Richard Fontaine
As campaign season heats up ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, so does the potential for foreign political interference. Russia and China both pair a willingness to do harm with sophisticated cyber capabilities. Iran has its own track record of meddling in American politics, and it, too, may be tempted to interfere. And the United States is not the only target. In recent years, Australia, Canada, France, and Germany have all been subject to attempts at foreign interference. For the foes of democracy, distorting electoral politics now seems to be a low-cost, high-reward way to support their favored candidates, harm their perceived enemies, or simply deepen polarization and sow internal distrust—often with the added benefit of plausible deniability.
This threat cuts to the core of the liberal democratic way of life. So far, however, democracies have mostly responded unilaterally. The United States’ democratic friends looked at Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election as mainly an American problem, to be dealt with by Washington. Similarly, Moscow’s interference in the 2017 French presidential election was considered a problem for Paris. Chinese intrusions into Australian politics that year were deemed a matter for Canberra. None of these episodes, nor other incidents since, have elicited a collective response, even from allied democracies.
Contrast this lack of coordination with the unified response to Russian violence in recent years. In 2018, when Russian agents poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom, the United States coordinated with a number of allies, including Australia, Canada, and Germany, to urge the United Kingdom to expel Russian diplomats. In 2020, after Russian intelligence agents attempted to poison the opposition activist Alexei Navalny inside Russia, the EU and the United States imposed sanctions. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, NATO allies and G-7 leaders denounced Russia’s move and stepped up their security cooperation with Ukraine; most of the largest democratic economies sanctioned Moscow.
It is time for democracies to muster such combined action against foreign political interference. To better coordinate their common defenses, they must create a formal response mechanism akin to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, binding allies to come to the aid of one of their own in the event of an attack. The stakes have grown too high and the threats too pervasive to leave every democracy to its own devices.
Russia’s predations ahead of the 2016 U.S. election are widely known. Less well known, however, are the numerous episodes of foreign interference that occurred in democracies before and since. This kind of interference has long existed. But in the last decade, social media and new digital tools have made meddling much easier, while sharpened domestic polarization and international competition have made democracies more vulnerable to it. The German Marshall Fund, which continually tracks such attempts, has identified Russian and Chinese political interference—in the form of information manipulation, cyberattacks, the co-opting of civil society groups, and support for divisive domestic movements—in more than 40 transatlantic countries since 2000. In 2020, when the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an independent think tank, examined cyber-enabled foreign interference in democratic politics over the previous decade, it discovered interference in 41 elections and seven referendums across 33 countries. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia were the primary perpetrators.
Russia is the chief culprit. In 2017, suspected hackers from Russia infiltrated the campaign servers of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. The hackers stole thousands of emails and files, which they distributed online just ahead of Macron’s runoff with Marine Le Pen, whom Russia viewed as a friendlier candidate. In 2020, the Russian government conducted influence campaigns to denigrate U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and undermine Americans’ confidence in their electoral process. Last year, the U.S. State Department estimated that Moscow covertly delivered some $300 million to political actors in more than two dozen countries over the previous eight years and that it planned to finance more in the future.
China comes in second on the roster of top meddlers. But it combines a will to interfere with increasingly substantial capabilities to achieve results. Its intrusions into Australian politics should be considered a warning sign to other democracies: in 2017, donors linked to the Chinese Communist Party directly funded Australian politicians. Last year, after Canadian intelligence officials alleged Chinese interference in the country’s federal elections, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Beijing of playing “aggressive games with our institutions, with our democracies.”
Iran has sought to influence democratic politics as well, particularly in the United States. In 2020, according to John Ratcliffe, then the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Tehran gathered voter data and sent faked emails that appeared to originate from the Proud Boys extremist group in an effort to intimidate voters in Alaska and Florida. U.S. officials later found that Iran had stolen data on American voters that could be used to compromise the 2020 election, and in 2021 the Department of Justice indicted two Iran-based hackers for their involvement in a cyber-campaign to influence voters, undermine confidence in the election, and spread discord in the United States.
WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Since 2016, many democracies have undertaken far-reaching domestic efforts to defend their democratic practices from outside attacks. In the wake of revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Australia’s universities and Chinese-language media, the Australian government enacted legislation criminalizing foreign political interference and banning foreign donations to politicians. Elsewhere, intelligence agencies are allocating more resources to tracking foreign interference attempts and preemptively knocking cyber-meddlers offline. Law enforcement agencies are investigating and charging malign actors. Social media companies are weeding out more foreign-state-sponsored material.
But these efforts are clearly not enough. China, for one, appears only to have ramped up its influence schemes. For years, Chinese agents have stalked and harassed Chinese American dissidents inside the United States, including Yan Xiong, an ultimately unsuccessful 2022 congressional candidate for New York. During the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, uncovered a China-based operation targeting its users with political propaganda. U.S. officials publicly warned that Beijing might seek to undermine candidates it believed threatened Chinese interests. And this April, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York charged 42 Chinese officials with harassing Chinese dissidents living in the United States, creating fake social media accounts, spreading propaganda, and attempting to have dissidents removed from a telecommunications platform.
Even as Russia has become bogged down in its war against Ukraine, it has continued to attempt to shape politics abroad. As The Washington Post has reported, the Kremlin in February tried to facilitate a coalition between a left-wing member of Germany’s Bundestag and the right-wing party Alternative for Germany. In June, Viginum, the French government agency that monitors foreign digital interference, discovered a major Russian disinformation campaign aimed at weakening French support for Ukraine; the effort included faking articles from top media outlets such as Le Monde and Le Figaro. In the words of Catherine Colonna, France’s foreign minister, Moscow is undermining “the conditions for democratic debate.”
Ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, social media research firms discovered Russian efforts to create fake social media accounts, spread disinformation, and incite voters to oppose aid to Ukraine. Just days before the vote, in a Telegram session, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter raised the subject of U.S. elections with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary chief indicted by the United States for operating a Russian troll farm in 2016. “Gentlemen,” Prigozhin said, “we interfered, we interfere, and we will interfere.”
Even casual observers know that U.S. politics has more than enough kindling for foreign adversaries to start fires. Americans’ rising distrust in key democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, law enforcement, and the military means that malign actors do not have to create discord in the United States. They can merely exacerbate the tensions that exist. Meddling is made even easier by new digital tools, such as generative artificial intelligence models that quickly produce believable images and authentic-sounding speech. Foreign interference threatens the United States’ already weakened ability to forge the political consensus necessary to confront major national challenges.
Indeed, rendering the United States and other democracies less able to cohere politically, and thus less able to wield power and act decisively, appears to be a driving motive for foreign meddlers. Of Iran’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections, the scholar Ariane Tabatabai has observed that “the main goal pursued by Iran—similarly to Russia and China—is to exacerbate divisions along ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and partisan lines” and to “sow chaos and confusion.”
Given the high potential benefits and low cost of meddling in democratic processes, democracies should expect more of it. Fortunately, policymakers are much more aware of the problem of foreign interference than they were in 2016. They also recognize that a multifaceted approach to defense and deterrence is required. But there is still a big gap between what is being done and what needs to be done. Last year, for example, a European Parliament report found that its member states “appear to lack the appropriate and the sufficient means to be able to better prevent, detect, attribute, counter, and sanction these threats.”
Missing among the attempts to combat foreign political interference is any significant mechanism for international collaboration. Many democracies share the same threat, but too often each defends itself individually, if at all. Democracies must actively cooperate by exchanging threat information, identifying areas of vulnerability, monitoring foreign activity, and sharing best approaches for deterring and defending against interference.
Even this kind of loose coordination, however, will likely prove insufficient to deal with the sharply increased threat of foreign interference in democratic practice. Even strong individual responses from targeted countries have not deterred new attacks. Democracies must go further. They should agree to devise a multilateral approach to ensure that interference elicits a collective reaction.
Democracies already have a model for the kind of coordination that will be required to defend their political systems from attack: the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5. Article 5 provides that an attack on one NATO ally will be considered an attack on every member and that each member will assist the victim with “such action as it deems necessary.” A coalition of key democracies—the G-7 members, NATO countries, and other like-minded countries such as New Zealand and South Korea—should adopt a similar formal mechanism to handle political interference. In a multilateral agreement, they should declare their intent to consider a significant, state-based attack on one member’s democratic processes to be an attack on all and should pledge to respond to the attacker collectively.
Members of such a new coalition would need to identify the most appropriate and effective defensive measures, such as tightening security on digital electoral systems, spreading awareness among social media users, and building expertise among officials to detect interference. The coalition’s intelligence agencies should cooperate to identify and publicize ongoing foreign interference campaigns, especially ahead of elections. The prototype should be the kinds of specific and intelligence-backed warnings U.S. officials issued about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine in March 2022, not the belated and general statements they made in 2016 about Russia’s plans to interfere in the U.S. election. Crucially, major interference attempts should elicit combined response measures such as the naming and sanctioning of individuals and entities engaged in malign activities, the coordinated expulsion of diplomats, integrated efforts to shut down the meddlers’ financing, and offensive cyber-operations aimed at taking down foreign interference networks or interrupting their work.
Formalizing a coalition approach to interference would have a few obvious complications. The deliberately covert nature of much foreign interference makes clear attribution much harder than when a state attacks another state militarily. Members of a democracy-protection coalition would need to agree on a common definition of interference, distinguishing it from both legitimate foreign political activity and the malicious work of homegrown actors. The coalition would need to account for its members’ differing campaign and electoral practices, as well as their divergent free speech laws. And coalition states would need to develop a sense of when outside interference rises to the level that should trigger a common response.
None of these complexities, however, justify inaction. The North Atlantic Treaty’s definition of an attack and its delineation of the responses an attack requires also remain quite broad and open to interpretation. But even the possibility of a collective response from an alliance of strong military powers has proved a potent deterrent. An agreement on the common defense of democracy itself could have a similar effect. And where deterrence fails, collective action could induce future behavior change and bar foreign meddlers from picking off democracies one by one.
Meddling in democratic practices now constitutes a threat almost as severe as the kinds of military attacks against which democracies concertedly defend themselves, and it is far more commonplace. Washington spends an enormous amount of time and treasure to protect itself against low-probability, high-consequence threats such as a conventional invasion of western Europe or a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. These investments are appropriate. But the probability that malicious foreign actors will seek to meddle in U.S. democratic practice is much higher, closer to 100 percent. And the consequences can be grave and enduring. Russia’s meddling in 2016 has continued to disrupt U.S. politics, seven years on.
Over the years, there have been many proposals for some sort of alliance of democracies to strengthen democratic cohesion, ensure that democracies work more closely in international institutions, and demonstrate the superiority of the democratic model. These proposals have failed, largely because they never addressed a specific threat. By now, they have also become insufficient. What is needed today is not a casual club but a literal alliance of democracies, one focused on protecting the institutions, processes, and activities that reside at the very heart of democratic political life.
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