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Officials attend the opening ceremony for the North Korean Embassy in Tehran, Iran in this undated photo released on August 5, 2017 by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang.
If North Korea and Iran hook up, will China be jealous?
Pyongyang’s Minister of External Economic Relations Yun Jong Ho became the first North Korean official to visit Iran in half a decade on Tuesday. The trip is officially about economic ties, but the US State Department said it was “incredibly concerned” about possible missile and nuclear technology cooperation.
There’s precedent: Tehran has borrowed Pyongyang’s missile designs for its own weapons and admitted to using North Korean missiles during its 1980-1988 war with Iraq. Today, North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles that Tehran can’t yet field.
“Given Iran's preoccupation with its strategic position, searching for increased deterrence against both Israel and the United States, the fact that it would welcome a North Korean delegation right now is significant,” said Eurasia Group Iran analyst Greg Brew. “It's also significant that this visit is taking place while Iran's national security advisor is in Moscow,” he added, noting that Russia has been the glue in ties between all three countries.
Both Iran and North Korea have shipped Moscow weapons to use in Ukraine, which Eurasia Group labeled one of its Top Risks for 2024. There’s a political benefit for North Korea on top of the aid Moscow reciprocates: attention from China. Wary of losing influence over Pyongyang, China responded to the closer Russo-Korean ties by launching its own diplomatic press, including a visit to Pyongyang from politburo member Zhao Leji this month. Pyongyang may be trying to run the same play with Tehran.
“From North Korea’s perspective, if all they have to do is bat their eyelashes at another suitor for China to roll out the diplomatic red carpet, that seems like a well they can go back to with Iran,” says Eurasia Group North Korea expert Jeremy Chan.
Are markets becoming immune to disruptive geopolitics?
There’s no escaping the intricate link between economics and geopolitics. Today, that link has become a crucial factor in investment decision-making, and who better to speak to that than Margaret Franklin, CEO of CFA Institute, a global organization of investment professionals? Franklin sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank spring meetings this week.
Economists once predicted that sovereign debt would overwhelm global markets. But now, having been through the pandemic, the advent of AI, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, “there's almost a level of immunity,” she says, “to the dramatic nature of it until something really cataclysmic happens.”
And then? “The response, generally speaking, has been pretty positive,” Franklin says, with central bank intervention saving markets and building resilience.
In much the same way, the World Bank is trying to boost investor confidence by making changes that leverage private sector capital for public sector goals by better evaluating what level of risk the private sector will accept.
Individual investors should do the same, Franklin advises. “Really evaluate your risk profile … making sure you diversify,” she says, noting that fixed-income offerings have become more attractive. Younger investors, meanwhile, need to be cautious with getting their information on social media, she adds.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
Everything’s political: sofa, tomato, shoe
If you’re reading this column, chances are you’ll agree that at some level everything is political, right?
All around us, the things we touch, eat, buy, and wear, the people we meet, the ways we communicate – there’s a little politics in all of it. There’s the trade policy that determines where your shirt comes from. There’s the immigration policy that shapes who your kids will befriend in kindergarten or where they’ll work when they grow up. There are the decisions about war and peace that can shape life for you or for family members thousands of miles away.
So from time to time, I want to take a look around the world closer at hand, spotting the big political stories in the small objects around us. Today we’re gonna do three quickies: a sofa, a tomato, and a shoe.
Let’s go.
Your sofa: Where’s it from? If you’re in the US, chances are that for most of the past 30 years, it’s been made in China, the major exporter of furniture to North America. But if you bought it over the past year? It just might be from somewhere closer to home.
That’s because just this week México officially passed China as the US’ largest annual trade partner, taking the top spot for the first time.
That’s a big deal. China has ruled the roost for most of the past 30 years on the strength of its business-minded dictatorship and its vast, relatively cheap labor force. But in recent years, two things started to change all that. First, Donald Trump uncorked a banger of a trade war against Beijing. Then, pandemic-related lockdowns shut much of China’s economy and choked off supply chains around the world.
Companies got spooked. Investors who once prized low costs over everything began to prioritize safer shores. They began scrambling to find places not named "China" to make things to sell to the vast American market: Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. They all boomed.
But México was the big winner. After all, it’s right next to the world’s largest consumer market and has a free trade agreement with Uncle Sam (renegotiated by Trump himself, no less.)
Nowadays, the industry-heavy states of northern México are practically choking on incoming investment. The catch? A lot of it is coming from … China, as companies like, say, Man Wah – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sofas – pile into Mexico to keep a foot in the American market.
So while you sprawl out on that sofa, ponder this: the 1990s and 2000s world of peak globalization, when companies scoured the planet for the lowest cost production, is over. We now live in a world where proximity and security matter more than cost. Get close to someone on that couch!
