Challenging External Authoritarian Threats

2. Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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External authoritarian threats* are not limited to conventional military invasion, though kinetic warfare remains a grave danger. Today’s authoritarian rivals also use cyberattacks, propaganda, covert influence operations, election interference, economic pressure, sabotage, transnational repression, and other “hybrid” tactics designed to weaken liberal democracies from within. These attacks often exploit the very freedoms that make democratic societies strong: open debate, free media, competitive elections, civil society, immigration, academic exchange, and decentralized information flows.

A central objective of many external authoritarian campaigns is not simply to persuade citizens to support a foreign power. It is to make democratic societies less confident, less united, and less capable of governing themselves. Foreign actors may amplify existing grievances, impersonate domestic voices, spread fabricated stories, hack and leak political material, target election systems or campaigns, use deepfakes, harass dissidents abroad, or try to convince citizens that all institutions are corrupt and all facts are unknowable. Even when such efforts do not change an election outcome, they can deepen mistrust, intensify polarization, and weaken public confidence in democratic processes.

These threats are especially dangerous when they combine information warfare with other forms of coercion. Cyber operations against critical infrastructure, sabotage, threats against shipping lanes or energy systems, pressure on smaller democracies, military intimidation, and wars of aggression can all be used to test democratic resolve. Authoritarian governments may also cooperate with one another, share tactics, use criminal proxies, or target diaspora communities and exiled journalists who continue to challenge repression from abroad. In this sense, defending democracy is not only a domestic civic task. It is also a security task.

Challenging external authoritarian threats requires strong defense and deterrence, but not only military strength. Liberal democracies also need secure election systems, resilient infrastructure, effective cybersecurity, trusted intelligence warnings, independent journalism, transparent fact-finding, media literacy, and laws that expose covert foreign influence without suppressing legitimate dissent. They need alliances with other democracies, support for vulnerable partners, and clear consequences for governments that conduct sabotage, cyberattacks, transnational repression, or election interference. At the same time, democracies must avoid responding in ways that destroy the liberties they are trying to defend.

The most important lesson is that external authoritarian threats work best when democracies are already badly divided. Foreign actors do not create all of our conflicts; they exploit them. The best defense is therefore a combination of national security and constructive conflict work: reducing hyper-polarization, refusing to amplify unverified inflammatory claims and always question "facts" you get from social media unless you are quite sure they are coming from a reputable source, defending fair elections even when one’s own side loses, protecting dissidents and minorities, and maintaining enough social trust that citizens can recognize and resist divide-and-conquer attacks. A democracy that can argue fiercely while still defending shared rules is far harder for external authoritarian rivals to undermine.

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This essay was written by ChatGPT and reviewed for quality and accuracy by Heidi Burgess, who also added a bit of content. The prompt we gave ChatGPT was: "Now do the same thing for the topic "Challenging External Authoritarian Threats" such as threats of other countries meddling in our elections, information flows, and other hybrid and kinetic warfare threats against liberal democracies worldwide."

ChatGPT's sources were: BI’s Guide says democracies need defenses against “divide and conquer” attacks from authoritarian rivals, and describes “Challenging External Authoritarian Threats” as an underappreciated part of preserving peace through national defense and deterrence. It also explicitly links authoritarian threats to propaganda, hybrid warfare, internal division, and attacks on democratic legitimacy.

For election and information-interference examples, a joint ODNI/FBI/CISA statement said Russia, Iran, and China were seeking to exacerbate divisions in U.S. society, viewed election periods as moments of vulnerability, and that Iran used cyber and influence operations to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral process. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center similarly reported sustained influence efforts by Russia, Iran, and China aimed at undermining U.S. democratic processes, including generative-AI content, cyber-influence preparations, and targeting of candidates and campaigns.

For the hybrid-threat framing, the EU Council describes Russia’s hybrid activities as including sabotage, disruption of critical infrastructure, cyberattacks, information manipulation, and attempts to undermine democracy and elections. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly warned in 2025 that hostile foreign powers increasingly use disinformation, cyberattacks, and election interference to manipulate public debate and erode democratic institutions in Allied societies.

For transnational repression, Freedom House reported that, from 2014 through 2025, at least 54 governments tried to silence dissidents abroad and recorded 1,375 direct physical incidents across 107 host countries; it also warned that democracies need sanctions, visa bans, diaspora outreach, and stronger protections against abuse of immigration and policing systems.