How the US Can Fight Foreign Malign Influence

Excerpt

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. 

Max Lesser is a senior analyst on emerging threats at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a non-profit, non-partisan research institution. Max previously served as head of US policy analysis and engagement at Darktrace Federal, a cybersecurity company that specializes in AI. Max’s research and insights on foreign malign influence have been referenced by OpenAI and featured in media such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NBC News.

Maria Riofrio is a research assistant at FDD. She is a junior at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, studying International Politics with a minor in Tech, Ethics, & Society. Her academic and professional interests lie at the intersection of international security, great power competition, emerging technologies, cybersecurity, and foreign malign influence operations.