Time Magazine published a surprising article by Richard Stengel, who previously served as Obama’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2014-2016, which can casually be referred to as the US’ infowar czar. Titled “Putin May Be Winning the Information War Outside of the U.S. and Europe”, this former diplomat raised the alarm that the US-led West’s information warfare campaign about Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine isn’t winning hearts and minds across the Global South like it was expected to do. To the contrary, the majority of humanity supports Moscow’s military-strategic goals.

The US’ former infowar czar doesn’t attribute responsibility for this to the West’s manipulative perception management campaign about Russia that incorporates a mix of facts, fake news, and wishful thinking but instead ridiculously blames what he describes as those countries’ so-called “unfree internet”. According to Stengel, governments like India’s and Turkey’s censor the media by only airing Russia’s interpretation of events while completely ignoring Ukrainian President Zelensky’s. He doesn’t mention, however, that one of CNN’s US intel sources admitted that every one of his public appearances is literally an “information operation”, or in other words, pure propaganda.

Moving along, Stengel then rants about what he considers to be Russia’s “top-down, clumsy, and slow” messaging to international audiences, totally ignoring that it’s this exact same style of messaging that he criticized that the Global South is so receptive to. He also ironically tried to discredit Russian media’s fact-checking of US-led Western Mainstream Media’s fake news about their country but inadvertently ended up discrediting his own civilization’s such efforts against Moscow. In Stengel’s mind, Telegram is also one of the primary reasons why Russia’s messaging has been so effective across the Global South, principally because its voices can’t be censored like Facebook and Twitter censored RT and others.

Put another way, Stengel hates Telegram because it won’t do the US-led West’s political bidding by participating in their infowar against Russia by censoring that country’s voices and thus manipulating its users by depriving them of alternative sources of information that challenge his side’s claims. That’s exactly the stance that one would expect a US infowar czar to take since his side’s unipolar liberal-globalist worldview is inherently totalitarian. The Global South is well aware of this after its people have been victimized by the US-led West for centuries, which is why they instinctively distrust whatever its talking heads say and are thus much more trusting of the Russian interpretation of events by default.

The majority of humanity, not the US-led West, has always been the true cognitive battleground, whether regarding the Ukrainian Conflict or whatever else that civilization is spewing propaganda about. Its perception managers rarely realize this though since they’re so indoctrinated by their discredited fascist-supremacist ideology of “American/Western Exceptionalism” that they wrongly assume that their people are the only ones that actually matter in the world. That’s never been the case nor will it ever be, but it’s still surprising when influential figures like Stengel publicly acknowledge this since it’s a de facto admission that their infowar campaigns are systemically flawed from the get-go.

Not only are they wrongly directed towards their captive Western audience, described as such since they’re deprived of consuming Russian media due to their governments’ censorship of it, but the odds are also against them since the much more important audience across the Global South already doesn’t trust them due to their experiences over the centuries. This objectively existing and easily verifiable observation strongly suggests that the US-led West will never win the real infowar against Russia for hearts and minds across the Global South, which is why Obama’s infowar czar is panicking. Stengel knows that the war is lost but he just can’t bring himself to admit it.

Nevertheless, it’ll likely continue being waged despite the impossible odds of it ever attaining victory. That’s because it’s extremely profitable for the many who participate in it. Any attempts to curtail funding for this campaign would likely be met with false claims that it’s “unpatriotic” to give up or that those suggesting this might be so-called “Russian agents”. The anti-Russian hysteria that reverberates across the US-led Western echo chamber is so crazy right now that nobody can imagine it calming down anytime soon, if at all. For that reason, one can easily predict that it’ll continue and will thus remain the profitable slush fund for its participants that it’s always been even though it’ll never succeed in winning.