Terms commonly used during the Cold War have again emerged amid allegations that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. These words and phrases, which were all but forgotten in recent history, include “active measures,” “agents of influence,” and “disinformation,” and they are tied to campaigns meant to alter public perception and influence political decision-making.
While it has been a struggle to prove that Russia’s alleged campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election had any effect, these strategies of influence are in fact being used heavily against the United States—only now, most are carried out not by Russia, but by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
All of these systems fall under an umbrella strategy known as “political warfare,” and the Chinese regime has at least an entire military branch and two political branches, as well as large-scale systems for information control, to carry out its aims on a massive scale.
“We haven’t even begun to coordinate ourselves to take on this challenge,” said Richard Fisher, senior fellow on Asian military affairs with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
“Any political activity undertaken by a dictatorship that, at its core, is devoted to the destruction of freedom, warrants the broad attention of Western security organs,” he said.
