America is losing a war it hasn’t even named yet

Foreign adversaries, including China and Russia, are waging a new form of warfare against the United States by manipulating public perception through technology. China has formalized this approach as the 'cognitive domain,' treating perception as a battlefield alongside traditional domains like land and cyber. Russia allocated an additional 54% of its 2026 budget to state media, funding networks like RT, Sputnik, and proxy accounts that spread disinformation across social media platforms. In 2022, Russia launched the Doppelganger operation, cloning websites of major U.S. outlets like Fox News and The Washington Post to disseminate Kremlin-approved content. The U.S. Department of Justice seized 32 of these domains in 2024, but new ones quickly replaced them. These tactics aim to deepen distrust and fracture shared reality, targeting both sides of the political spectrum. During the 2016 election, Russia simultaneously operated Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages to amplify divisions. Iran joined this effort in early 2024, flooding platforms like TikTok and X with AI-generated videos mocking U.S. political figures, including President Trump and Pete Hegseth, which garnered millions of views. The firm behind these videos confirmed to the BBC that the Iranian government was a client. Around the same time, Alexis Wilkins, girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, alleged on X that a foreign-linked network, including Russia Today accounts, had spent 22 months coordinating attacks against her. The U.S. lacks a formal framework to counter these threats, which exploit social media, autonomous AI agents, and synthetic media to undermine democratic institutions. Unlike traditional warfare, this conflict is waged at machine speed, making it difficult to detect and mitigate. The coordinated nature of these campaigns suggests a deliberate strategy to erode public trust and destabilize American society.