*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Consider the following scenario: Candidate Donald Trump loses the 2024 election by a narrow Electoral College margin. In fact, he gains more popular votes than Kamala Harris, but as in the 2000 and 2016 elections, idiosyncrasies in the American Electoral College were enough to push the election to Harris. Major news outlets called the race soon after the close of polling on Election Day, but many right-wing pundits and social media information sources encouraged their subscribers and followers to refuse to abide by the “mainstream” results. Trump refuses to concede, and spends the month of November holding rallies around the United States where he claims the election was “stolen” in a far more egregious manner than the 2020 election. Far-right commentators in both traditional and social media outlets lament that the American electoral system is corrupt and untrustworthy. Stoking the fires, Russian and Russian-affiliated disinformation agents flood conservative social media echoing the same sentiment.

By early December 2024, Trump supporters begin to hold large-scale protests, some turning violent, in several major cities in the Midwest and South. Soon, protests expand beyond Trump-friendly venues and into major cities where counter-protesters began to push back. In the midst of the growing chaos, Russia, China, and Iran decide to strike, putting Operation Cold Winter into effect. To begin, Russia enlists freelance journalists to cover bogus rumors and spread disinformation on the results of the election, going so far as to create plausible-sounding media outlets such as the “Chicago Chronicle” or the “New York News Daily.”[1] When a disinformation story is picked up by a major American news source, bots and trolls are enlisted to cite the story and propagate it through social media in order to further the disinformation campaign. Shortly after the Christmas and New Year holidays, well-organized protests are launched in major cities around America. The protestors demand the election results be overturned and Donald Trump instated as the President. Russian disinformation agents began to amplify this discourse. They propagate a story carried by CNN and Fox News that invited election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had declared the election “not free and fair.”[2] Both news organizations retract the story later, but the damage had been done.

Russia takes the next two weeks to intensify the narratives it had sown earlier. First, its agents began reporting that the Harris Administration would seek vengeance against Trump supporters, using much more specific “microtargeting” tactics.[3] Russian trolls, RT, Russian-backed false news outlets and other manipulated reporters begin to propagate and reinforce the narrative that Harris officials will interrupt electricity and essential services to Trump supporters. Simultaneously, Russian operatives introduce a new narrative on left-leaning social media sites claiming that Trump supporters were planning to overthrow the US government and install a Trump dictatorship. Microtargeting deepfake campaigns on both sides of the political spectrum are launched on social media, showing “Donald Trump” and “Kamala Harris” making statements that demonize the other and calling for supporters to rise up.[4] Protests become larger, and low-level violence between opposition groups is now a common occurrence.

Iran begins its phase of the operation on January 27, 2025. As in the past, Iranian cyberattacks again targeted water supply systems. However, instead of limiting the attack to Pennsylvania, they targeted twelve eastern states, including Washington D. C. during the height of the protest. The disruption of fresh water to citizens was followed by an online campaign that promoted stories reading that the Biden Administration was punishing conservatives or the government had lost control of the water supply, depending on the target. Russian trolls used large language model (LLM) AI to help discern appropriate targets.[5] Panic began to foment in a small percentage of the US population in these twelve northeastern states. Next, Chinese “Net Warriors” activate malware buried in the US electrical grid and turn off as much of the power in as many states as possible. Local and national news begin reporting on the danger of power outages in many midwestern and eastern states with subfreezing temperatures. Russian cybergang DarkSide, working with operatives from the Main Intelligence Directory of the General Staff (GRU), emerge from hiding in Colonial Pipeline’s IT systems and lock 40 percent of the transfer valves on the pipeline’s physical structure. The pipeline goes down for months, further exacerbating the energy problems in the eastern and southeastern United States.

