The killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top nuclear scientist, will complicate the incoming Biden administration’s efforts to renew the nuclear deal—and could lead to escalation. Last Friday, Iran announced that an important player in its security app [...]
An Iranian scientist, who U.S. intelligence says is one of Iran's top nuclear officials, has been assassinated. Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai spoke to NPR's Ari Shapiro about the news. [...]
In last week’s post-U.S. election coverage from Russian state media, two major topics were the pro-Trump demonstrations in DC the weekend of November 14, in which accounts of violence directed at pro-Trump demonstrators and the size of the rally wer [...]
Overview The aftermath of the U.S. presidential election has seen a tidal wave of false and misleading information about the validity of the election results as well as the legitimacy and security of the voting process. Narratives related to ballot [...]
After four years of “America First,” President-Elect Biden recently declared: “America is Back.” In other words, U.S. foreign policy is on the verge of change. On this episode, Ariane Tabatabai, the Middle East Fellow at GMF’s Alliance for Securing [...]
Last week’s U.S. election coverage from Russian state media continued to feature familiar themes, including claims of fraud, criticism of mainstream media coverage of the election, and condemnation of social media platforms for election-related issu [...]
Last week, Russian state media devoted substantial coverage to the U.S. elections. During election week (prior to the presidential race being called for Biden), the outlets continued to showcase various themes characteristic of their coverage of the [...]
In the last full week of coverage prior to Election Day, Russian state media continued to advance several familiar themes, including promotion of Hunter Biden allegations, claims of media bias, criticism of the two-party system, and claims of improp [...]
Americans have heard a lot about threats to the 2020 election. But one of the greatest threats may be a loss of faith in our electoral system itself. The director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, told Congress in September that his greatest concern [...]
Director Laura Rosenberger has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics since 2016, and she is the author of two recent significant articles—one in Foreign Affairs and one on Lawfare—both on the subject of foreign inf [...]
In mid-2020, the Alliance for Securing Democracy convened a task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts to devise a national strategy for the United States to offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of [...]
In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell interviews former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, current Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democra [...]
Last week we learned Russia and Iran are interfering in the 2020 presidential election. That's concerning, but hardly surprising. It's a reminder that Americans need to be vigilant as the election approaches. And there are some common-sense actions [...]
The final U.S. presidential debate provided significant fodder for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media to criticize the current state of U.S. democracy. Russian state media provided the most extensive coverage of the debate, with the majority [...]
With November 3rd just around the corner, Out of Order is continuing the elections theme this week with a conversation on voting in America—making sense of this patchwork system and how it’s all working in an unprecedented year. The host seat this w [...]
With just days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Americans are once again scrolling through news feeds full of stories about foreign operations that seek to undermine their country’s electoral process. Some of the reports raise questions [...]
During the second and final presidential debate between incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, the candidates faced questions about foreign interference in the election. It was an issue four years ago as well. Earlier this week, th [...]
On Wednesday night, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called a news conference to warn Americans that foreign adversaries were actively interfering in the U.S. elections. Ratcliffe noted that two countries, Russia and Iran, have launc [...]
Head of External Affairs Rachael Dean Wilson spoke to Spectrum News after the DNI announced Iran and Russia are attempting to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. “It’s very easy to get sucked into this trap of which country is trying to support whi [...]
The New York Post’s publication of salacious and unverified personal materials from a laptop allegedly owned by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was covered extensively by Russian state media, which focused both on the “explosive” contents of the story, as [...]
Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai moderated a GMF Face Off debate, where participants answered the question, "Is the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign against Iran working?" In a twist, participants Richard Nephew and Mark Dubowitz [...]
Last week, Russian and Iranian diplomatic and state media accounts and outlets primarily focused on regional issues, while Chinese accounts and outlets concentrated on U.S.-China disputes as well as President Trump’s coronavirus recovery. Russian st [...]
Overview On September 29, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden sparred in the first of three (now two) presidential debates. The event, which was labelled a “debacle” and a “total disaster” by the U.S. news media, unsurprisingl [...]
President Trump’s positive coronavirus diagnosis was covered extensively by the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese networks monitored on Hamilton 2.0, with most of the content covering factual updates or well-wishes from diplomats and world leaders. Russ [...]
Donald Trump and Joe Biden are putting forward very different ideas about U.S. policy toward Iran, which arguably makes the results of their contest very consequential for Tehran—though some in the Islamic Republic say otherwise. That raises the que [...]
Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai joined the New Statesman's "World Review" podcast to discuss Iran's role in its region and the world, how diplomacy with the United States is likely to proceed, and the violence breaking out in Nagorno-Karabakh. R [...]
This policy paper was co-authored with Edgar P. Tam, visiting senior fellow at the Paris Office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Please click the link at the right to view the full paper. President Donald Trump’s views on Iran hav [...]
Last week, Russian state media and diplomats continued to emphasize the safety of and demand for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, as well as developments around a competing Russian vaccine created by the Vektor State Research Center of Virology and Bi [...]
Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph discusses how the rise of foreign funding distorts politics in the West, drawing on our recently released paper Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interferen [...]
ASD Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai gives readers a short introduction to her recently released report Iran's Authoritarian Playbook: The Tactics, Doctrine, and Objectives behind Iran’s Influence Operations. In one of the first comprehensive di [...]
Introduction According to a 2013 indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice, hackers backed by a foreign power gained access to the controls of the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small dam in the New York City suburb of Rye, New York. Cyberattacks on inf [...]
Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government and state media accounts and outlets covered well-trodden ground last week, with each country returning to familiar topics or themes. For the third straight week, Russian government officials and state media [...]
As with most major dates in World War II, Russian diplomatic and government accounts last week put out a spate of messaging marking the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and, more significantly, the recently changed date Russia recognizes [...]
Overview On August 9, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared a landslide victory in an election widely regarded to be neither free nor fair, sparking widespread protests across the country. Since that time, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian [...]
The major through-line in messaging from Russia, China, and Iran last week was a focus on police brutality, racial justice protests, and violence and unrest in the United States, following a pattern established earlier this year in their respective [...]
Major news events covered last week by the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian networks monitored on the Hamilton dashboard included the Democratic National Convention, past and present geopolitical developments in the Middle East, the alleged poisoning o [...]
Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state media and government accounts focused on an array of major developments last week. Iranian accounts continued to cover the aftermath of the Beirut explosion—including continued accusations of U.S. and Israeli invo [...]
Heavy coverage of the explosion in Beirut was substantial enough to break through the coronavirus news cycle, reflected in the fact that #Beirut was the third most-used hashtag by Russian, Iranian, and Chinese state media and government accounts las [...]
Summary As the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world, authoritarian actors have engaged in robust information-manipulation campaigns. China—where the virus originated and spread due to the government’s initial cover up and mismanagement [...]
Restart, a fringe Iranian dissident group, shows how conspiracy spreads—and what that means for U.S. politics, Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatai writes in Foreign Policy. QAnon entered the mainstream U.S. political lingo in 2017, when its followers [...]