Vassilis Ntousas & David Salvo
Introduction
Combating foreign interference in democracies, once a fringe policy issue on both sides of the Atlantic, has become one of the key policy and societal challenges of our time. It was not long ago when this set of issues would be buried in official communiqués in sections labeled “hybrid threats” and walled off to be studied by specialists in nascent institutions, if not virtually ignored, across the transatlantic space.
Russia’s comprehensive interference operation in the 2016 US presidential election changed that calculus, as did high-profile interference cases targeting European countries in the subsequent years. Since that time, adversaries have grown in numbers, appetite, and sophistication, launching increasingly disruptive campaigns that take direct aim at the democratic fabric of the transatlantic community. In response, most national governments and multilateral institutions like the EU and NATO have ramped up their attempts to defend against and respond to foreign interference.
Yet the threat of foreign interference has evolved rapidly, in some cases outpacing efforts to address it. This is not just due to slow or sclerotic bureaucracies having to adapt quickly—and, unfortunately, not always successfully—to the challenge at hand. Foreign interference threats have targeted all sectors of democratic society and aggressively exploited technological innovations to make their offensives more complex and far more demanding to tackle in real time for governments, private industry, and civil society alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment