https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-russia-advocacy/2025/01/14/id/1195050/
Former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey served on the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services Committees. He publishes a Russian-language YouTube channel, Nashi Emigranti, that tells America’s story to the Russian people.
The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy document hit the nail on the head. “U.S. efforts to counter the exploitation of information by rivals have been tepid and fragmented.” Ironically, the Russian Academy of Sciences concurs, reporting in 2021 that the U.S. information war structure looks like “a dusty relic of a bygone era.” Both statements are factual and explain why the nation that invented the internet continues to lose the information war to despotic regimes. It should be no surprise that freedom has been retreating around the world for nearly two decades, imperiling our national security.
Nothing has changed significantly since the first Trump administration sounded the alarm. In his second term, with a Republican majority in each House, President-elect Trump has an opportunity to create a 21st century strategic messaging structure that can persuasively tell America’s story to the world while undermining despots by stoking the coals of discontent among those they misruled and abused. Think Putin, Xi, Khamenei, and Kim. The president should seize this new opportunity to put us on the offense in the battle of ideologies, a battle we must win or, in all likelihood, perish as a free and prosperous nation.
Broadly, our adversaries are on the attack, employing every means of hybrid warfare, from outright invasion, as in Ukraine, to sabotage, as in the severing of vital cables in the Baltic; to terrorism, as in the attempt, believed to be Russian, to hide incendiary devices in cargo meant for air shipment to the U.S.; to assassination plots, witness the November federal court indictment of three persons accused of plotting to kill Trump on behalf of Iran. In between increasingly frequent acts of attempted or actual violence, there is the daily poisoning of human minds by disinformation meant to confuse and demoralize. We’ve never faced anything like today’s hybrid war. But we’d better get used to it because it’s here to stay as long as there are evil regimes in the world.
To survive and triumph, we must bring to bear every instrument of national power. Trump has vowed to rebuild our armed forces, restore self-sufficiency in our defense industrial base, and protect essential infrastructure from cyberattacks. Those big programs reflect one of the president’s well-known business principles: Think big. But they will take years to accomplish.