“Russia’s number one objective right now is to weaken support for Ukraine,” said Schafer. “The number one supporter of Ukraine is the United States. [A second] Trump administration is without question going to be less willing to support Ukraine. So it’s a pretty simple equation for them.”
More complex is how Russia, Iran (which Schafer said favors Harris) and other foreign adversaries seek to sow domestic disruption here at home. Where each malign country aligns is “an America that is either in chaos or is at least so wrapped up in partisanship that we’re not functional,” Schafer said, adding that his biggest concern is disinformation efforts “to cause people to doubt the election, to help to create political violence.”
The “most sobering aspect of all of this,” said Carvin, “is the Kremlin has successfully primed the pump over the last several presidential election cycles: by stoking conspiracy theories and partisan rage, they’ve contributed to significant discourse collapse in the U.S., where millions of angry voters are more than happy to share false and misleading information as long as it hurts the other party. And there’s no clear solution to any of this, particularly in the near term.”
Carvin’s correct; right-and left-wing social and partisan-media silos in America are increasingly entrenched, and efforts for more European-style social-media regulation are resisted due to appropriate First Amendment concerns.
But media mistrust matters too, said Schafer. Disinformation “is so effective,” he said, because this mistrust “has picked up steam, particularly on the right, and so fewer and fewer people turn to trusted sources, and their sources of information are now not just even Facebook and Google and Twitter [X], you’re talking 30 platforms that don’t care at all or don’t have anybody to deal with content moderation. This is just a sort of wide-open space for malign activity to take place without a lot of checks there.”
Other Western democracies face similar dynamics (the authoritarian axis, conversely, quashes the possibility). But countries like Germany, Schafer said, “aren’t as vulnerable [because] there is still a higher degree of trust in government institutions and media. That’s degraded in the U.S., and so that creates a pretty perfect environment if you’re a threat actor.”
