key: cord-1045325-5ryudifg
authors: Mölder, Holger
title: The prospects of strategic imagination in explaining international security challenges
date: 2022-04-13
journal: Qual Quant
DOI: 10.1007/s11135-022-01386-w
sha: ad1a8574806b2742c3653490e1a9468defbda1f0
doc_id: 1045325
cord_uid: 5ryudifg

This paper will study the potential applicability of the strategic imagination method to international security analysis, which has been previously used to improve prognostic quality in business studies. The method should allow security experts to think about the future by considering “what if” situations, and creatively assess the probability of different threats, even those that appear as improbable to others. The components of the method include strategic fit (the actor’s competence between its abilities and the needs of market), structure (the degree of concentration and maturity), competitive advantages (the extent to which the resources denied to the competition can be gathered, for example, access to novel technology), and strategic focus (i.e., on cost advantages, a differentiated product or exploitation of a market niche), in which a strategic advantage can be obtained by changing rules or deliberately creating turbulence. Strategic imagination can promote an academic discussion on changing nature of global processes like the emergence of global security market and provide nonorthodox methods for advancing a qualitative security analysis. Educated forecasting by connecting today’s developments with strategic imagination offers an important component in building successful security strategies and supportive public policies, especially in what concerns psychological warfare. For example, in the current COVID-19 crisis, main efforts have been made to defend against its national consequences (e.g., various restrictions introduced by individual countries), and less attention has been paid to cooperative strategies that can significantly reduce the global spread of the virus.

The old but durable proverb tells us that generals are always prepared to fight the last war, and similarly the international security studies literature is heavily dependent on the largescale conventional wars between major powers typical to the nineteenth and twentieth century. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated the main security strategic imagination will be examined as a potential method of creative and critical assessment, which should help examine the short-and long-term effects of proposed security scenarios in the policy planning process. The potential use of the method has been tested in a post-Covid security environment. The adjustment of the method of strategic imagination for international security studies, on which this work focuses, should allow security experts to think about the future by considering "what if" situations, and creatively assess the probability of different threats, even those that appear as improbable to others-as 9/11 or the Russian annexation of Crimea once seemed (Mölder and Shiraev 2021; Shiraev and Mölder 2020; Verity and Pinault 2012, p. 153) . Independent variables to test the applicability of the method are relying on alternative scenarios assessing potential strategic developments in the course of time periods, while strategic components (i.e., fit, advantages, structure, focus) refer to path-dependent variables.

The world is entering into a new epoch without strict polarities between great powers, where actors can easily change their affiliations to alliances and communities. The international system becomes less static. 1 The contemporary world is not a chessboard of few European powers as it was just a few centuries ago, or a scripted game between ideologically opposing superpowers as it was during the Cold War. There are no fixed allegiances and polarities, but the borderlines between potential adversaries are always changing and moving, which makes long-term policy developments hardly predictable (Buzan 1999) . New rising international powers like China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, or South African Republic have never been global powers before and can make international relations less subject to Western or European political traditions. In the new globalized world, there will be much more cultural diversity, which also makes its predictability more difficult. Wendt (1999, p. 247 ) by adapting the tradition of the English School of International Relations has paid attention to separate cultures of anarchy-Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian cultures, which address the macro-level patterns to determine relations between states based on what kinds of social arrangements-enemy, rival, and friend-are assigned to describe international interactions in the international system. Following Wendt's cultural roles, Brian Frederking (2003, pp. 367-368) identifies principal paradigms that operationalize these distinctive political cultures in the system-Hobbesian war, Lockean rivalry, Kantian security community, and collective security. In the Hobbesian culture, enmity is a natural relationship between actors operating in the system, and consequently, a war, which may occur at any moment, is a normative political category to protect the national interests and power-seeking ambitions of individual states (Wendt 1999, p. 265; Frederking 2003, p. 368) . The Kantian political culture stresses on interdependence and cooperation, while Hobbesian and Lockean systems focus respectively on wars and competition, but there is a paradigmatic difference between the last two as the Lockean system is based on maintaining status quo where rivals are expected to recognize the sovereignty of each other (Wendt 1999, pp. 279-80) . Wendt (1999, p. 265 ) describes the Hobbesian system as "a truly self-help system", where survival depends solely on military power and actors identify each other as enemies who threaten their existence. Therefore, everyone seeks greater military capability, the military capabilities of others are interpreted in an offensive manner, and the use of force is considered inevitable, necessary, and appropriate. According to Wendt (1999, pp. 265-6) , there exist four macro-level patterns, the Hobbesian political culture is seeking:

• endemic and unlimited warfare, • the elimination of unfit actors not adapted for warfare and militarily too weak to compete, • the unsustainable balance of powers that will be achieved by the lack of inhibition and self-restraint, • Nonalignment and neutrality have been made almost impossible with the only exception of geographical isolation.

After the Cold War, the international system began to build cooperative networks, which indicated the increasing role of Kantian culture in the future security environment. In the Kantian culture, actors are obliged to follow agreed-upon norms and engage in peaceful multilateral decision-making (Frederking 2003, pp. 368-9) . NATO has launched new regional partnership initiatives the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue, and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. Bilateral cooperation frameworks were established for Russia and Ukraine. The European Union launched the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in 1995, followed by the European Neighborhood Policy outlined in 2003. A short Kantian period in the 1990s brought along important conflict resolutions like the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and the end to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, among others.