Tomato: Speaking of México, consider one of that country’s greatest gifts to the world: the tomato.
The once-feared fruit* didn’t make it widely to Europe until about 250 years ago – no penne al pomodoro or pan con tomate until then – but at the moment it’s a little political grenade on the continent: France and Spain have gotten into it over tomatoes in recent days.
First France said the Spanish ones were “false organic” frauds. Spain shot back that France’s were “inedible.” French farmers roughed up a Spanish tomato truck.
The issue? Paris says Spanish tomato farmers are shirking the EU’s strict rules on pesticides to flood France with cheaper produce. Spain says its own campesinos are fully following the rules and points to massive imports of cheaper Moroccan tomatoes to France as the culprit.
This is more than just a tú dices “tomate,” je dis “tomate” dispute. It echoes the larger wave of farmer protests that is roiling Europe. Across the EU, farmers are raising pitchforks against Brussels, mad about climate-conscious fuel subsidy cuts that are hurting their bottom lines at a time when their costs (for fuel and fertilizer) are already up because of the Ukraine war. Meanwhile, they’re also getting squeezed by cheaper competition from abroad.
Critics of the protests point out that European agriculture has been protected by massive subsidies for decades, and that it’s a shrinking sector of small farms and old farmers that has resisted modernization.
That may be, but no sane politician in Europe wants to be seen ignoring granddad the farmer, so governments across the continent have been rolling back subsidy cuts and icing new trade deals.
Lastly, look at your shoe. And while you’re looking at it, consider the Houthis, the Iran-backed rebel group that controls Yemen.
What could these two things possibly have to do with each other?
The answer is floating in the Red Sea, where, as you probably have heard, the Houthis have been raining drones and missiles down on commercial ships as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. As a result, shipping companies that move goods through the Red Sea and onto the Suez Canal are rerouting around the Horn of Africa. What’s this got to do with shoes?
As my colleague John found earlier this week, fully HALF of all shoes that go to Europe travel through the Red Sea. And about 40% of all clothing. So if you see a European friend walking around with two left shoes or one bare foot – you know who to blame.
*Yes, the tomato is a fruit. Don’t shoot the messenger. If you can’t handle that, don’t let me be the one to tell you that a strawberry isn’t a berry, but an eggplant is.
How Russia, North Korea, and Iran will sow chaos in 2024
Russia, North Korea, and Iran are the world’s most powerful rogue states. They have been working to strengthen their cooperation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, united by the draconian sanctions levied against them, their shared hatred of the US, and their willingness to violate international law to disrupt a global status quo they believe serves Western interests at their expense. These rogues are agents of chaos in today’s geopolitical order, bent on undermining existing institutions and the governments and principles that uphold them.
Once seen by Russia as a nuisance at best and a liability at worst, North Korea has become an essential resource for Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine thanks to its pariah status, militarized economy, and large stocks of Soviet-standard artillery ammunition. Meeting in Russia’s Far East in September 2023, Kim Jong Un and Putin struck a deal that sends North Korean artillery shells, rockets, and ballistic missiles to Russia in exchange for Russian food, energy, and – most importantly – technological assistance, especially on satellite development and deployment.
Russia and Iran, longtime partners in a bid to protect Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, have also upgraded their relationship from a limited tactical alliance to a more comprehensive and strategic military and economic partnership. Tehran has supplied Moscow with kamikaze drones to terrorize Ukrainian cities – now also being built in Russia – and has drawn on its decades of experience to help Moscow evade Western sanctions. For its part, Russia has become Iran’s chief external weapons supplier, its top source of foreign investment, and a key trading partner. Moscow also provides diplomatic cover for Tehran’s nuclear program at the UN Security Council and has developed warm relations with Iranian proxies at war with the United States and Israel in the Middle East.
While less prominent than Russia’s bilateral ties within the axis, North Korea and Iran have a decades-long history of cooperation on nuclear and ballistic missile development. This cooperation has reportedly extended to North Korea supplying weapons and missile designs to Hamas, the Houthis, and other Iranian-backed militant groups.
In 2024, coordination among these rogue states will increase. Deepening alignment and mutual support will pose a growing threat to geopolitical stability as they boost one another’s capabilities and act in increasingly disruptive ways on the global stage.
Russia will be the primary actor here, seeking to bolster its warfighting capabilities in Ukraine while working to deflect Western attention elsewhere. In exchange for North Korean artillery shells and rockets to sustain its war of attrition, Moscow will provide Pyongyang with technologies and know-how to advance its missile, submarine, and satellite programs, with major repercussions for Northeast Asian security. And in exchange for stepped-up provision of Iranian drones, munitions, sanctions relief, and ballistic missiles with which to strike Ukrainian cities, Moscow will supply Tehran with fighter jets and advanced weapons technology. Along with growing Russian support for Iran’s proxies, this will alter the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor at a time when Tehran and its proxies represent a much more direct security challenge to the West. Both bilateral deals will strengthen Russia’s hand in Ukraine and increase that war’s damage and costs.
