For three decades, democracies have treated sanctions, diplomacy, and military activities (exercises or otherwise) as their primary tools for influencing authoritarian States. Yet our research suggests there is a tool that autocrats fear even more: challenges to their information control. Analysis of propaganda and official communications from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea shows that these regimes consistently react more negatively to information threats than to the economic, diplomatic, and military tools of statecraft. This insight highlights a key, underutilized opportunity for democratic national-security policymaking.
From Criticism to Disruption
Authoritarian regimes differ in ideology, but they share a common structural weakness: survival depends on controlling their domestic information environment. Authoritarians’ extensive censorship apparatus, internet throttling, criminalization of journalism, suppression of opposition protests, and aggressive responses to even limited breaches of information control reflect deep anxiety about uncontrolled narrative space.
We have illustrated this anxiety across a range of authoritarian States by analyzing government propaganda, official statements, and state-controlled media (which we refer to with the shorthand “POSM data”). We analyze data within diplomacy, information, military, and economic (DIME) spheres using text and sentiment analysis paired with statistical analysis and qualitative analysis. Measuring the levels of negativity, positivity, or neutrality if and when a subject government discusses a DIME tool employed by an outside entity — whether U.N. resolutions, economic sanctions, military exercises, arms sales, or any other tool of statecraft — reveals which tools generate the most/least negative responses. The approach reflects noted conflict and deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling’s conjecture that governments “create a bargaining position by public statements, statements that are calculated to arouse a public opinion that permits no concessions to be made.” Importantly, the degree of factual, propagandistic, or dis/misinformation included in such statements is of less concern because their public nature is meant to convey threat(s), promise(s), and commitment.
Using these methods, our research consistently finds that authoritarian states from China, to North Korea, to Russia, or even relatively smaller autocratic states such as Azerbaijan, respond more negatively to the information tools of statecraft than to military, economic, or diplomatic tools. For example, criticizing Russia over its censorship and information control creates a more negative POSM reaction from the Kremlin than a NATO exercise in the Baltics. Similarly, criticism of Beijing’s information controls, first labeled the Great Firewall nearly 30 years ago in a 1997 Wired magazine article, creates a more negative POSM reaction than economic sanctions or even Taiwanese military exercises involving U.S. participants. By “more negative reaction,” we mean that the targeted State’s public messaging is more hostile, condemnatory, and accusatory toward the initiating State and its actions. Such responses may portray the action, whether sanctions, military exercises, or other tool of statecraft, as illegitimate, threatening, hypocritical, or deliberately hostile; these negative reactions by authoritarians are highest in response to the information tools of statecraft.
Of nearly equal importance to the (re)discovery of authoritarian sensitivities to information challenges is the asymmetric nature of many of the information tools. Unlike the costs required to generate a significant military threat, or the economic heft required for sanctions to bite, the information tool that generates among the most negative POSM reactions from authoritarians is public documentation and criticism of their information controls. For example, annual reports from human rights organizations including Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch regularly produce among the most negative responses seen in the POSM data: more negative than sanctions, diplomatic criticism, or even nearby military exercises. Similar reports from the United Nations, groups of states like the European Union, or large countries such as the United States (for example, the State Department’s annual human rights reports) generate similarly high negativity.
It is important to note that the negative reactions seen in our analyses are largely in response to rhetorical criticism — what outsiders are saying and publishing regarding a state’s censorship and information control. When such actions of the receiving country are actually challenged — for example, by groups in South Korea using loudspeakers and leaflets (or drones) to pierce the North’s controls — the negative reaction spikes further. To continue with the North Korean example, Pyongyang has never conducted a kinetic response to economic sanctions, but over the past 25 years it has gone kinetic in response to leaflets and loudspeakers multiple times, including shelling South Korean loudspeakers and firing on large balloons carrying leaflets from the South to the North. Pyongyang also goes kinetic in response to such leaflets and loudspeakers — i.e., information tools — more often than to military tools such as joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises.