In international politics, the Global War on Terrorism launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001 was an early warning of the systemic shift from the cooperative Kantian political culture to the principles of adversarial Hobbesian culture (Frederking 2003, p. 376) . The strategy harnessed by the US President Bush after September 11 aimed not to destroy the prevailing international order, but to make it more in line with US strategic interests by changing some core principles of it (Tenembaum 2012) . The controversial military intervention to Iraq led by US in 2003 has divided the unity of the Western world. Many European powers, chief among them Germany, France, Belgium, Spain (after the change of government) criticized US actions, but others, the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark and Poland joined US in the intervention. Even if the aim was not to change the status quo in the international system, it undermined the basic principles of the Kantian security arrangements, collective security and the building of a liberal democratic security community.

Revisionist powers do not recognize the legitimacy of the prevailing international system and seek to alter or to overthrow it (Tenembaum 2012) . The Global War on Terrorism created a favorable environment for the cultural change of the international system purposefully exploited by revisionist powers. The post-9/11 world order has been less cooperative and is rapidly shifting towards a neo-Hobbesian arrangement to be characterized by changing polarities, enhanced power competition and status conflicts (see also e.g., Renshon 2017; Murray 2019; Shevcenko 2019, 2010; Lebow 2008 Lebow , 2010 Lebow , 2018 Bleiker and Hutchinson 2008; Lindemann and Ringmar 2012; Mercer 2006; Renshon and Lerner 2012; Ringmar 1996 Ringmar , 2016 Ross 2006; Sasley 2011) .

The Global War on Terrorism brought with it a strong image of permanent warfare, accompanied by the activation of global arms race and otherization. Diversionary war theories assume that leaders prefer foreign adventure over addressing domestic troubles and key domestic political players want conflict (Yin 2019; Tierney 2017) . In his testimony to the House Committee on Judiciary, US Attorney General John Ashcroft (2001) claimed that "Americans were attacked September 11 by an enemy who does not seek territory, nor resources, nor material gain… the attacks of September 11 drew a bright line of demarcation between the civil and the savage", which added a civilizational character to making a clear distinction between rightful us and outrageous others. In his book "Theory of World Security", Booth (2007, pp. 396-7) warned of a New Twenty Years' Crisis, which started with the war on terror handled by the US administration as a military business-as-usual, distracted the world's most powerful state from the world's most fundamental problems. Brzezinski (2007) emphasized that war against terrorism is meaningless, because "terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare-political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants ", but marketing campaigns to sell fear and uncertainty among the people help demagogic politicians to mobilize public audience to support those policies they want to pursue.

However, the Bush administration probably did not succeed in challenging cultural patterns of the system if there have not been other ambitious status seekers who have not been satisfied with cooperative and peace-oriented efforts of the Kantian system. Another significant step in moving towards the neo-Hobbesian world order was made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech given on 10 February 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, where Putin criticized the United States for monopolistic dominance in global relations and uncontained use of force. Soon, on 11 December 2007, Russia suspended its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe followed by military interventions in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine since 2014.

In April 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced the compilation of a list of unfriendly countries. According to the Russian MFA spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, the list will be drawn up by order of President Vladimir Putin, and there are nine countries listed: USA, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom (Hankewitz 2021). This can be interpreted as a list of enemies in the Hobbesian arrangement, which to some extent remembers US list of state sponsors of terrorism in the Global War on Terrorism. At the same time, Russia has promoted a kind of Westphalian arrangement similar to the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, in which five nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council take greater responsibility over the international system, which would perpetuate Russia's status as a superpower and further enable it to intervene in the decision-making process on global issues (Putin 2020) .

The Xi Jinping administration in China has also strengthened its international ambitions as a revisionist power, which seeks to change the status quo in the international system. Chinese military ambitions in the neighborhood, especially in the South China Sea, became more visible. By new strategically ambitious international infrastructure developments, like the Belt and Road initiative, China showed its economic capability to enter the great power competition (McFaul 2020; Yin 2019). At the same time, while the new global bipolarity between US and China is widely expected based on the historical evidence of the Cold War (Zhao 2019; Khong 2019; Goldstein 2020), there are some obvious differences if to compare the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Xi's China today. Chinese regime is officially a Communist regime but maintains the ideological pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping brought in 1970s-1980s to the Chinese foreign policy. In this respect, Xi's China is a strongly nationalist regime, which sometimes refers to Communist slogans if it supports the nationalist agenda, but it has never sought to spread Communism around the world and its international actions follow the prevention of national interest and economic success in the global market. According to Yin (2019) , party elites expect from their leader above all political stability, economic development, and successful management of Sino-American relations, which is not justified by diversionary war theories.

The US administration of Donald Trump under its populist slogan "America First!" undermined the Kantian world order and intensively attempted to change patterns of the world order (Renshon and Suedfeld 2021) . However, the commitment to pursuing US hegemony over the rest of the world based on inaccurate and romantic narratives from the past could not work in facing a present-day globalized and largely unpredictable world. The containment strategy that is widely believed to be a victorious strategy that ended the Cold War may not produce similar effects in the trade war with an economically viable China (McFaul 2020).

By awakening the trade war policy towards its main competitors, Trump also reviewed the US participation in international agreements. During the Trump administration, the United States pulled out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, the Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership of 2016, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and renegotiated South Korean Trade Deal (KORUS) and North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA). Additionally, Trump threatened to pull out from NATO and the World Trade Organization (WTO), but at the same time concluded the Singapore Agreement with North Korea and wanted Russia to rejoin G-7 (Wolff and Carman 2019) . This all corresponds with the Hobbesian cultural patterns the Trump administration wanted to promote regarding the international system.