The severity of existing Western sanctions against all three rogue states and the close cooperation among them means they will not be deterred by fear of further sanctions and isolation. This will unleash them to wage asymmetric warfare (short of direct military attacks) on the US and Europe, including via cyberattacks, support for terrorism, and disinformation campaigns designed to disrupt elections and sow chaos. More generally, the axis’s coordinated sanctions-busting and rule-breaking will undermine the compellent and deterrent power of Western sanctions, emboldening other would-be rogues.
It bears noting that China is not a member of the axis of rogues. Beijing did not openly condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine, but neither did it endorse the invasion or do much to help Putin’s war effort beyond purchasing discounted oil and allowing flows of dual-use goods to continue. (If India and the UAE were less friendly to the United States, analysts would be likening their Russia policies to China’s.) Beijing has looked on warily at the deepening security cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang – in fact, Chinese officials didn’t know Kim was going to Russia until after it was publicly announced … and they were piqued by it. And while it has ramped up oil imports from and diplomatic support for Tehran, Beijing has no desire to jeopardize its more strategically important interests in the Gulf (particularly its ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) by helping Iran make regional trouble.
That said, China is often well-served by the three rogues’ anti-Western operations and maintains a de facto policy of pro-axis neutrality. Indeed, without active acquiescence from China, the axis’s rogue activities would be less impactful. Short of violating international sanctions or jeopardizing its own interests, expect Beijing to continue to do business with and legitimize the axis as it undermines the US and its allies this year.
Three caveats are in order. First, Russia, Iran, and North Korea leaning on each other is a sign of their desperation and weakness on the global stage. When your best (and near only) friends are two rogue states, you’re in trouble. Second, all of them seek to avoid an active shooting war with the West, which means continued caution when escalating direct attacks on the United States or its core allies. And third, despite their common interest in sowing chaos, dictators have trouble trusting each other, making the entente a fragile one. This axis is a marriage of convenience and opportunity; its members are neither strategic nor ideological bedfellows – they are focused primarily on regime survival and geopolitical gain. As such, their relationships will remain largely transactional.
Still, the disruptive potential of their growing cooperation – especially with a boost or at the very least a blind eye from Beijing – should not be underestimated.
Welcome to Antarctica: A conflict-free zone
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Happy New Year 2024 from Antarctica.
That's actually where I am in a year where we're going to have, unfortunately, so much international conflict, so much geopolitical posturing, so much difficulty around the world. Seems like a good place to take a fresh start to kick off the year one continent that is actually free of that conflict and free because the world has decided to govern it well, the Antarctic. They used to be territorial claimants with overlapping claims, old colonial powers, and countries that were closed, whether it's Chile, Argentina, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, others. But they all suspended those claims as they entered into an Antarctic Treaty back in 1959.
For the duration of that treaty, which still is in place today and will be, we think, for at least decades to come. That means that Antarctic is free and clear of territorial claims and also free and clear of any military use or any natural resource exploitation, any commercialization. Now, instead, it's used for peaceful and scientific purposes for the benefit of humanity on this planet, and it has been running as such for over 60 years, despite the fact that there's no enforcement mechanism for this treaty. It's a very thin document, and everybody basically engages to try to ensure that over time we'll all work together, and so far, so good.
In fact, right now I'm closest to a Russian research base and an Indian base. Even though those are countries that don't get along incredibly well, they manage to still socialize and share weather information, other data, you wouldn't know that they're from different countries. In fact, that's true of the Americans and the Chinese and pretty much everybody that's here on the ground in Antarctic. Now, part of the reason for that is because there's very few people on the ground. It's really hard to get here. There are no indigenous people whose land has been taken away and who have claims upon it.
So in a sense, the very remoteness has made it comparatively easier to govern. Also, the fact that no one has seen huge profit in it, and over time, that could change as the space rate race heats up and people see that basing rockets in the Antarctic or satellite tracking could be useful and have military purposes, commercial applications. Maybe as we're going to Mars. Certainly also, as we talk about rare earths and the ability to extract minerals from the earth. There'll be more discussion of this, but for now, at least 8 billion people on the planet and the Antarctic is run pretty darn well.
Now, climate change has made a difference, and I've seen that with emperor penguin colonies getting smaller and glaciers receding, but it still seems very far away, this continent, from what we've been experiencing pretty much everywhere else, and so nice to reflect on that for a moment as we kick off 2024. I hope everyone enjoyed their New Year. I'll be back in the States real soon and I'll be talking to you about topics that are very close to our heart and a little more challenging to talk about.
