Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. It’s Aug. 1—and though July was an unusually busy news month, August is so far shaping up to be just as wild. Luckily, you have SitRep’s summer reading list to keep you entertained and enlightened amid all the craziness.
We’ll start with some breaking news: The United States and Russia on Thursday carried out a major prisoner swap that included the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. FP’s Amy Mackinnon and Robbie have the story here.
Here’s what else is on tap for the day: U.S. adversaries are already meddling in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Ukraine claims it played a role in the Wagner Group’s deadliest day ever in Africa, and Taiwan’s new U.S. envoy is a self-described “dragon warrior.”
Spinning Up the Troll Farms
Voters check in to cast ballots at a polling location in Atlanta on May 21.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
OK, we’ve already said it, but the last month-plus of news was insane. There was a big NATO summit. Former U.S. President Donald Trump came within an inch of being killed by an assassin’s bullet at a Pennsylvania rally. The Republicans had a convention. U.S. President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, and days later, his country was on the brink of a wider regional war.
Now you can add one more news story to the running tally: Iran has joined the list of U.S. adversaries trying to interfere in the U.S. election in November, U.S. intelligence agencies believe.
The U.S. intelligence community expects that Iran and Russia are adjusting their disinformation strategies to undermine democratic institutions, foment discord, and change public opinion in light of last month’s events, said a U.S. intelligence official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the intelligence community.
Different strokes. But foreign countries have different approaches for how they’re targeting the American public.
The U.S. intelligence community has already observed Iran trying to influence the election, drawing on fake online personas and troll farms in an effort to spread disinformation to harm Trump’s chances at winning another term in the White House. “Iran’s preference is focused on this core interest,” the official said.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal three years after it was signed, leading to intense tit-for-tat skirmishes in the Middle East that culminated in the January 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani and retaliatory Iranian attacks.
Iran has also tried to exacerbate tensions in the U.S.-Israeli relationship since the war with Hamas broke out last October.
Iran has a long history of sophisticated meddling. In 2021, for instance, the U.S. Justice Department charged two Iranian hackers with election interference for posing as pro-Trump Proud Boys and sending threatening emails to Democrats.
Meanwhile, Schafer, the disinformation expert, said that Russia is heavily leaning into right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Trump assassination attempt, but said that the Kremlin expresses no clear preference for Trump in their efforts.
China is probably not planning to influence the result of the U.S. election, the official said, though Beijing did target propaganda at down-ballot candidates with social media campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections.
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence in February issued a public threat assessment warning that “Beijing is expanding its global covert influence posture to better support the [Chinese Communist Party’s] goals. The [People’s Republic of China] aims to sow doubts about U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and extend Beijing’s influence.” (China’s ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, said his country has no such plans at an event in Washington last week.)
Scaling up. The scale of foreign disinformation targeting U.S. elections is growing, especially with artificial intelligence powering it, and it’s getting more sophisticated, too.
“The bad news … is the power of AI, that its scale and speed can spread disinformation at an exponentially rapid rate,” Sen. Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a talk at the Reagan Forum last week. “Foreign adversaries know disinformation and misinformation is cheap and it works.”
Warner said another potential threat is “the fact that Americans believe a lot more crazy stuff.”
“You go back again, way back in 2016, oftentimes the Russians had to plant the false implication and then elevate it. But now they can simply elevate or promote the crazy things that Americans say,” he said.
“I don’t think [foreign adversaries] are responsible for the discord here, but that presents a huge opening for them,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for media and digital disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “So when you have more radicalized people, more willing to believe divisive, corrosive narratives, that’s an opportunity for them.”
The U.S. intelligence official said foreign actors, especially Russia, are getting more professional, including by co-opting marketing and public relations firms to try to shape U.S. public opinion with fake websites and campaigns, even though Western authorities are catching up.
Worst case. There are influence campaigns, and then there’s the potential for even greater harm, such as direct hacks of voting machines.
No one is discounting the possibility of direct interference. But for experts, the worst-case scenario is a complex influence campaign that casts doubt on the result. “I would be more concerned about the appearance of interference, that they could then couple with an influence campaign to make it seem like there was a significant hack that affected the outcome,” Schafer said.
“Influence campaigns are very much parasitic, and they’ve got to sort of latch on to something that exists in our own ecosystem,” he added. “So the more toxic the environment is, the more openings that they have.”