The evolving Hobbesian challenge to the post-Cold War Kantian world order undermined confidence-building measures, cooperative security, and security governance initiatives that have been central components of the global international system in the 1990s. Arms reduction became a key word during the Cold War and led to multiple strategic arms reduction agreements between the leading actors of the international system, the United States and the Soviet Union. Differently from the Cold War system, which was heavily controlled by two superpowers, the new neo-Hobbesian system, where national interests of individual powers dominate over universal benefits, does not encourage global arms reduction agreements, downplayed many confidence-building measures from previous security arrangements and simultaneously reinforced the global arms race that started immediately after the launching Global War on Terrorism. Global military expenditure started to decrease after the Cold War, but since the 2000s it started to grow again, reaching the Cold War level of 1988-89 for the years 2006-2007. The expenditure increased 2.6% from 2019 to 2020, which means nearly two trillion USD according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and it was the biggest rise since the global financial and economic crisis in 2009 (SIPRI 2021). 2 Differently from the Cold War arrangement, the new world order lacks its bipolar clarity and universal reason, which can meet multilevel global threats we face today (Booth 2007, p. 397) . By changing the status quo in the unstable environment, revisionist powers may successfully create multiple security dilemmas that are easy to enter, but difficult to exit. In the context of such constructed security dilemmas, fear and uncertainty will easily lead actors to irrational and self-defeating responses, especially if they face urging concerns in their domestic politics.

The intentions of great powers to strategically challenge the cultural patterns of the international system can be hardly successfully addressed if they have not been supported by the ongoing populist wave and the evolutionary trends of Hollywoodization and diversionary politics, which strongly affected social processes in the entire global community during the last decades. The populist wave has gradually accelerated since the global financial crisis started in 2007-2008, followed by the European debt crisis, and the European migration crisis. The latter ones have strengthened the political impact of various neo-nationalist movements in Europe, and the number of proponents of extremist ideologies increased significantly. The revolution in communication technologies together with increased influence of Hollywoodized popular culture to various social processes forced concepts of diversionary policy (Smith 1996; Tierney 2017; Baum and Potter 2019) , which more often appear in contemporary political discourses.

The era we live in today has also often been called the post-truth world, which describes the situation where "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" (English Oxford Living Dictionaries 2021). Alan Knight (2003) refers to the changing role of the investigative journalism in the current post-truth political environment, where it is greatly disadvantaged and manipulated by the pressure from employers, laws, bureaucracies, and defamation and forced to turn into infotainment.Infotainment, at the same time, has a significant impact on public expectations of political outcomes, and obviously a violent conflict can be more efficiently sold than a stable peace. The public debate appeals mainly to manipulating public emotions, without focusing on the implementation of the policies, and by ignoring factual objections, in particular by the repetition of narratives the audience is expected to accept without criticism.

Increasingly market-oriented contemporary society is prone to a Hollywoodization process, in which the reality is constructed according to the most successful strategies of the Hollywood entertainment industry. By Hollywoodization, I mean the introduction of business strategies, similar to those that are set up by the Hollywood motion-picture industry, into international politics, which has significantly helped in building a global security market instead of an institutionally (e.g. by the United Nations) controlled international security governance. Business strategies that are specific to the film industry are also well suited for marketing populist policies that aim to attract publicity. In Hollywood's most successful films, superheroes, often backed by military firepower, step in to save the world from aliens, mutants, supervillains, or other threats (Keating 2013) , by which effective and best-selling image building can influence mass perceptions of politics and force politicians to adapt their policies to the expectations of their audiences.

A typical scenario, which applies for success in the market of infotainment, provides a heroized character with supernatural powers who is saving the world. However, according to a movie scenario, a hero always needs an anti-hero. Consequently, Batman needs Joker, Harry Potter needs Lord Voldemort, and Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarty. In the Hollywoodized political arena, heroized politicians need their demonized anti-heroes too. Similarly, the West in its attempts to emphasize a positive character in the battlefield between good and evil, has demonized respectively Osama bin Laden, Vladimir Putin or Kim Yong Un. Nevertheless, in selling the safety package in the market of Hollywoodized popular culture, anti-heroes might become heroes for those who are not satisfied with mainstream scenarios. At the same time, it would be extremely difficult to seek political reconciliation in a deeply divided society, influenced by heroes and their demons. Steinberg (2002, p. 209) warns: "This Hollywood diet is not innocent; it is constructed on obsession, otherization, fear, and most important, what sells." Consequently, popular culture shows up as an influential curriculum that feeds the popular obsession to consume infotainment. Infotainment has proven to be an effective a path to masses. The typical image-building in the post-truth world offers a combination of real facts, constructed myths, and historical beliefs that should attract the target audience. Very often Hollywoodian narratives have been created around real events, which makes them more marketable but also makes it more difficult to separate the fiction from the fact. The most dangerous result of Hollywoodized policies in the post-truth era would be when conspiracies and fake news create a new normality. For example, in case people are ready to accept to the extent that they are reaching a public consent that the Earth is flat, so it will be, and nobody does not care that the globe is still round.

