The War Before the War

Why This Book Was Written ?

This book was born of a question that for a long time I was unable to answer in a way that satisfied me, and that was put to me, in different versions, by people with no professional connection whatsoever to defense: are we, or are we not, at war? Those who ask it distrust their own question. They suspect that it is exaggerated and suspect, at the same time, that it comes too late. That hesitation is not ignorance. It is a correct perception that the available language has ceased to serve. We have words for peace and we have words for war, and what Europe has been going through since 2014, with growing intensity after February 2022, does not fit comfortably into either of them.

The honest answer is that the question is badly framed, and that its poor framing is, in itself, one of the outcomes the adversary seeks. As long as public discussion is organized around a binary alternative, every concrete event — a severed cable, an airport closed after sightings of unidentified aircraft, a coordinated social media campaign during an election, a fire at a logistics warehouse — will be classified by default in the category of peace, because it does not look like a war. And the accumulation of events that individually do not look like a war produces, after a few years, a situation that no longer looks like peace either. It was to describe that interval with rigor, and not to dramatize it, that I decided to write.

I wrote it, second, because I became convinced that there is in Portugal a dangerous gap between the country’s real exposure and the public attention that exposure receives. Portugal’s Atlantic position, the extent of its exclusive economic zone, the presence of landing stations for submarine cable systems, its energy dependence, and its role as a hinge between the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean give the country an exposure profile that is not that of a peripheral state distracted from the European problem. It is that of a state located at one of the points of convergence of the infrastructure on which the day-to-day functioning of the continent depends. The Portuguese debate on defense, when it exists, is almost always organized around spending percentages and very rarely around the prior question: spending to protect what, against what threat, with what priority, and within what time frame. [1]

There is a third reason, and it is the one that seems to me the strongest today. Hybrid confrontation is, before it is a problem of means, a problem of understanding. A sabotage operation produces a limited material effect and a political effect that can be very large; the difference between the two is determined by the way the targeted society interprets what has happened to it. A society that recognizes the pattern, that knows how to distinguish the frequent accident from the rare act, that mistakes neither malfunction for attack nor attack for malfunction, and that turns each incident into neither panic nor indifference, is substantially harder to coerce than a society with the same material resources and without that interpretive capacity. I wrote this book in the conviction that attentive reading is, in this precise domain, a modest but real form of defense...