Never before has a US National Security Strategy (NSS) taken foreign malign influence as seriously as the one released last week. But strategy alone is not enough. To fight this threat, the United States must now put its money where its mouth is and rebuild capabilities that it largely dismantled.

The new NSS frames countering foreign malign influence as a requirement to fundamentally “protect our own sovereignty,” and “determine our own destiny, free of outside interference.”

But over the past year, the US government has shut down the FBI’s Foreign Malign Influence Task Force, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

To understand how the US government should respond to the new NSS and rebuild its capacity to counter foreign malign influence, it is helpful first to understand how the NSS defines the problem.

The NSS rightly casts “hostile foreign influence” as a holistic challenge more vast than botnets on social media, including “espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, [and] cultural subversion.”

This approach marks a clear improvement over the Biden administration’s 2022 NSS by shifting language from countering “disinformation” to “influence operations.” The distinction matters. Disinformation—that is, intentionally deceptive information—is merely one tactic within a broader spectrum of foreign malign influence.

Indeed, foreign powers have attempted to shape Americans’ beliefs, behaviors, and policies through efforts as far ranging as

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