Diversionary foreign policy is attention-grabbing, symbolic, and popular, where the goals are covered in glamorous and distracting information noise (Tierney 2017) . It has played an important role in Trump's foreign policy agenda in the United States. In this context, President Trump successfully fulfills the criteria of great entertainer and a conceptualized hero, who plays leading roles in the reality show we call international politics. This image was substantially driven by his Twitter appearances (Baum and Potter 2019, p. 753) . Former US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder doubted that Trump had a foreign policy strategy-"the reality is he shakes the tree, and then he walks away " (Toosi 2019) . His meetings with North Korean leader Kim Yong Un grabbed the attention of wide audiences and produced multiple peacemaking narratives about a political breakthrough, but the focus of the meetings has been on the personal relationship between leaders and their nonevidential statements about the progress made during the meeting. In fact, the meetings did not produce any credible result in initiating durable confidence-building measures, which put an end to the North Korean nuclear program, but this was not the purpose of strategic image building of peacemakers, as these meetings meant.

Milestones the Trump administration has set in the Middle East were similarly designed considering marketing effects, with the intent to increase the president's low approval ratings of rather that ensuring a durable peace in the region. In many ways Trump's policy in the Middle East reminded a storyline of George R. R. Martin's "The Game of Thrones", 3 which would fit well with a Hollywood movie theater where the goal is dedicated to the resort surrounded by powerful scenes of killings of anti-heroes from the opposite side-the leader of the Islamic State caliph Ibrahim (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) or the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The missile strikes against Syria in 2017 should demonstrate capacity of US to intervene when a public rally effect is most likely, but simultaneously bring a limited risk of American casualties since no ground troops were involved (Blomdahl 2019, p. 539) . These attractive attacks produced images of strength and power for the attention of the audience in the global security market but did not bring with it any remarkable policy change to the region.

A market-based information building sets criteria which require to be more attractive for the public audience in order to increase sales numbers and in such context myths, beliefs, and conspiracy theories tend to be more attractive than ordinary news. Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, wrote at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics (2020): "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Market journalism can produce a solid bias favorable for the spillover of heroized stories, which can easily spread through unlimited access to numerous social media channels. However, these stories can impact the market-oriented mainstream media as well, by which various popular channels make Hollywoodized narratives competitive to the mainstream policies. Galtung (1969, p. 169) makes distinction between the threat of physical violence, and the threat of violence that decreases mental potentialities-lies, brainwashing, indoctrinations, intimidation among others. This new era opened horizons for less destructive but more efficient manifestations of violence forced by unusual types of warfare which focus on psychological influences that are shaping knowledge instead of physical dominance-cyber warfare, information warfare, psychological warfare besides stimulating various hybrid forms of warfare, where a limited use of force supports the influence operations goaling to destroy the psyche of the opponent rather than focusing on materialist gains that has been peculiar to the historical tradition of human society. The strategic objective of these new types of warfare is to create the atmosphere of fear where the millions can survive physically unharmed, but in profound emotional distress (Ganser 2005, p. 30) . Contemporary conflict in the neo-Hobbesian environment does not necessarily involve actual fighting in military fronts but may appear as a war of narratives (Achcar 2010; Rickli and Kaspersen 2016; Mölder 2016) , which could strengthen images of fear and hatred among potential adversaries. Influence operations are becoming efficient tools for revisionist powers, whose goal is to change the international order by promoting various manifestations of psychological warfare.

Fear and uncertainty in people's minds-as it was described by Thomas Hobbes already in the seventeenth century-can efficiently thrive in today's informational environment and in due course can lead actors to turn to irrational responses in their decision-making. In his dystopian novel "1984", George Orwell introduced a fictional world that remembers a posttruth environment of the twenty-first century characterized by perpetual warfare, omnipresent surveillance, historical negationism (a cancel culture), and massive propaganda forcing popular beliefs.

Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within a measurable distance of its end (Orwell 1949, 25) .

Orwell described a perpetual war, which was fought somewhere far away, and the only information citizens received was information about victorious battles in unseen military fronts. The preceding segment may easily fit into any suitable description of information campaigns related to the contemporary conflict, where fictional newsflashes are becoming an irreversible part of political battles. In the post-truth environment, fake news and conspiracy theories promoted and disseminated by different affiliations of media, effectively compete with well-elaborated strategic forecasts in the security market and may easily advance if they meet public expectations. Systems that have been traditionally used to increase situational awareness can be attacked by either denying or manipulating the information (Jones and Kovacich 2016, p. 81) .

Modern psychological warfare usually introduces a well-designed strategic ambition to influence emotions, judgement, and subsequent behavior of individuals or groups with the main target of knowledge shaped by ideologically motivated image-building, conspiracy theories and artificially created (in)security dilemmas, why Shiraev and Mölder (Shiraev and Mölder 2020; Mölder and Shiraev 2021) called the ongoing global process the Global Knowledge Warfare. Psychological warfare targets three types of public sentiment: a culture of uncertainty (Barber 2001; Schedler 2013; Button 2016) , a culture of fear (Furedi 2018 (Furedi , 2002 Massumi 2005 Massumi , 2015 Wodak 2015; Mölder 2015 Mölder / 2011 , and a culture of irrational responses. Adversarial international actors can easily manipulate information by cultivating long-lasting uncertainty and fear, which can produce irrational demands legitimated by myths and beliefs, misperceptions about each other's intentions, and new unsolvable security dilemmas. Deliberate disinformation, exaggeration, and misinterpretation of facts became an integral part of the last two US presidential elections, the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the migration crisis in Europe.

Storytelling and image building became an essential part of studying strategic communication after the extensive virtualization of the media space since the 1990s. By efficient management of public expectations, seemingly absurd ideas often find support among emotionally charged audiences. Purposefully elaborated strategic narratives, which aim at moving the status quo in a targeted environment, can easily attract large audiences, which vote and consequently impact the decision-making process of political elites sensitive to electoral outcomes. Narratives can explain the situation, define a problem that changes the initial situation and then provide a resolution to the problem (Goldstein 1993; Riessman 2008; Antoniades et al. 2010; Bushell et al. 2017; Grzywacz and Gawrycki 2021) . Revisionist states may disseminate strategic narratives in order to incorporate controversial and divisive topics, which activate and exacerbate preexisting societal cleavages in the target audience through influencing cognitive processes on the individual and societal level (Foster 2021, p. 146) .

Strategic narratives may concern the international system, which articulate how a political actor conceives their understanding of international order; political actors seeking to influence the development of policies, as in international arms control negotiations, or in challenging opponents in armed conflict; or identity, how political actors seek to project their identity in international affairs (Miskimmon et al. 2018, p. 8) . The populist status contenders in the present security environment can be characterized by their skeptical attitudes towards international institutions and cooperative security efforts, goals to change policy patterns and a strong sense of identity. If political actors succeed in aligning the narratives of the system, politics, and identity with their strategic goals, they might have a greater chance to increase their influence in international relations (Miskimmon et al. 2018, p. 3) .

According to the proposed model ( Fig. 1) , strategic challengers by introducing strategic narratives (stories that have strategic ambitions to change the status quo) for public dissemination intend to produce a policy change in the target actor by influencing it by shaping public opinion accordingly. Often a successful strategic narrative has been built on effectively visualized image-building (i.e., Trump's wall against the Mexican border), which can reach and attract the audience. The visualization of emotions has always had a certain effect on influencing public audience by popular images that promote instability and anxiety in social discourses and relationships. If the public audience is moved to accept the proposed narratives, the potential outcome would be a strategic policy change achieved by elections, referendums, and other decisive elements of the democratic society.

A systemic change from the Kantian culture to the Hobbesian one has caused that the strategic environment may become more troublesome for political analysts. The current strategic environment should consider fundamentally behavioral issues in decision-making, cognition, routines and capabilities, organizing, and strategic leadership (Rindova and Martins 2018, pp. 167-8) . There are certainly various new innovative methodological approaches in political sciences to extend the limitations of game theory (i.e., non-linear approaches -Axelrod 1997; Cederman 2003 or the Paris school of security studies-Bigo 2008, among others). However, we may also find appropriate approaches from other disciplines to study security challenges in the market-based and Hollywoodized environment. This article focuses on the applicability of methods that have previously been used for business studies in advancing quality of prognosis in strategic forecasts, especially on the opportunities offered by the method of strategic imagination (Glaser 1994; Ogilvie 1998; Roos and Victor 1999; Rindova and Martins 2018; Dworzecki and Leśniak-Łebkowska 2019) .

The logic of international business market may fit well with the logic of security market. Many components of effective business strategies can be translated into the language of security studies. Snidal (1985, p. 32) finds similarities between the construction of Fig. 1 Operationalization of modern psychological warfare economic market and international system by claiming that both economic enterprises and states are self-help systems to act strategically.

• The economic marketplace versus the international system • The firm versus the nation-state • Firms maximize profits versus states that maximize survival • Oligopolists versus great powers • Market concentration versus the concentration of power • Price wars versus military wars Strategies in trade competition to conquer new markets and psychological warfare often refer to similar strategies to convince potential target groups (consumers) that their product will be the best they can trust. They can do so using corporate advertising techniques and platforms, such as Facebook ads and Twitter ads, and sometimes even outsourcing the process to private entities, such as Russia's Internet Research Agency. For example, let us imagine that there are heated discussions in some society about making investments to improve its medical facilities, and a narrative is disseminated by the media, which aims to convince the target audience that there exists a real threat of military attack by neighboring country. The strategic goal is to force the opponent to make decisions that favor allocating resources towards building the defense structure rather than the medical structure. The result is that the target will be well prepared to face any military offensive but is unprepared to manage a deadly virus pandemic.

A Hollywoodized worldview emphasizes what the masses believe, instead of focusing on problems set by reality. Successful business strategies should break traditional habits and make innovations attractive to potential customers, by understanding that the essential value of a strategy is its originality, which is desperately needed to navigate the business landscape of tomorrow, "in ways that create new value for customers, wrong-foot competitors, and produce new wealth for all stakeholders " (Roos and Victor 1999, pp. 348-9) .

Robert Sheckley's short story "Ghost V", 4 describes the situation where the astronauts faced their imagined childhood ghosts in their space trip. These imaginary ghosts were destroyed only by imaginary weapons. Sheckley's science fiction resembles the present reality. For the same reason, to shake of historical thinking patterns and strategic orthodoxies, the method of strategic imagination should potentially advance in future strategic forecasts for international security studies. In the increasingly unstable and challenging post-truth environment, where rational decision-making must compete with the myths and beliefs actors use in justifying their strategic goals, the method of strategic imagination may open new doors in deciphering the new trends in international relations as it can be purposefully used for seeking potential tracks of changing status, destabilization, and regime change in the current turbulent world order. Imagination, creating characters, combining data with fictional narrative, or with one's own experience will add original and empathetic value to studying international relations (including international security studies) and promote conceptual thinking about fact, reality, and truth (Sungju 2014, pp. 361-2) .