Moving up the ladder of technology, authoritarian governments have long been preparing to counteract satellite internet services, including kinetically, due to concerns over the services’ ability to circumvent national-level information controls. From leaflets and radio broadcasts to VPNs and satellite phones, information’s ability to allow uncensored outside information to flow into an authoritarian state, or internal information to flow more freely within it, have long generated significant negativity. From simple criticism to outright challenges, information capabilities offer democracies a powerful, effective tool for deterring, negotiating with, or punishing authoritarian States. Allowing this type of tool to go dormant, as discussed below with the Trump administration’s cuts to U.S. information programs, is a mistake; information activities should be expanded, not disappeared.
The capabilities — from South Korean leaflet balloons to anti-Putin posters on Estonian museums to reports from human rights organizations or tools that help circumvent government censorship — can be employed in a variety of asymmetric, cost-effective forms:
- public documentation of censorship and repression,
- support for satellite internet and other censorship circumvention tools like VPNs,
- amplification of independent journalists and civic groups,
- multilateral condemnation of information suppression.
As we saw above and further explore below, we know these capabilities ‘work’ in terms of generating negativity and historically relevant fear in authoritarian States. But many are single-source, relatively unintegrated, often tactical-level activities; increased attention and organization is required to return these capabilities to strategic-level statecraft.
A Neglected Tool
From the Cold War to the current day, dissidents and human rights groups have understood this authoritarian information vulnerability and consistently favored free information flows over force. As the late Alexei Navalny of Russia put it, “We must do what they fear — tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites.” Navalny’s words echo those of imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, “The path to democracy in Iran lies not through violence, war, or military action by a foreign government, but through organizing and strengthening civil society,” and imprisoned Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai, with his succinct “information is freedom.” All three have been imprisoned by their governments for supporting these most dangerous of concepts: truth, civil society, and information freedom.
During the Cold War, the United States and its allies shared this understanding, investing heavily in civil society organizations and capabilities to keep accurate information flowing, from news services such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that broadcast factual information about the United States or about their own countries, respectively, to educational and cultural exchanges. These efforts were central to U.S. foreign policy and strategy. At one point the then-United States Information Agency, which was folded into the State Department after the Cold War, had the most extensive overseas presence of any Washington agency, as part of what one U.S. Foreign Service Officer described as “the biggest information and cultural effort ever mounted by one society to influence the attitudes and actions of men and women beyond its borders.”
These information capabilities, often involving both propaganda (information meant to influence an audience) and public diplomacy (information meant to inform an audience) clearly resonated with Cold War audiences. When Lech Wałęsa, the head of the Solidarity trade union and later president of Poland, and ultimately a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was asked about the importance of Radio Free Europe to Solidarity’s work in freeing Poland from Soviet authoritarian control, he simply responded, “Can you imagine the earth without the sun?”
In the early 1990s, as the Cold War was ending and the U.S. Congress was contemplating cuts to American information programs, Václav Havel, dissident-turned-president of (then) Czechoslovakia, called U.S. President George H.W. Bush to lobby for continued funding. Bush described his conversations with Havel during a 1991 address, “Last year, Václav Havel came to the White House and told me that he and others used to listen to Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. And President Havel credited those broadcasts with helping to launch the Velvet Revolution and turn a totalitarian society into a democratic one.” Bush ensured the funding continued.
Compare Wałęsa and Havel’s support for U.S. information activities with the voices supporting President Donald Trump’s 2025 cutbacks of U.S. information programs:
“‘Die, B*stards’: Russian Propagandists Celebrate Trump’s Closure of Radio Liberty, VOA”
“‘Today We Celebrate’: Kremlin and Russian Propaganda Rejoice as Trump Guts RFE/RL, VOA”
“‘Discarded like a dirty rag’: Chinese state media hails Trump’s cuts to Voice of America”
“China’s Global Times praises Trump funding cuts to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia”
This shift in U.S. information policy, from one supported by dissidents and human rights activists to one supported by authoritarian regimes, not only has profound security implications for the United States and fellow democratic societies, but also helps highlight how democracies, especially the United States, have unwisely abandoned a powerful tool of statecraft.
