How The Enemy Within Imperils Democratic Security

Foreign influence operations do not create vulnerable societies. They exploit them. Influence operations are most effective when inspired by a massive propaganda machine that builds on existing fears and grievances.

The populations most susceptible to manipulation are not, as a rule, the credulous or the poorly educated. They are people whose distrust of existing institutions has been earned through the lived experience of economic abandonment, political contempt and the slow discovery that democratic systems, for all their procedural correctness, were not in fact designed with them in mind.

Any strategy for defending democratic resilience that treats disenfranchisement as background noise rather than as a primary variable will find itself – repeatedly – surprised by its own failure.

The agents inside the room

With that foundation in place, the architecture of interference becomes legible. The greatest challenge facing European democracies is not adversary broadcasting from beyond their borders, but the one already inside the room.