The experience on Global War on Terror that produced the transition from the Kantian security environment to the neo-Hobbesian one, remembers shortages on long-term planning. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) revealed failures in imagination as the United States was not prepared for fresh sources of instability and new security challenges, while "imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies." Evidently, before the incident any polling organization in the United States did not think the subject of terrorism is relevant to be studied in a major national survey, neither it was an important topic in the 2000 presidential campaign and media called little attention to it (The 9/11 Commission Report 2004). While launching the war on terror as a response to attack organized by al Qaeda, it focused much on the initial step of forced regime change, but next steps, how to build stable societies, remained obscure and unexamined. There was also lack of a successful business strategy how to make the regime change adaptable for potential customers in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, to convince them it improves their quality of life as well the question of reconciliation was ignored, which is an inseparable part of successful peace processes.

In their response to new types of security challenges, international actors not only do need to rely on the past experience, but to take a step further and outline the ways in which this warfare can emerge tomorrow. Traditional qualitative methods, based to a great extent on the analysis of historical evidence, as well as quantitative methods dependent on the sample construction, do not necessarily provide objective results to strategic forecasts international actors build in critical situation, and looking for new methodological approaches cannot be written off from the further development of security studies. Alexander Wendt (1999, p. 61) has warned if theories become instruments for organizing experience, to "save the phenomena", the tangibility of assumptions does not matter anymore. Creative techniques may become more helpful when facing ambiguity and rapid change than techniques designed to focus on collecting and analyzing data (Ogilvie 1998) .

The major difference of strategic imagination with game theory relies on the uniqueness of the situational environment, which does not apply for universal models but is flexible, changeable, and evolving with its independent way of developing. Duncan Snidal (1985, p. 25 ) expands the limitations of game theory from restrictive confines of the Realist perspective to a more complex concerns, which are balancing between conflict and cooperation. However, the logics of game theory must still grapple with the questions of ambiguity, change and cultural diversity. Rationalist theories have often marginalized questions of perception, belief, and identity (Williams 2007, p. 44) , while Graham Allison (1971, p. 35) notes "an imaginative analyst can construct an account of value-maximizing choice for any action or set of actions performed by a government." In their response to potential security challenges, researchers must go beyond relying on analyzing actors based on their actions in the past, to analyzing the courses of action of these actors based on their repertoire and opportunities tomorrow.

Basic principles of strategic imagination refer to challenging deep-rooted assumptions, which do not assess new innovations and opportunities by current systems and standards (Schmierer 2019) . The imagination should not stick in the fixed limitations set by mathematical models which to a great extent ignore outside-the-box thinking but should help the examination of long-run effects of interactions between international actors in the largely unpredictable scene, where each case is unique with multiple paths to consider, which may not necessarily look rational. Stan Glaser (1994, p. 31) wrote that "strategic advantage can be obtained by changing the rules or deliberately creating turbulence." A security analysis based on strategic imagination should be like a chess game with different openings and techniques to complete endgames, and only the most successful combinations, which sometimes require the sacrifice, will lead to victory.

Strategic imagination can be processed in several ways, which help us to describe images in turning them into something tangible and cognitive: patterns, regularities and pathologies of information enable to analyze and make educated judgment calls. Outsidethe-box thinking creates something completely different from what already exists (e.g., business innovation) and deconstructs existing knowledge, perception, and language (Herskovitz 2016). Anticipatory thinking, analogical reasoning, and design thinking could be key elements of strategic imagination (Rindova and Martins 2018) . For operating in the global security market, strategic imagination might consider the following factors in building its research design (see also Glaser 1994) :

(1) strategic fit the actor's competence between its abilities and the needs of the market, which indicates the actor's ability to adapt to the external environment (e.g., international system). For example, membership in international institutions may increase deterrence against destabilizing influence and (mis)information campaigns by increasing interoperability with other actors. (2) structure the degree of concentration and maturity, which indicates the functionality to develop necessary capabilities for the crisis situation. If structural factors represent a low value, the actor may become more open to cultures of fear and uncertainty. (3) competitive advantages the extent to which additional resources can be mustered, e.g., access to novel technology, which indicate technological and resource advantages. If the actor is technologically more advanced, this may give advantage in increasing its awareness against influence operations performed by others. (4) strategic focus cost advantages, a differentiated product or exploit a market niche, which indicate resource management capability. This refers also to the planning capability and the efficient resource allocation, which may help to resist the potential offensive from more advanced actor.

The task set up in Fig. 2 is to develop potential scenarios (independent variable, marked with x), which consider strategic components (path-dependent variable, marked with E)strategic fit, structure, competitive advantages and strategic focus. The imagination should fill the gap between historical evidence and potential outcomes. The goal is then to examine their further impact and potential adaptation during the process, where × 0 can take on any arbitrary combination of values. The goal achieved at t2 (long run effects) must be an outcome of the correlated variations in the period t0-t2, at t1 (short run effects) an outcome of the correlated variations respectively in the period t0-t1. For example, if two Fig. 2 The proposed model of scenario building by strategic imagination countries have troublesome relationship in the past based on adversary identities (t − 1), one actor starts to disseminate strategic narratives of imminent military attack they are planning against their contestant (t0), and if this follows a successful campaign by which the narrative is widely accepted by the contestant society, this may produce increased instability in the short-run perspective (t1) and increased distrust of democratic procedures in the long-run perspective (t2), there will be a path which may end with the establishment of autocratic regime by one potential scenario.