Policy Implications: Conducting Information Operations Ethically
What does this mean for policymakers? First, democracies and civil-society actors should double down on supporting free media, independent reporting, human-rights monitoring, and transparency in authoritarian countries. Rather than viewing information campaigns merely as pressure tools, democratic states should view them as normative contests: truth, transparency, moral suasion, and media freedom all command interest and retain immense power.
Second, in their information operations, democratic states should focus more on the controls, less on specific narratives. For example, rather than attempting to outfox Putin’s propagandists with narratives that appeal to Russian audiences, policymakers should work to reduce the controls that prevent, for example, Russian mothers of servicemembers killed in the war in Ukraine from expressing themselves. Messages and memes arising organically from within a society can often be more compelling, and therefore more threatening to authoritarian regimes, than narratives crafted by outsiders. To use Radio Free Europe as an example, this was one of the reasons for hiring primarily emigres — the Radio was meant to sound like “a home service located abroad.” Even with an assist from artificial intelligence and solid language training, it is difficult for outsiders to craft equally timely, compelling content.
Third, recognizing that authoritarian regimes may respond harshly with repression targeting their domestic population when they express themselves publicly, international actors should be prepared to offer protection and support to civil society, journalists, and dissidents. As in the Cold War, ethical information operations demand accountability. For example, offering VPNs and satellite internet services is only part of information statecraft; offering to support and shelter those who avail themselves of these capabilities, including with refugee status, must remain an option. As in the Cold War, such refugees can then assist U.S. or other content creation activities targeting their home country.
Fourth, instead of unilateral actions, states should seek to work through international institutions or at least via a coalition of like-minded states. The U.N., regional bodies, and related coalitions provide collective legitimacy and reduce the risk of strategic abuse. This helps keep the contest focused broadly and collectively on freedom of information access and related normative conditions that favor democracies, rather than engaging in the type of ethics-light, propaganda-versus-propaganda contest that favors the controlled information environments of authoritarians.
Overall, for the past decade, authoritarian states have been more successful at deploying practices (from election interference to Covid conspiracy theories) designed to manipulate the open information environments of democratic societies, than democratic states have been at targeting authoritarian reliance on information control. During the Cold War, the U.S. government led a successful campaign to undermine authoritarian information controls, ultimately helping collapse the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. But since 2025, the United States has largely abandoned what remained of those efforts. While human rights groups and some democracies still conduct information-related activities, the vigor and scale of the Cold War are lacking, creating a strategic-level gap. We believe there remains a clear, relatively low-cost opportunity for Brussels, Berlin, Paris, or London.
Conclusion: Statecraft Beyond Sanctions and Strikes
From Moscow’s Soviet-era efforts to jam radio broadcasts and restrict access to copy machines, to China’s AI-driven Great Firewall, authoritarians have long invested significant time, treasure, and technology in maintaining information control. Yet while they have adapted determinedly to preserve that control, democracies have largely allowed information statecraft to recede from the center of strategic competition, the Trump administration’s recent thinly veiled efforts to propagandize European democracies for political benefit notwithstanding.
Our findings suggest that this imbalance should be reconsidered. Across a range of authoritarian regimes, challenges to information control consistently provoke stronger reactions than economic, diplomatic, and military tools. Democracies should take these signals seriously, and raise the costs of information control to reclaim a policy option that has historically worked in their favor.
Support for independent media, anti-censorship technologies, and civil society engagement should not be treated as peripheral democracy-promotion initiatives. These are strategic national security instruments that raise the costs of repression while remaining consistent with democratic values. Reclaiming these capabilities would revive a form of statecraft championed by Wałęsa and Havel, and so courageously demanded by Navalny, Mohammadi, and Lai.
