly filtered for importance and analysing both geopolitical drivers and business implications. You’ll get a truly global view and not merely an America-centric world of news. You’ll get strategic insights and analysis written by former diplomats that go well beyond the news but without any of the distraction. And, if you’re really disciplined, you could even get your time back — you can level-up on geopolitics in just ten minutes a day, confident that you won’t need to read anything else, which will inevitably be noise anyway.
We’ve done the filtering for you. We’re swimming in the flooded zone so that you don’t have to. And we bring decades of experience advising prime ministers, trade ministers, ambassadors and heads of international organisations to the task.
So if you would like to unplug, reclaim your time (and possibly your sanity), consider upgrading your subscription today.
Good luck with getting through this extraordinary period of flux.
Warm regards
Damien
CEO, Geopolitical Strategy
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