From the perspective of strategic imagination, all strategic textbooks should be regarded as history books because "they will always be out of date and their main benefit is to outline the fading conventional wisdom and perhaps indicate how this can be fractured" (Glaser 1994, p. 34). Umar Haque (2008) notes tremendous difficulties accompanied by strategic imagination, because "it requires us to put aside yesterday's tired assumptions and orthodoxies and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created." Turning to business methodologies can provide non-orthodox solutions to security problems caused by ongoing market-oriented processes like Hollywoodization, diversionary politics and psychological warfare. The COVID-19 pandemics may offer another hardly predictable case study that indicates the lack of imagination in strategic forecasts.

The largely unexpected impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global security environment has been deeply influenced by the neo-Hobbesian international system, characterized by a global security market characterized by a global security market and accompanying phenomena such as psychological warfare and Hollywoodization of world politics. In March 2016, the national defense survey conducted in Estonia examined potential security threats the respondents have considered the most probable at this time. The survey highlighted the Islamic State's actions and military conflict in Syria as the most important global security threats (67%, in 2015 44%) according to respondents. The turmoil in the Middle East was followed by the refugee crisis in Europe (63%, this was not in the questionnaire in 2015) and activities of terrorist networks (62%, in 2015 44%). Russia's attempts to regain influence in the territories of the former Russian Empire (35%) and the armed conflict in Ukraine (34%) have been considered somewhat less dangerous, but these numbers were slightly higher, respectively 46% and 37%, a year ago. The least likely threats to be afraid were, according to this survey, those which paradoxically became hot topics 4-5 years later, the spread of epidemics (26%) and the growth of China's influence in the world (17%) (Avalik arvamus ja riigikaitse 2016, pp. 17-25) . This survey indicates that security concerns of the people are mostly short-term and much dependent on daily discourses, and the society is unprepared to resist against unordinary threats that appear from nowhere as they are not well represented in the media market.

The international response to the COVID-19 pandemics characterizes the society very well, where safety has been declared the highest value for which the freedoms of human society can be restricted, and the response is much about protection and less about solution. Strict safety measures throughout the world society have significantly reduced the risks associated with a pandemic but have also led to greater insecurity. However, instead of comprehensive global cooperation, which would help to resist the further spread of the coronavirus and would correspond to the principles of Kantian political culture, global pandemics became an object of widespread psychological warfare based on self-help and competition between world powers. Several narratives, which largely refer to the patterns of the Hobbesian culture, became popular during the pandemics. Lucas Mauer (2021) describes the impact of COVID-19 on the multilateral world order, which has highlighted the weaknesses of the current international system, exacerbated existing crises and made the post-World War II world order vulnerable. The pandemic highlighted dependence on external suppliers and global supply chains, especially in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. The confrontation between the United States and China could become a major focus of global policy in the coming years, not only due to security concerns but also due to economic competition. Thus, the United States has wanted to cut funding for the WHO because it has not been sufficiently critical of China.

The author analyses the effects of three COVID-related cases that reflect the increasing appearance of the Hobbesian patterns in international interactions and identifies their short-run and long-run effects. First, studying the origin of virus became a part of US versus China confrontation, highlighted by bilateral status conflict and trade wars. Second, the expansive mistrust toward international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization undermined the activation of effective cooperative networks that would stop the extensive spread of pandemics. Third, the European Union has suffered from the lack of a common approach to how to fight the pandemics and standing against the global threat remained to great extent a national responsibility of individual member states.

The virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Wuhan Institute of Virology is a leading biological and biomedical research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the only one to specialize in virology, viral pathology, and virus technology. Another Chinese research institution, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, is located in the vicinity of the seafood market, where the coronavirus was first detected. There was considerable speculation as to the virus's man-made origins, as well as that it was accidentally leaked from the laboratory by an infected staffer or contaminated object. There was no clear evidence within the SARS-CoV-2 genome that it had been artificially manipulated or that the laboratory harbored progenitor strains of the pandemic virus (BBC News 2021). Nevertheless, the lab-leak theory was undermined not so much by China's denials, but by the fact it was being pursued by former US President Donald Trump, who used the case for activation of its political goals and strategic ambitions to force bipolar stands with China. The lack of transparency and readiness to international cooperation by Chinese authorities also facilitated various conspiracy theories about Chinese laboratories in Wuhan. The Chinese government refused to allow international scientists into Wuhan in early 2020. The invitation of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) to Wuhan took more than a year, and only limited access has been provided to them. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) after a visit of their experts to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus outbreak has evaluated as extremely unlikely that the virus started to spread from a lab leak (BBC News 2021).

The Wall Street Journal claimed that three laboratory researchers were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019 (Gordon et al. 2021) . Australian scientist Danielle Anderson excludes the possibility of weak security measures as the building of the institute refers to the highest biosafety designation and practices strict protocols and requirements for safety. Anderson said that the threats of violence many coronavirus scientists have experienced over the past 18 months have made them hesitant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be misconstrued (Fay Cortez 2021). After taking office, US President Joseph Biden asked for a report on the origins of Covid-19, "including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident", which was condemned by the spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry: "Their aim is to use the pandemic to pursue stigmatization, political manipulation and blame shifting. They are being disrespectful to science, irresponsible to people's lives and counter-productive to the concerted efforts to fight the virus." (BBC News 2021).