Later in the week, Russia and China open up a barrage of cyberattacks through formal military and intelligence channels attempting to disrupt banking services, beef and poultry processing plants, other energy providers and even a nuclear power plant. Energy stocks decline dramatically, and the larger stock market enters “correction” territory. In a novel cyberattack, PLA and PLA-affiliated hackers infiltrate Amazon and placed millions of fake orders. This results in 70 percent of the warehouse inventory being shipped to citizens who did not order the goods and would not pay for them. In the chaos that ensued, Amazon had no way to recapture much of the lost goods, and its share price fell more than 50 percent, bringing the stock market down another seven percent. President Harris closes Wall Street, and retreats to Camp David to plan a recovery, but her popularity ratings fall below 15%. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives begins to draft articles of impeachment, and prominent politicians across the political spectrum begin to call for her resignation. Along with its economy, the US democracy is crippled.

Though the above scenario is fiction, threats both real and imagined abound to American democracy, its economy and its open society. During the Cold War, films such as The Manchurian Candidate or Three Days of the Condor forced Americans to confront the specter of high-level conspiracies to destroy the country, with threats coming both from without and within.[6] More recently, no threat looms larger in the contemporary popular imagination than the actual hijacking of an American presidential election by an adversary such as Russia or China, and the attendant political violence that would no doubt ensue.

Policymakers and pundits endlessly debate in the press which candidate Russian President Vladimir Putin prefers to win the 2024 American election, and what actions he will authorize to affect his preferred outcome. Now that Vice President Harris has supplanted President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for president, the speculation on whether or how Russia involved itself in the election is even more rife. We consider this debate, while fascinating, to be ultimately beside the point; the Russian state has neither the capability to precisely enough manipulate the myriad sub-national elections that comprise the 2024 election nor the overt desire to do so. Indeed, such an aim does not even fulfill Putin’s strategic objectives very well. Even if Russia has a preferred candidate, is able to somehow engineer the federalized electoral system to get that candidate elected, and is then able to somehow “control” that newly-elected President, it is unclear whether the risks of such direct meddling would be worth the benefits.

Despite popular conceptualizations of the president of the United States as all-powerful, the executive branch is still subject to constitutional checks and balances. Elected officials in both the legislative and executive branches are (still) accountable to the public that elects them, and constitutional provisions exist to impeach of the executive for conducting high crimes and misdemeanors, of which the ceding of American foreign policy to an adversary surely would be an example. These constitutional guardrails make an overt strategy of seeking to control American foreign policy through a preferred candidate tenuous at best. Further, given that a May 2023 Pew survey conducted on the issue of American attitudes toward Russia found that more than six in ten Americans have very unfavorable views of the country,[7] most candidates are unlikely to overtly support Putin’s foreign policy objectives of restoring the greatness of the former Russian Empire, degrading or destroying NATO, and diminishing American power and leadership in the world.[8]

For its part, China is also likely not in the business of overtly attempting to influence election winners and losers. While contemporary Chinese foreign policy is driven by the same decision calculus as every other state in the international system, China has a long history of strategic thinking that gives it a deep well from which to draw. In many ways, ancient military writers influence contemporary Chinese strategy. Both former US Ambassador to China Michael Pillsbury and China scholar Alastair Johnston argue that Chinese strategy leans heavily on their warring states' history, c. 475-221 BCE.[9] Because of this reliance on the warring states period and the seven military strategists of the time, like Sun Tzu, China often orients its strategy on the Thirty-Six Stratagems, first elucidated in the distant past. In these stratagems, there is a great emphasis on deception and degrading enemies indirectly, which would indicate that attempting to choose the correct candidate and ensure his or her election really is not in keeping with tenets of Chinese strategic thought. Instead, one of the stratagems (Stratagem Five), known colloquially as “loot a burning house” sheds far more light on China’s possible intentions than does a discussion of which candidate China prefers. The meaning behind the stratagem is simple: when your enemy is in disarray, vulnerable, or weak, that is the time to add energy to the system to push the enemy system into chaos, and possibly self-destruction.

