It is not only politics that may be seen as war by other means. For centuries, governments have sought to demoralize and defeat their enemies without resorting to the battlefield. In “A Measure Short of War,” Jill Kastner and William Wohlforth give a well-researched account of the many ways in which nation-states have conducted information warfare aimed at “subversion”—with lessons for democracies in our current, war-raging moment.
Ms. Kastner and Mr. Wohlforth—an independent London-based scholar and a professor of government at Dartmouth, respectively—distinguish subversion from other forms of covert action, such as sabotage and espionage. Subversion, they say, aims at “undermining accepted authority” in a rival state by reaching into its domestic politics and weakening it or causing it to alter its policies.