The US can’t be weak on the battlefield of information warfare

(July 17th, The Hill)

The most active battlefield in the 21st century is not in Gaza or Ukraine — it’s the war over information.

U.S. adversaries such as Russia and Iran have used the West’s free flow of information against it by exploiting political divisions, bolstering extremists on the left and right and disseminating misinformation. At the same time, they promote a flowery, romantic vision of their dictatorships.

And the U.S. is being outspent and outmaneuvered by their “soft power” efforts.

The U.S. can go on the offensive, however, by empowering the populations of these authoritarian regimes, exposing corruption and human rights abuses and dismantling their internal propaganda.

Washington used to understand the need for soft power, or direct state-to-foreign-population diplomacy. During the Cold War, U.S. soft power played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and arguably was a driving force during the revolutions of Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989.

But since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been fixated on traditional warfare. In 2023, Washington spent $916 billion on bolstering its military, more than the next nine countries combined.

In March, President Biden requested a budget of $950 million for the government agency responsible for international broadcasting, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). This is a 7.4 percent increase of the 2023 budget, but almost a thousand times less than the military budget.

In comparison, China spent billions of dollars on cyber-propaganda and global disinformation; Russia’s budget for this is nearly $2 billion and Iran spent $200 million on state broadcasting last year.

Moreover, Russian and Iranian propaganda are hyper-focused on sullying America’s image in strategic areas. USAGM’s budget, in contrast, covers six separate entities spanning five continents. This means that only a small percentage of the yearly budget reaches such crucial areas as Iran.

Iran should be a vital target of soft power, considering its regional ambitions, anti-Western agenda, human rights abuses and threat to global stability through its axis of resistance proxies. Given the regime’s unpopularity with its own people, robust soft power could be a real force for change. Yet in 2023, only $17.3 million was dedicated to VOA Persia and only $9.2 million to Radio Farda, USAGM’s two Persian-language broadcasting networks.

Even with a small budget, these services have been effective. VOA Persia says it reaches a weekly audience of over 15 percent of Iran’s 90 million population. In comparison, Fox News’s annual budget for 2023 was over $12 billion, and it averages around 14 million views a week — around 4 percent of the U.S. population. Radio Farda for its part, has a heavy social media presence, collecting over 1.5 billion views on Facebook and Instagram, and is well known in Iran for its exposes.

Yet, according to a senior USAGM official speaking on the condition of anonymity, a lack of funds caused Radio Farda in 2018 to remove powerful AM radio transmitters in Kuwait that broadcast directly into Iran. The budget cuts were chalked up to Iranian jamming, making radio broadcasts ineffective; however blocking 24-hour streams is unsustainably expensive — especially for a developing country like Iran.

The budget aimed at Russia is also too low to be most effective. Only $7.8 million was dedicated to RFERL’s Russian service, not including an additional $3 million to minority language services; $9.5 million to VOA Russia; and another $12.3 million to Current Time, a Russian-language program broadcasting to former Soviet states. Yet these services still reach 10 percent of Russia’s population weekly, according to USAGM.

For these dictatorships, internal and external messaging have different goals. While external messaging to the West is about sowing chaos, internal messaging aims to maintain stability. Inside Russia and Iran, state media paints Western democracies as hostile and immoral, while depicting themselves as prospering and stable guardians of order and morality under Western siege. Moscow and Tehran mask their imperial ambitions as a defense against Western aggression.

For example, Russian propaganda has advanced two main arguments for the war in Ukraine. The first was the need to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine’s Donbass region, who were supposedly being slaughtered after the 2014 Maidan Revolution. The second and more frequently cited was that the invasion was necessary to prevent NATO expansion, which would result in nuclear war with Russia. That is, the West is the aggressor and Russia is only trying to prevent a regional war.

This logic is a throwback from Soviet times. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistanin 1979, internal propaganda argued that had Moscow not invaded, the U.S. would have taken over Afghanistan, creating a bridgehead to invade the then-USSR.

Iran’s messaging, on the other hand, claims it is the victim of Western-backed disinformation campaigns. To maintain stability, it villainizes its own minority communities and sabotages attempts by the fractured Iranian opposition to unite against the regime.

Tehran masks its regional ambitions as a defensive policy against the U.S., which, according to the regime, seeks to set up illegitimate regional vassal states. The irony of Iran’s use of proxies to combat potential U.S. proxies is lost on the regime but not on the population. The slogan, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life is for Iran” has become a common rallying cry at anti-regime protests over the past 15 years.

According to a 2023 poll conducted by the Netherlands-based Gamaan institute, 81 percent of Iranians are against the existence of the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, a 2023 poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow found that over 80 percent of Russians support  Vladimir Putin.

This, however, could soon change.

The invasion of Ukraine has strained the Russian information apparatus. According to the Kremlin-loyalist pollster WCIOM, trust in state channels as an objective source has dropped from 46 to 26 percent since 201, while only five percent of respondents under the age of 25 consider Russian state television trustworthy.

Considering the vulnerabilities of both regimes, the U.S. should increase government-backed broadcasting targeting their populations. The goal of such broadcasting must be to dismantle the regimes’ arguments, shining a light on what they try to hide. But an increase in funding must be done with transparency and congressional oversight.

In June, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) released a three-year investigation into USAGM over issues including poor vetting processes, political favoritism and the ignoring of whistleblowers complaints. Even worse, VOA’s Russian service has hired journalists who had previously worked for pro-Kremlin state media.

Additionally, VOA has come under fire for refusing to designate Hamas terrorists as such, instead opting to label them as “militants” per Associated Press Guidelines.

Despite such issues, USAGM agencies continue to advance U.S. interests. The information provided by them empowers populations living under dictatorships by tearing down carefully crafted misinformation. By increasing the activities of these networks, U.S. soft power will be even more effective in taking the fight to Moscow and Tehran.

Joseph Epstein is director of legislative affairs for the Endowment for Middle East Truth and a fellow at the Yorktown Institute.