Let’s Get Personnel
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the nominations of Michael Sulmeyer for assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy and Tonya Wilkerson for undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, giving both hope of being confirmed before Congress breaks for August recess.
Boeing has named Robert “Kelly” Ortberg as the company’s new president and CEO, after safety issues with the 737 Max aircraft forced his predecessor, Dave Calhoun, into retirement.
Paul Dans has left the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 after the Trump campaign disavowed the program, which calls for a complete makeover of the U.S. government. Heritage framed Dans’s departure as a completion of the project’s work.
Dans was chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Plea deal. Three men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks—Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi—reached a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors at Guantánamo Bay to accept sentences of life in prison instead of facing the death penalty in trial. The plea deal announcement follows decades of pretrial proceedings and legal backlogs and could close a significant chapter in the U.S. war on terrorism. The families of 9/11 victims reacted with a mixture of relief and anger, the New York Times reported, as some families had advocated for the United States to push for the death penalty, while others saw the plea deal as a viable if imperfect way to bring closure.
Ukraine’s long reach? Ukraine’s military intelligence branch has claimed that it played a role in the recent deadly ambush of Russian Wagner Group paramilitaries in Mali, including providing “necessary information, and not just information,” to the fighters involved in the attack. Mali’s army said it had suffered significant losses in two days of clashes with Tuareg rebels and al Qaeda-linked militants that took place in the desert near the border with Algeria this week. The death toll of Wagner fighters over the two days of fighting is thought to be as high as 80. Al Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin appeared to trap a convoy of Wagner fighters in an ambush before killing them. It is believed to be the greatest known loss of Wagner forces in a single skirmish in Africa.
Battle lines. With NATO’s annual summit over, the allies still have a big piece of unfinished business to address after Finland and Sweden joined: where to draw the line across the Baltic Sea—between Finland and Sweden in the north and the Baltic states in the south—so that the Nordic countries can all be under one NATO command.
“Do you put it on the east side of the Baltic, the west side of the Baltic, or down the middle?” said a NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about still pending war plans. “It can absolutely be done, but it’s quite politically sensitive.”
The Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as Poland don’t think anyone should be drawing lines in the Baltic Sea. And they’ll be arguing that position as NATO’s military expert committee plans to make a decision on where to draw the line by the end of the year. Jack took a look at the alliance’s new geography in a feature this week.
Snapshot
Brazil’s Gabriel Medina reacts after taking on a large wave during the Olympic men’s surfing competition in Teahupo’o, on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, on July 29.erome Brouillet/AFP via Getty Images
Hot Mic
“Well, I was born in the year of the dragon … I don’t know, ‘dragon warrior’? We are suit-wearing warriors, but the battle is very brutal. So call me any name, but dragon sounds fine.”
—Alexander Tah-ray Yui, Taiwan’s representative to the United States, tells FP’s Rishi Iyengar that he wants his style of diplomacy to be called “dragon warrior.” His predecessor, Hsiao Bi-khim—now Taiwan’s vice president—famously called herself a “cat warrior” when asked how she would counter China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy.
Put On Your Radar
Thursday, Aug. 1: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit Mongolia.
Tuesday, Aug. 6: Vice President Kamala Harris is set to hold her first rally with her running mate in Philadelphia and will embark on a four-day tour of battleground states that includes Michigan and Arizona.
Quote of the Week
“Someone takes a dump on your front doorstep and you’re like, ‘What do I do with this?’ Because you’ve got to touch shit or it’s going to sit there.”
—Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst who helped lead the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, describing his reaction when the FBI sent him a copy of the so-called Steele Dossier on Trump.
This Week’s Most Read
- The Top International Relations Schools of 2024, Ranked by Irene Entringer García Blanes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney
- The Kamala Harris Doctrine by FP Staff
- The Trump-Vance Unilateralist Delusion by Stephen M. Walt
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
BRIC-lympics. Russian athletes aren’t allowed to compete under their country’s tricolor flag during the Paris Olympics because of a yearslong doping scandal, but their athletes can compete under Russian colors at the BRICS Games, which were hosted in Kazan, Russia, in June. A Russian synchronized swimmer appeared to win a gold medal in the event. He was also the only athlete to compete.