It's dictators, not democracies, that are vulnerable to subversion | Jill Kastner

We live in hostile times, confronted by the ugly resurgence of war in Europe, the threat of a clash with China over Taiwan, and the lasting effects of a devastating conflict in Gaza. But alongside this growth in current and potential conflicts, we’ve also seen a meteoric rise in measures short of war: information ops, foreign political meddling, and sabotage. Subversive tactics are ramping up, and we’re all in the crosshairs. Historian Jill Kastner argues our democracies aren’t as susceptible to subversion as we may think, and everyone has a part to play when it comes to countering international espionage.

We Need to Talk About Subversion

The relative peace of the post-Cold War era has long receded in the rear-view mirror. Russia’s war on Ukraine is entering its third winter. Russian drones and fighter jets are probing NATO airspace, while European nations are boosting their defense spending back to Cold War levels. China’s designs on Taiwan and stranglehold on critical mineral supply chains have raised alarm bells with Washington and its allies. Iran and Israel concluded a twelve-day war, while the Israeli-Hamas conflict, despite the recent ceasefire, could yet continue to ravage Gaza and polarize the Middle East. It’s no wonder that military conflict is very much on the minds of citizens and statesmen across the globe.

When states find themselves in a rivalry and diplomacy is not delivering, leaders will turn to subversive tactics to try and make inroads without resorting to war.

But war shouldn’t be allowed to hog all the attention. Connect the dots on the headlines today and you’ll see that we’re witnessing a renaissance of state-sponsored subversion. What’s more, individual citizens are much more likely to be affected by some form of hostile foreign subversive action than by war, in ways they may not realize. “We the people” are both pawns and victims in any subversive campaign. We are also the key to pushing back against it.

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It’s important to take a step back and see subversion for what it is: a tool of statecraft. Foreign subversion is defined broadly as hostile, unwanted action by one state on the territory of a rival, with the intent of weakening it or changing its foreign policy. In real life, this means information operations, bribery and influence, and sabotage, all designed to sway a society or government in ways amenable to an adversary.

This may seem inherently malign or “bad,” but it is also rational. When states find themselves in a rivalry and diplomacy is not delivering, leaders will turn to subversive tactics to try and make inroads without resorting to war. This makes sense; it’s a lot easier, cheaper, and more flexible to try one’s hand at covert, below-war-threshold activities in order to make a gain than it is to resort to military measures. We see this simple logic over and over, from ancient Greece to the present day. Subversion in general is a signal that a rivalry is becoming intractable; violent subversion can be a prelude to war.

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Subversive action is playing out in front of us every day. Information operations are the most ubiquitous. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the debate around TikTok, information manipulation and disinformation are constantly in the headlines. We are easy targets. Every one of us feeds daily on a diet of information, delivered with varying degrees of curation and intent. We are influenced by those around us to an astonishing degree; we are, above all, creatures of trust and connection. In our daily lives, advertising is itself a mild form of propaganda, and occasionally disinformation. The same goes for political campaigns, often to a greater degree. It is easy for a foreign actor to join in, leveraging the internet and social media in an attempt to stoke societal divisions and influence individuals. The result is almost impossible to measure, but, like dark matter in the universe, we know it’s there.

A recent report from the International Institute of Strategic Studies shows confirmed incidents of Russian sabotage of European critical infrastructure increased 246% from 2023 to 2024.

Bribery and influence operations are easier to track. In 1972, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt survived a no-confidence vote by just two votes; both politicians had been paid by the KGB in an operation to keep Brandt’s Ostpolitik alive. US support for the successful anti-Milosovic group Otpor in the Serbian elections of 2000 is well-documented. A 2022 US intelligence review reported that Russia had provided at least $300 million in covert funding to political parties, officials, and politicians in more than two dozen countries since 2014. In 2024, the FBI uncovered Chinese agents working for the Governor of New York and for a local politician in California.

Sabotage in Europe is on a sharp upward trajectory. While less kinetic forms of subversion are designed to nudge, sabotage seeks to instil fear and inflict tangible harm. Since the danger of escalation and miscalculation is dramatically higher, violent subversion of this nature is a flashing red light, a warning that an adversary is willing to take great risks over an existential issue. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has sponsored arson attacks in Poland and the UK, orchestrated the planting of incendiary devices in DHL shipments (prompting then-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to urgently contact the Kremlin to tell them to knock it off), and plotted the assassination of the head of Rheinmetall AG, a major German supplier of weapons to Ukraine. Critical national infrastructure is particularly vulnerable. A recent report from the International Institute of Strategic Studies shows confirmed incidents of Russian sabotage of European critical infrastructure increased 246% from 2023 to 2024.

But living in a democracy does not make us sitting ducks. When it comes to fighting subversion, three counterintuitive points work in our favor. First, democracies are not as vulnerable as they seem. Second, technology is not a game-changer. And third, individuals have the power to make or break a subversive campaign.

Democracies are seen as inherently more vulnerable. Yet this is not necessarily so.

In the struggle between liberal democracies and their more autocratic foes, it seems at first glance like an unfair fight. Free speech and the porous nature of open societies provide opportunities for our adversaries to drive a wedge into pre-existing fissures and operate with relative impunity. Democracies are seen as inherently more vulnerable. Yet this is not necessarily so. Wealthy liberal democracies have built-in institutions that can push back, from well-regulated mechanisms for power transfer to robust intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement. Even the private sector is an asset; the global cybersecurity industry has grown from roughly $11 billion in 2016 to nearly $200 billion in 2025. And autocracies are more brittle than they appear. Repression can create built-in fifth columns for adversaries to exploit; censorship stifles creativity and encourages intellectual capital flight, with serious long-term economic implications.