That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.
Top stories of 2023: GZERO World with Ian Bremmer
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer looks back at the big stories that captured our attention in 2023. From Russia’s ongoing Ukraine invasion and the Israel-Hamas war erupting in the Middle East, to mind-blowing advances in artificial intelligence and former President Trump’s multiple indictments, it can be hard to keep track of everything that happened this year. GZERO was on the ground for all of it: bringing you news-making interviews from world leaders, reporting from around the world, and, as always, geopolitical analysis with a side of wit. Don’t worry, we’ll be back in 2024 to unpack the biggest stories and help make sense of the unseen forces shaping our world.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Watch the replay of Ian Bremmer's State of the World speech
Ian Bremmer delivered his highly anticipated State of the World speech, providing a comprehensive overview of how the latest geopolitical events—from war in Ukraine to the crisis in the Middle East and more—are influencing elections, policy priorities, and economic trends.
Watch the replay at gzeromedia.com/stateoftheworld.
Podcast: Foreign influence, cyberspace, and geopolitics
Listen: Thanks to advancing technology like artificial intelligence and deep fakes, governments can increasingly use the online world to spread misinformation and influence foreign citizens and governments - as well as citizens at home. At the same time, governments and private companies are working hard to detect these campaigns and protect against them while upholding ideals like free speech and privacy.
In season 2, episode 3 of Patching the System, we're focusing on the international system of bringing peace and security online. In this episode, we look at the world of foreign influence operations and how policymakers are adapting.
Our participants are:
- Teija Tiilikainen, Director of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats
- Clint Watts, General Manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center
- Ali Wyne, Eurasia Group Senior Analyst (moderator)
GZERO’s special podcast series “Patching the System,” produced in partnership with Microsoft as part of the award-winning Global Stage series, highlights the work of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, a public commitment from over 150 global technology companies dedicated to creating a safer cyber world for all of us.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
TRANSCRIPT: Foreign Influence, Cyberspace, and Geopolitics
Disclosure: The opinions expressed by Eurasia Group analysts in this podcast episode are their own, and may differ from those of Microsoft and its affiliates.
Teija Tiilikainen: What the malign actors are striving at is that they would like to see us starting to compromise our values, so question our own values. We should make sure that we are not going to the direction where the malign actors would want to steer us.
Clint Watts: From a technical perspective, influence operations are detected by people. Our work of detecting malign influence operations is really about a human problem powered by technology.
Ali Wyne: When people first heard this clip that circulated on social media, more than a few were confused, even shocked.
AI VIDEO: People might be surprised to hear me say this, but I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot. Yeah, I know. I'd say he's just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that.
Ali Wyne: That was not Hillary Clinton. It was an AI-generated deepfake video, but it sounded so realistic that Reuters actually investigated it to prove that it was bogus. Could governments use techniques such as this one to spread false narratives in adversary nations or to influence the outcomes of elections? The answer is yes, and they already do. In fact, in a growing digital ecosystem, there are a wide range of ways in which governments can manipulate the information environment to push particular narratives.
Welcome to Patching the System, a special podcast from the Global Stage series, a partnership between GZERO Media and Microsoft. I'm Ali Wyne, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group. Throughout this series, we're highlighting the work of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, a public commitment from over 150 global technology companies dedicated to creating a safer cyber world for all of us. Today, we're looking at the growing threat of foreign influence operations, state-led efforts to misinform or distort information online.
Joining me now are Teija Tiilikainen, Director of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, and Clint Watts, General Manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center. Teija, Clint, welcome to you both.
Teija Tiilikainen:Thank you.
Clint Watts: Thanks for having me.
Ali Wyne: Before we dive into the substance of our conversation, I want to give folks an overview of how both of your organizations fit into this broader landscape. So Clint, let me turn to you first. Could you quickly explain what it is that Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center does, what its purpose is, what your role is there, and how does its approach now differ from what Microsoft has done in the past to highlight threat actors?
Clint Watts: Our mission is to detect, assess and disrupt malign influence operations that affect Microsoft, its customers and democracies. And it's quite a bit different from really how Microsoft has handled it up until we joined. We were originally a group called Miburo and we had worked in disrupting malign influence operations until we were acquired by Microsoft about 15 months ago.
And the idea behind it is we can connect what's happening in the information environment with what's happening in cyberspace and really start to help improve the information integrity and ecosystem when it comes to authoritarian nations that are trying to do malign influence attacks. Every day, we're tracking Russia, Iran, and China worldwide in 13 languages in terms of the influence operations they do. That's a combination of websites, social media hack and leak operations is a particular specialty of ours where we work with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center. They see the cyberattacks and we see the alleged leaks or influence campaigns on social media, and we can put those together to do attribution about what different authoritarian countries are doing or trying to do to democracies worldwide.
