National Interest

by Max Lesser and Maria Riofrio

    The most effective strategy to combat foreign influence is to ensure the effort remains unpoliticized and non-partisan.

    Never before has a US National Security Strategy (NSS) taken foreign malign influence as seriously as the one released last week. But strategy alone is not enough. To fight this threat, the United States must now put its money where its mouth is and rebuild capabilities that it largely dismantled.

    The new NSS frames countering foreign malign influence as a requirement to fundamentally “protect our own sovereignty,” and “determine our own destiny, free of outside interference.”

    But over the past year, the US government has shut down the FBI’s Foreign Malign Influence Task Force, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

    To understand how the US government should respond to the new NSS and rebuild its capacity to counter foreign malign influence, it is helpful first to understand how the NSS defines the problem.

    The NSS rightly casts “hostile foreign influence” as a holistic challenge more vast than botnets on social media, including “espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, [and] cultural subversion.”

    This approach marks a clear improvement over the Biden administration’s 2022 NSS by shifting language from countering “disinformation” to “influence operations.” The distinction matters. Disinformation—that is, intentionally deceptive information—is merely one tactic within a broader spectrum of foreign malign influence.

    Indeed, foreign powers have attempted to shape Americans’ beliefs, behaviors and policies through efforts as far ranging as bribes, death threats and even honeypot espionage with politicians. These more analog efforts accompany a storm of digital activity, including social media campaigns, fake news websites and hack-and-leak operations that sought to further a range of goals. In one case, in 2022, a Chinese influence operation posed as environmentalists online to call for protests against rare earth processing facilities in Texas. In 2024, Iran hacked US water facilities and defaced the exploited machines with anti-Israel messages.

    To effectively counter the totality of the challenge of foreign malign influence, the US government must make a concerted effort to respond. It effectively coordinated across agencies in the lead-up to the 2024 US elections. Many of the now-defunct government efforts to combat foreign malign influence issued public service announcements in response to campaigns or warnings about future threats. The Treasury also sanctioned Iranian threat actors and the Department of Justice seized Russian websites posing as US news outlets.

    Interagency coordination benefits from a coordinating body. With the Foreign Malign Influence Center at ODNI now effectively dismantled, it is unclear who in the government “owns” efforts to counter foreign malign influence.

    Moreover, with the elections over, the US government and the American people seemed to have largely forgotten that America’s adversaries are waging near-constant information warfare. They reach deep into the platforms and devices we use in our daily lives. Recent changes to X’s transparency feature served as a rude awakening, exposing that people outside America have operated prominent political accounts posing as Americans.

    The new NSS should be a reminder that foreign malign influence is not a seasonal affair, but an evergreen issue. In response to the NSS, the Director of Cognitive Advantage at the National Security Council—a new position created by the current administration—should advise the White House on how to form a strategy to counter foreign malign influence. To craft an effective strategy, deep thought needs to be given to measures that might deter adversarial information warfare and to the responses that would impose appropriate costs on malign actors.

    Lastly, efforts to counter foreign malign influence must remain as non-partisan as possible. Foreign adversaries target individuals on both sides of the party lines. Russia hacked and leaked Democratic campaign materials in 2016; Iran targeted the Trump campaign in 2024 and operated fake US news websites intended to appeal to both liberals and conservatives. China’s sprawling “Spamouflage” campaign has attacked Republican candidates and members of Congress, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator.

    Politicizing efforts to counter foreign malign influence would hand America’s adversaries a strategic gift. Any perception that initiatives exclusively target or benefit one party—as has happened in the past—will invite backlash, undermine legitimacy and fracture the coordination the NSS demands and that the American people deserve.