When talk arose within the United States and Israel of the possibility of Damascus using chemical weapons against insurgents, Moscow became alarmed. Since US President Barack Obama had earlier clearly stated that such action would be considered a casus belli, an immediate suspicion arose that a campaign to create a basis for a massive intervention in Syria was in the making.  

The problem with current international relations is the lack of means to verify information that would be regarded as trustworthy by all parties involved. In that controlled system, which existed during the Cold War years, there was certainly also room for provocations. However, the two superpowers, at the highest level of the world hierarchy, in the first place, took an interest in seeing that nothing would occur outside what they willed; secondly, they were well-aware that the price of incompetent intrigue could be unacceptable, nuclear conflict. In the conditions of intense nuclear deterrence, it was necessary to always be able to immediately assess where there was a real threat, and where there was a technology of a controllable escalation in any conflict.

Nowadays, there is neither such a feeling, nor operating mechanisms. Military-political and ideological deadlocks do not work anymore; the threats of local clashes turning into a global war hardly exist anymore. Nuclear weaponry still serves as a deterring instrument; however, specific countries use it as a warranty against non-interference into their affairs rather than a way to prevent conflicts in general. Paradoxically, universal informational transparency and the seeming abundance of data regarding all events have not enhanced mutual understanding of the processes but, on the contrary, have turned them into objects of manipulations.

In Russia, for instance, a specific, popular area of research is informational wars. It is believed that a massive concentration of public opinion in favor of the use of force has become an integral element of any campaign today. As a rule, there is always a certain jumping-off point when it all starts. A massacre in the city of Rachak in January 1999, of which the Serbian police were accused, the allegedly existing evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, information on the massive use of air force against Libyan civilians … All this appeared in the media, forming an image that took on a life of its own, and which, eventually, led to a “moral obligation” to intervene. Subsequently, it would often turn out that the initial cause had been unfounded. The story of the Iraqi weapons goes without saying; however, the incidents which became the grounds for the wars in Yugoslavia and Libya were not independently supported later on either.