Ali Wyne: Teija, I want to pose the same question to you because today might be the first that some of our listeners are hearing of your organization. What is the role of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats?
Teija Tiilikainen: So this center of excellence is an intergovernmental body that has been established originally six years ago by nine governments from various EU and NATO countries, but today covers 35 governments. So we cover 35 countries, EU and NATO allies, all, plus that we cooperate closely with the European Union and NATO. Our task is more strategic, so we try to analyze the broad hybrid threat activity and with hybrid threats, we are referring to unconventional threat forms, election interference, attacks against critical infrastructures, manipulation of the information space, cyber and all of that. We create capacity, we create knowledge, information about these things and try to provide recommendations and share best practices among our governments about how to counter these threats, how to protect our societies.
Ali Wyne: We're going to be talking about foreign influence operations throughout our conversations, but just first, let's discuss hybrid conflicts such as what we're seeing and what we have seen so far in Ukraine. And I'm wondering how digital tactics and conflicts have evolved. Bring us up to speed as to where we are now when it comes to these digital tactics and conflicts and how quickly we've gotten there.
Teija Tiilikainen: So it's easier to start with our environment where the societies rely more and more on digital solutions, information technology that is a part of our societies. We built that to the benefit of our democracies and their economies. But in this deep conflict where we are, conflict that has many dimensions, one of them being the one between democracies and authoritarian states, that changes the role of our digital solutions and all of a sudden we see how they have started to be exploited against our security and stability. So it is about our reliance on critical infrastructures, there we have digital solutions, we have the whole information space, the cyber systems.
So this is really a new - strengthening new dimension in the conflicts worldwide where we talk more and more about the need to protect our vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities more and more take place in the digital space, in the digital solutions. So this is a very kind of technological instrument, more and more requiring advanced solutions from our societies, from us, very different understanding about threats and risks. If we compare that with the kind of more traditional one where armed attacks, military operations used to form the threat number one, and now it is about the resilience of our critical infrastructures, it is about the security and safety of our information solutions. So the world looks very different and ongoing conflicts do that as well.
Ali Wyne: And that word, Teija, that you use, resilience, I suspect that we're going to be revisiting that word and that idea quite a bit throughout our conversation. Clint, let me turn to you now and ask how foreign influence operations in your experience, how have they evolved online? How are they conducted differently today? Are there generic approaches or do different countries execute these operations differently?
Clint Watts: So to set the scene for where this started, I think the point to look at is the Arab Spring. When it came to influence operations, the Arab Spring, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, lots of different political movements, they all occurred roughly at the same time. We often forget that. That's because social media allowed people to come together around ideas, organize, mobilize, participate in different activities. That was very significant, I think, for nation states, but one in particular, which was Russia, which was a little bit thrown off by, let's say, the Arab Spring and what happened in Egypt, for example. But at the same point intrigued about what would the ability to be able to go into a democracy and infiltrate them in the online environment and then start to pit them against each other.
That was the entire idea of their Cold War strategy known as active measures, which was to go into any nation, particularly in the United States or any set of alliances, infiltrate those audiences and win through the force of politics rather than the politics of force. You can't win on the battlefield, but you can win in their political systems and that was very, very difficult to do in the analog era. Fast-forward to the social media age, which we saw the Russians do, was take that same approach with overt media, fringe media or semi-covert websites that look like they came from the country that was being targeted. And then combine that with covert troll accounts on social media that look like and talk like the target audience and then add the layer that they could do that no one else had really put together, which was cyberattacks, stealing people's information and timing the leaks of information to drive people's perceptions.
That is what really started about 10 years ago, and our team picked up on it very early in January 2014 around the conflict in Syria. They had already been doing it in the conflict in Ukraine 10 years ago, and then we watched it move towards the elections: Brexit first, the U.S. election, then the French and German elections. This is that 2015, '16, '17 period.
What's evolved since is everyone recognizing the power of information and how to use it and authoritarians looking to grab onto that power. So Iran has been quite prolific in it. They have some limitations, they have resource issues, but they still do some pretty complex information attacks on audiences. And now China is the real game changer. We just released our first East Asia report where we diagrammed what we saw as an incredible scaling of operations and centralization of it.
So looking at how to defend, I think it's remarkable that, like Teija mentioned, in Europe, a lot of countries that are actually quite small, Lithuania, for example, has been able to mobilize their citizens in a very organized way to help as part of the state's defense, come together with a strategy, network people to spot disinformation and refute it if it was coming from Russia.