For these reasons, among others, it is far more likely that Russia and China are more interested in eroding confidence in the American election system, with consequences ranging from the relatively benign (e.g., voter apathy depressing turnout) to the increasingly destructive (e.g., the normalization of political violence within society), to the existential (e.g., the normalization of political violence by the state), potentially leading to an insurgency or civil war. Individually, these efforts are dangerous to American democracy. Combined, they may be catastrophic. When one views Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks sponsored or condoned by the Russian government in this new light, disinformation and cyberattacks no longer seem uncoordinated, ham-fisted, or unconnected events. For much of the early 21st century, China appeared to be focused on cyberattacks that steal American intellectual property.[10] Recently, however, the FBI has warned that Chinese government-affiliated hackers are preparing to attack American infrastructure and cause “real-world harm.”[11] This new trend has elevated China to the prime cyber threat against the United States.

Chinese cyber-attacks against American companies and infrastructure, though dangerous, are known quantities and can be defended against. But another disturbing angle has emerged: that of China utilizing American weaknesses in its own information space against it. China is likely aware of Russian disinformation operations against the American population, even if not engaged in outright coordination and information sharing.[12] Looking at the system holistically, a frightening picture emerges that could be building toward a future integrated operation which would accelerate instability in the American political system. The first phase would be a coordinated effort to foment discontent, disinformation, and paranoia among differing sides of the political spectrum. The second phase would entail a coordinated series of cyberattacks across multiple economic, energy, transportation, and media domains to ensure that discontent turns into violence and, perhaps, insurgency. The next section of this paper examines the connection between disinformation and the American population, specifically the American electorate, and lays the groundwork for a scenario whereby Chinese and Russian coordinated disinformation campaigns serve to systematically weaken the country from the inside out.

Disinformation and the American Electorate

Disinformation in the American electorate is a topic that provokes reactions ranging from hyperbolic to yawns.[13] Research into whether disinformation is a clear and present danger is hampered by the fact that a sizeable proportion of the American public does not believe it exists, much less that it is harmful. Despite this existential challenge to the American electoral system, few voters consider disinformation to be the threat that disinformation researchers do. And even among cybersecurity professionals, election-oriented disinformation is not regarded in the same way as America’s physical and cyber election infrastructure, which upon the creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in 2017 was elevated to a “critical infrastructure” subsector (under the “government facilities” sector).[14] Such a designation means that “the United States’ election infrastructure is of such vital importance to the American way of life that its incapacitation or destruction would have a devastating effect on the country.”[15]

CISA was created out of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) National Protection and Programs Directorate in large part as a direct reaction against Russian hackers targeting US election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.[16] It has as its mission to “lead the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure.”[17] Since its inception, CISA has been more in the public eye than many federal security agencies.[18] It became best known immediately after the 2020 election, when then-Director Chris Krebs was fired by President Trump for noting that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and debunking rumors that the election had been stolen using CISA’s “Rumor Control” website, as well as his personal social media account.[19]

Recently, and belatedly, CISA and others have now begun to consider the risks posed by generative AI and other tools of malicious threat actors in cyberspace.[20] In collaboration with international partners such as the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (UK-NCSC), the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), and the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ), as well as the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Cyber Command Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), CISA in late 2023 released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) raising awareness of a Russia-based threat actor group known as “Star Blizzard.”[21]

Integrating Cyberattacks into a Campaign to Create Chaos

We have already established that Russian threat actors engage in disinformation campaigns online through social media, the use of proxies in the media, and the establishment of false media outlets, like Russia Today (RT), to provoke and stoke extremists across the political spectrum. But the ability of threat actors to do so effectively relies at least as much on the open-society nature of their target. Few societies are as open, relatively speaking, as the United States.[22] The celebrated freedoms of the American population, and the expectations of that population for the continuation of those freedoms, paradoxically makes defending them from threats from abroad extraordinarily challenging.[23]

The United States is almost perfectly positioned for exploitation by outside influences.[24] The U.S. is, as two scholars noted, “perniciously polarized” with increasingly serious consequences for institutional and........

© E-International