Further, legislative guardrails are critical in the broader campaign against foreign attacks. The US Foreign Agents Registration Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, was aimed at domestic subversion by Nazi agents but continues to serve as a way of prosecuting those caught working covertly for foreign governments. The UK National Security Act of 2023 adopted similar provisions, some of which have already been used to prosecute arsonists in the UK hired by Russia’s Wagner Group last year.

Technology is also not a game-changer in subversion. It is more a double-edged sword, as new technologies used to subvert are invariably repurposed to fight back. The arrival of the printing press in the 15th century led to a surge in Europe of cheap pamphlets supporting the Protestant Reformation and challenging the power of the Catholic Church. The Church retaliated with publications of its own and a crackdown on independent publishing. In the 1930s and 40s, radio propaganda from Nazi Germany met robust counter-propaganda, most notably from the Voice of America, which began broadcasting into Germany in February 1942. Broadcasts from Radio Free Liberty and Radio Europe into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the early Cold War were countered with radio frequency jamming. In more recent times, internet hackers have been hacked back, cyber “bombs” can be planted by many countries, and AI-produced deepfakes and bots are targeted by AI-empowered deepfake and bot hunters.

Finally, individuals have the agency to make or break subversive ops. Every subversive campaign throughout history has relied on one key ingredient for success: the witting or unwitting cooperation of the regular citizen. Swayed by superstition, religion, uncritical thinking, fear, greed, or simply indifference, it’s the millions of individual actors throughout history who have enabled foreign and domestic subversion campaigns to flourish.

So what should regular people do to fight back? We can start by recognising that we wield considerable power as individuals in the face of disinformation and propaganda. As any two-year-old or corporate CEO can tell you, human attention is the most precious commodity on the planet. Getting and holding attention is the secret sauce for all information operations. We can learn to jealously safeguard and care for our own attention, much as we do for our physical and mental health.

Demand that algorithms be engineered to provide a regular “reset” as a sort of breaker switch against the echo-chamber effect.

Reclaiming control over our attention allows us to challenge and de-fang information manipulation and disinformation, regardless of the source. We can take a pause before reacting and deprive information ops of the oxygen they need to proliferate. Bogus news stories with zero views and re-posts wither on the vine. In 2016, the GRU was forced to collude with WikiLeaks to disseminate Democratic operative John Podesta’s emails after their own clumsy attempt at getting people’s attention (via an amateurish website called DCLeaks.com) was a flop. Exposed disinformation campaigns lose their power. In February 2022, the US intelligence community publicly exposed a Russian plan to use a fake video as a pretext for attacking Ukraine, taking one of Moscow’s cards off the table. We can encourage discussion of exposed disinformation campaigns while highlighting the danger of individuals’ unwitting participation. After all, no one likes to be exposed as a fool. We might harness the power of our own vanity to help drive a trend toward more critical thinking.

We can also change the way we think about algorithms, viewing them not through a publishing or media lens but considering them in the same light as fast food or nicotine, as a man-made product to create profit at the potential expense of the consumer. We can ask hard questions about who benefits from our time and attention in a smartphone-saturated world, and demand that algorithms be engineered to provide a regular “reset” as a sort of breaker switch against the echo-chamber effect, similar to the recommended “desk holiday” for traders in the financial industry. We can demand simplification, standardisation, and clarity for opt-out processes on social media. Examples like Twitter’s partnership with the UK Gambling Commission during the COVID pandemic, which allowed customers to limit the amount of gambling-related content they saw on social media platforms, could be highlighted to educate people about their options. There is room for social media companies to make a profit without damaging the body politic.

When it comes to sabotage, public messaging about confirmed cases could help galvanize our urge to protect those we care about. The “See it, Say it, Sorted” public safety campaign, launched in 2016 as a counterterrorism measure, has been wildly successful in increasing reports of suspicious activity to British Transport Police and preventing attacks. Publicity around the need to keep vigilant would be an easy and effective way to build on this.

When it comes to thwarting foreign meddling, there is a strong case for optimism. Despite our adversaries’ best attempts to convince us that all is hopeless, subversion faces some serious constraints. If a state seeks gains but rationally wants to avoid war, fear of escalation and punishing retaliation helps keep subversion to a simmer instead of a boil. (Russia’s on-again-off-again, spigot-like approach to sabotage over the past two years is a good example of this.) States need to maintain a modicum of trust with rivals for cooperation on other, unrelated issues; diplomacy still matters. Reputational damage poses the risk of a state being perceived as more malign than it actually is, potentially hampering its freedom of movement with other potential allies. You don’t want to be labeled a Hitler or a Stalin when you’re actually a Brezhnev. This calculus leaves room for a subverter to back down when subversion begins to backfire.

On an individual level, every one of us has the power to combat foreign meddling in our society. It shouldn’t take a major incident of sabotage or disinformation to wake citizens up to the threat. We must choose to be aware and to nurture a more robust security culture, while carefully avoiding the paranoia and countersubversive excesses seen in Russia, North Korea, or China. After all, fighting foreign subversion is everybody’s business.

This article is based upon arguments made in Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth’s book, A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, published by Oxford University Press.