In other parts of the world though, it's been much, much tougher, particularly even the United States where we've seen the Russians and other countries now infiltrate into audiences and you're trying to figure out how to build a coherent system around defending when you have a plurality of views and identities and different politics. It's actually somewhat more difficult, I think, the larger a country is to defend, particularly with democracies.
And then the other thing is you've seen the resilience and rebirth of alliances and not just on battlefields like NATO, but you see NATO, the EU, the Hybrid CoE, you see these groups organizing together to come through with definitions around terminology, what is a harm to democracy, and then how best to combat it. So it's been an interesting transition I would say over the last six years and you’re starting to see a lot of organization in terms of how democracies are going to defend themselves moving forward.
Ali Wyne: Teija, I want to come back to you. What impact have foreign influence operations had in the context of the war in Ukraine, both inside Ukraine but also globally?
Teija Tiilikainen: I think this is a full-scale war also in the sense that it is very much a war about narratives. So it is about whose story, whose narrative is winning this war. I must say that Russia has been quite successful with its own narrative if we think about how supportive the Russian domestic population still is with respect to the war and the role of the regime, of course there are other instruments also used.
Prior to the war started, Russia started to promote a very false story about what is going on in Ukraine. There was the argument about an ongoing Nazification of Ukraine. There was another argument about a genocide of the Russian minorities in Ukraine that was supposed to take place. And there was also a narrative about how Ukraine had become a tool in the toolbox of the Western alliance that is NATO or for the U.S. to exert its influence and how it was also used offensively against Russia. And these were of course all parts of the Russian information campaign – disinformation - with which it justified – legitimized - its war.
If we take a look at the information space in Europe or more broadly in Africa, for instance, today we see that the Western narrative about the real causes of the war, how Russia violated international law, the integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, how this kind of real fact-based narrative is not doing that well. This proves the strength of foreign influence operations when they are strategic, well-planned, and of course when they are used by actors such as Russia and China that tend to cooperate and also outside the war zone, China is using this Russian narrative to put the blame for the war on the West and present itself as a reliable international actor.
So there were many elements in the war, not only the military activity, but I would in particular want to emphasize the role of these information operations.
Ali Wyne: It's sobering not only thinking about the impact of these disinformation operations, these foreign influence operations, but also, Teija, you mentioned the ways in which disinformation actors are learning from one another and I imagine that that trend is going to grow even more pronounced in the years and decades ahead. So thank you for that answer. Clint, from a technical perspective, what goes into recognizing information operations? What goes into investigating information operations and ultimately identifying who's responsible?
Clint Watts: I think one of the ironies of our work is, from a technical perspective, influence operations are detected by people. One of the big differences, especially we work with MSTIC, the cyber team and our team, is that our work of detecting malign influence operations is really about a human problem powered by technology. And that if you want to be able to understand and get your lead, we work more like a newspaper in many ways. We have a beat that we're covering, let's say, it's Russian influence operations in Africa. And we have real humans, people with master's degrees speak the language. I think the team speaks 13 languages in total amongst 28 of us. They sit and they watch and they get enmeshed in those communities and watch the discussions that are going on.
But ultimately we're using some technical skills, some data science to pick up those trends and patterns because the one thing that's true of influence operations across the board is you cannot influence and hide forever. Ultimately your position or, as Teija said, your narratives will track back to the authoritarian country - Russia, Iran, China - and what they're trying to achieve. And there's always tells common tells or context, words, phrases, sentences are used out of context. And then you can also look at the technical perspective. Nine years ago when we came onto the Russians, the number one technical indicator of Russian accounts was Moscow time versus U.S. time.
Ali Wyne: Interesting.
Clint Watts: They worked in shifts. They were posing as Americans, but talking at 2:00 AM mostly about Syria. And so it stuck out, right? That was a contextual thing. You move though from those human tips and insights, almost like a beat reporter though, to using technical tools. That's where we dive in. So that's everything from understanding associations of time zones, how different batches of accounts and social media might work in synchronization together, how they'll change from topic time and time again. The Russians are a classic of wanting to talk about Venezuela one day, Cuba the next, Syria the third day, the U.S. election the fourth, right? They move in sequence.
And so I think when we're watching people and training them, when they first come on board, it's always interesting. We try and pair them up in teams of three or four with a mix of skills. We have a very interdisciplinary set of teams. One will be very good in terms of understanding cybersecurity and technical aspects. Another one, a data scientist. All of them can speak a language and ultimately one is a former journalist or an international relations student that really understands the region and it's that team environment working together in person that really allows us to do that detection but then use more technical tools to do the attribution.
Ali Wyne: So You talked about identifying and attributing foreign influence operations and that's one matter, but how do you actually combat them? How do you combat those operations and what role, if any, can the technology industry play in combating them?