Potential short-run effects: focus on conflict and conspiracy theories instead of fighting the pandemics. Potential long-run effects: restrictions in international communication and travelling, polarization in international relations, unstable security environment.

This claim became popular in some US political circles close to Donald Trump. On May 29, 2020, President Donald Trump announced the United States will start to pull out from the World Health Organization, which coincided with record daily increases in COVID-19 cases worldwide and most of the US states. Trump's claims against WHO based on accusation of mismanaging the pandemic when it emerged in China in 2019, and of failing to make "greatly needed reforms" (BBC News 2020). Overall, the campaign against WHO followed strategic narratives promoted by the Trump administration, which are based on deep mistrust of international organizations and international cooperation. Instead of stimulating cooperative patterns and encouranging global cooperation, Trump preferred withdrawal over reforming WHO, which should make the organization more capable for organizang coordinated international response to the spread of virus.

Potential short-run effects: increasing distrust against the United Nations and international cooperation. Potential long-run effects: extinction of the United Nations similarly to the League of Nations in the twentieth century.

The unity of the European Union became a litmus test about the readiness to fight against global threats. The EU's initial response in 2020 to the spread of coronavirus showed unpreparedness and lack of solidarity. Border controls and restrictions on the export of personal protective equipment (i.e., face masks) were quickly established. Countries China, Russia, Cuba, and even Albania provided assistance to Italy, which was one of the hardest hit countries by virus in 2020, than the EU was able to mobilize for assistance (Mauer 2021) . Since the spread of virus to Europe, the European Union did not commit to take leadership in the joint fight against the COVID-19, which remained the main responsibility of the Member States. Furthermore, the national responses often disregarded for established rules of the single market and the Schengen area. The situation proves unpreparedness of the European Union to stand against the unexpected attacks, which may emerge with unprecedented cases outside of standard risk assessments and immediately require outside-of-box thinking, for clumsy bureaucratic mechanisms inconvenient to adjust.

Potential short-run effects: increasing distrust against the European Union and cooperative security measures. Potential long-run effects: dissolution of the European Union and conflict between competing nation-states in Europe.

The international environment that the world faced during the COVID-19 pandemics was supported by Hobbesian claims of "virus wars", which refers to the cultural transformation of the international system from the post-Cold War Kantian system to the new Hobbesian one, more suspicious of each other and less cooperative. For marketing purposes, national solutions emphasizing protection were preferred to international collaboration. Besides the Trump administration, China and Russia have been dominant status challengers in the transformation of the international system by sharing "engendering epistemological nihilism " (Foster 2021) . The European Union, which has been built on Kantian values as a potential security community, has been targeted by status challengers in the transforming international system. However, Russia (and this view has been largely shared by the Trump administration) imagines European democracy, prosperity, and particularly the European security order as declining, which suffers under the weak and vague liberal democratic worldview (Mölder 2021; Brandt and Taussig 2019) . For China, a stable Europe is needed as a trustworthy trade partner, even it imagines the potential partnership in Chinese terms that resists the spread of democratic values and ignorance towards China's strategic interests (Brandt and Taussig 2019, p. 133) .

However, the unfriendly political climate may become an obstacle to find coordinated solutions for global problems. The attacks against China and WHO, together with the underperformance of joint policy in the European Union indicate the prevalence of Hobbesian patterns of enmity over the Kantian cooperative approach, and the revisionist challenge by Trump administration, supported by China and Russia, has met at least a partial success in changing the culture of the international system.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was strong shift towards systemic change in international relations, whereby the Kantian arrangements of the post-Cold War world order were attacked by status-seeking revisionist powers. Its transformation into the Hobbesian international system is characterized by permanent psychological warfare, diversionary policies, status conflicts, influence operations, cyber-attacks, and global arms race. The abandonment of Kantian political culture and return to the Hobbesian practices conquered the global security market and made the international system more unstable and unpredictable. The security environment in the heavily Hollywoodized post-truth world supported by a strong populist wave is built according to market principles in which conspiracy theories explicitly fit with the constructed realities, and by appropriate marketing strategies revisionist powers can efficiently influence public opinion as a key center of gravity.

With the emergence of a global security market, business methods have considerable potential in security research, and confirm the validity of the working hypothesis. Strategic imagination evaluates the impact of processes that shape the political decision-making, but is not limited solely to rational choice options, which makes it distinct from the reliance on "wisdom of the crowd" or "super forecaster" experts: how the actors expect to see the international system operating; how they promulgate policy changes; and by which patterns they identify themselves, their friends, and foes in the psychological warfare. The inclusion of a method applied in business studies can be justified by the emergent market-based structure of contemporary security discourses. Strategic imagination may help researchers to establish new paths for analyzing security concerns in the rapidly evolving modern security environment, in which reality meets myth and beliefs often hardly distinguishable from facts.

The path-dependent out-of-box thinking is required in successful operating in the largely unpredictable environment and imagination is a way to fill gaps between rapid developments. The lack of imagination often leads to a lack of strategic awareness when considering potential threats. The spread of coronaviruses and COVID-19 pandemics manifests the typical situation of the contemporary world, where threats are effectively communicated but much less efficiently solved.

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The author would like to thank Eric Shiraev, Noel Foster and anonymous reviewers for their contribution to this article.

The authors have not disclosed any funding.

The authors have not disclosed any competing interests.