Clint Watts: So we're at a key spot, I think, in Microsoft in protecting the information environment because we do understand the technical signatures much better than any one government could probably do or should. There are lots of privacy considerations, we take it very serious at Microsoft, about maintaining customer privacy. At the same point, the role that tech can do is illustrative in some of our recent investigations, one of them where we found more than 30 websites, which were being run out of the same three IP addresses and they were all sharing content pushed from Beijing, but to local environments and local communities don't have any idea that those are actually Chinese state-sponsored websites.
So what we can do being part of the tech industry is confirm from a technical perspective that all of these things and all of this activity is linked together. I think that's particularly powerful. Also in terms of the cyber and influence convergence, we would say, we can see a leak operation where an elected official in one country is targeted as part of a foreign cyberattack for a hack and leak operation. We can see where the hack occurred. If we have good attribution on it, Russia and Iran in particular, we have very strong attribution on that and publish on it frequently, but then we can match that up with the leaks that we see coming out and where they come out from. And usually the first person to leak the information is in bed with the hacker that got the information. So that's another role that tech can play in particular about awareness of who the actors are, but what the connections are between one influence operation and one cyberattack and how that can change people's perspectives, let's say, going into an election.
Ali Wyne: Teija, I want to come back to you to ask you about a dilemma that I suspect that you and your colleagues and everyone who's operating in this space, a dilemma that I think many people are grappling with. And I want to put the question to you. I think that one of the central tensions in combating disinformation of course is preserving free speech in the nations where it exists. How should democracies approach that balancing act?
Teija Tiilikainen: This is a very good question and I think what we should keep in mind is what the malign actors are striving at is that they would like to see us starting to compromise our values, question our own values. So open society, freedom of speech, rule of law, democratic practices, and the principle of democracy, we should stick to our values, we should make sure that we are not going to the direction where the malign actors would want to steer us. But it is exactly as you formulate the question, how do we make sure that these values are not exploited against our broad societal security as is happening right now?
So of course there is not one single solution. The technological solution certainly can help us protect our society, broad awareness in society about these types of threats. Media literacies is the kind of keyword many times mentioned in this context. A totally new approach to the information space is needed and can be achieved through education, study programs, but also by supporting the quality media and the kind of media that relies on journalistic ethics. So we must make sure that our information environment is solid and that also in the future we'll have the possibility to make a distinction between disinformation and facts because it is - distinction is getting very blurred in a situation where there is a competition about narratives going on. Information has become a tool in many different conflicts that we have in the international space, but also in the domestic level many times.
I would like to offer the center's model because it's not only that we need cooperation between private actors, companies, civil society actors and governmental actors in states. We also need firm cooperation among like-minded states, sharing of best practices, learning. We can also learn from each other. If the malign actors do that, we should also take that model into use when it comes to questions such as how to counter, how to build resilience, what are the solutions we have created in our different societies? And this is why our center of excellence has been established exactly to provide a platform for that sharing of best practices and learning from each other.
So it is a very complicated environment in terms of our security and our resilience. So we need a multiple package of tools to protect ourselves, but I still want to stress the - our values and the very fact that this is what the malign actors would like to challenge and want us to challenge as well. So, let's stick to them.
Ali Wyne: Clint, let me come back to you. So we are heading into an electorally very consequential year. And perhaps I'm understating it, 2024 is going to be a huge election year, not only for the United States but also for many other countries where folks will be going to polls for the first time in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Does that fact concern you and how is artificial intelligence changing this game overall?
Clint Watts: Yeah, so I think it's too early for me to say as strange as it is. I remind our team, I didn't know what ChatGPT was a year ago, so I don't know that we know what AI will even be able to do a year from now.
Ali Wyne: Fair point, fair point.
Clint Watts: In the last two weeks, I've seen or experimented with so many different AI tools that I just don't know the impact yet. I need to think it through and watch a little bit more in terms of where things are going with it. But there are a few notes that I would say about elections and deepfakes or generative AI.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, we have seen very sophisticated fakes of both Zelensky and Putin and they haven't worked. Crowds, when they see those videos, they're pretty smart collectively about saying, "Oh, I've seen that background before. I've seen that face before. I know that person isn't where they're being staged at right now." So I think that is the importance of setting.
Public versus private I think is where we'll see harms in terms of AI. When people are alone and AI is used against them, let's say, a deepfake audio for a wire transfer, we're already seeing the damages of that, that's quite concerning. So I think from an election standpoint, you can start to look for it and what are some natural worries? Robocalls to me would be more worrisome really than a deepfake video that we tend to think about.
The other things about AI that I don't think get enough examination, at least from a media perspective, everyone thinks they'll see a politician say something. Your opening clip is example of it and it will fool audiences in a very dramatic way. But the powers of AI in terms of utility for influence operations is mostly about understanding audiences or be able to connect with an audience with a message and a messenger that is appropriate for that audience. And by that I mean creating messages that make more sense.
Part of the challenge for Russia and China in particular is always context. How do you look like an American or a European in their country? Well, you have to be able to speak the language well. That's one thing AI can help you with. Two, you have to look like the target audience to some degree. So you could make messengers now. But I think the bigger part is understanding the context and timing and making it seem appropriate. And those are all things where I think AI can be an advantage.
I would also note that here at Microsoft, my philosophy with the team is machines are good at detecting machines and people are good at detecting people. And so there are a lot of AI tools we're already using in cybersecurity, for example, with our copilots where we're using AI to detect AI and it's moving very quickly. As much as there's escalation on the AI side, there's also escalation on the defensive side. I'm just not sure that we've even seen all the tools that will be used one year from now.
Ali Wyne: Teija, let me just ask you about artificial intelligence more broadly. Do you think that it can be both a tool for combating disinformation and a weapon for promulgating disinformation? How do you view artificial intelligence broadly when it comes to the disinformation challenge?
Teija Tiilikainen: I see a lot of risks. I do see also possibilities and artificial intelligence certainly can be used as resilience tools. But the question is more about who is faster if the malign actors take the full advantage of the AI before we find the loopholes and possible vulnerabilities. I think it's very much about a hardcore question to our democracies. The day when an external actor can interfere efficiently into our democratic processes, to elections, to election campaigns, the very day when we cannot any longer be sure that what is happening in that framework is domestically driven, that they will be very dangerous for the whole democratic model, the whole functioning of our Western democracies.
And we are approaching the day and AI is, as Clint explained, one possible tool for malign actors who want to discredit not only the model, but also interfere into the democratic processes, affect outcomes of elections, topics of elections. So deepfakes and all the solutions that use AI, they are so much more efficient, so much faster, they are able to use so much - lots of data.
So I see unlimited possibilities unfortunately for the use of AI for malign purposes. So this is what we should focus on today when we focus on resilience and the resilience of our digital systems.
And this is also a highly unregulated field also at the international level. So if we think about weapons, if we think about military force, well, now we are in a situation of deep conflict, but before we were there we used to have agreements and treaties and conventions between states that regulated the use of weapons. Those agreements are no longer in a very good shape. But what do we have in the realm of cyber? This is at the international level a highly unregulated field. So there are many problems. So can only encourage and stress the need to identify the risks with these solutions. And of course we need to have regulation of AI solutions and systems in our states at the state level as well as hopefully at some point also international agreements concerning the use of AI.
Ali Wyne: I want to close by emphasizing that human component and ask you, as we look ahead and as we think about ways in which governments and private sector actors, individuals, and others in this ecosystem can be more effective at combating disinformation foreign influence operations, what kinds of societal changes need to happen to neutralize the impact of these operations? So talk to us a little bit more about the human element of this challenge and what kinds of changes need to happen at the societal level.
Teija Tiilikainen: I would say that we need a cultural change. We need to understand societal security very differently. We need to understand the risks and threats against societal security in a different way. And this is about education. This is about schools, this is about study programs at universities. This is about openness in media, about risks and threats.
But also in those countries that do not have the tradition. In the Nordic countries, here in Finland, in Scandinavia, we have a firm tradition of public-private cooperation when it comes to security policy. We are small nations and the geopolitical region has been unstable for a long time. So there is a need for public and private actors to share a same understanding of security threats and also cooperate to find common solutions. And I think I can only stress the importance of public-private cooperation in this environment.
We need more systematical forms of resilience. We have to ask ourselves what does resilience mean? Where do we start building resilience? Which are all the necessary components of resilience that we need to take into account? So that we have international elements, we have national elements, local elements, we have governmental and civil society parts, and they are all interlinked. There is no safe space anywhere. We need to kind of create comprehensive solutions that cover all possible vulnerabilities. So I would say that the security culture needs to be changed and it's not the security culture we tend to think about domestic threats and then international threats. Now they are part of the same picture. We tended to think about military, nonmilitary, also they are very much interlinked in this new technological environment. So new types of thinking, new types of culture. I would like to get back to university schools and try to engage experts to think about the components of this new culture.
Ali Wyne: Teija Tiilikainen, Director of the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. Clint Watts, General Manager of Microsoft Threat Analysis Center. Teija, Clint, thank you both very much for being here.
Teija Tiilikainen: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Clint Watts: Thanks for having me.
Ali Wyne: And that's it for this episode of Patching the System. There are more to come. So follow Ian Bremmer's GZERO World feed anywhere you get your podcasts to hear the rest of our new season. I'm Ali Wyne. Thank you very much for listening.
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