QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelThe Future of Malign Influence Campaigns Is Here: In Moldova, the U.S. Allows Russia a Free Play
The Trump administration has dismantled the U.S. capabilities built to track, thwart, and respond to Russian disinformation and influence campaigns both around the world and in the United States. Russia will not be the only one to exploit this unilateral U.S. disarmament: China, Iran, North Korea, and other adversaries of the United States will readily, and gratefully, exploit it, too.
The adjective “consistent” is rarely applied to President Donald Trump, and not without reason, but there is one issue on which he has been uncharacteristically consistent: Russia. With all the attention focused on issues such as immigration, tariffs, and the deployment of states’ National Guards to deal with imaginary crises (see Paul Rosenzweig, “State of Permanent Fake Emergency,” The Atlantic, 2 September 2025), other initiatives by the administration have gone largely unnoticed.
One of the more consequential initiatives comprises a series of policies and organizational changes which make it much easier for Russia to conduct and expand its broad, sustained, and disciplined anti-American – and, more broadly, anti-democracy — disinformation and influence campaigns, both around the world and in the United States.
Exhibit One: The administration has taken a series of steps which have substantially weakened U.S. government-funded media outlets whose task it was to tell the American story and counter the global propaganda and disinformation efforts of U.S. adversaries. These moves greatly benefit the anti-American propaganda efforts of Russia and China, which will now go unchallenged (see “Silencing America’s Voice,” HSNW, 30 August 2025).
Exhibit Two: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that the functions of the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) would be significantly reduced. Gabbard has thus dismantled the last remaining U.S. federal government organ dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society –following the Trump administration’s shutting down of related units at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Department of Justice earlier this year (see David Salvo, “What Just Happened? Dismantling the Intelligence Community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,” HSNW, 30 August 2025).
Steven Lee Myers, writing in the New York Times (7 September 2025) about the coming election in Moldova, notes that “Since returning to the White House in January, President Trump has dismantled the American government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation. The problem is that Russia has not stopped spreading it.”
He adds:
The Trump administration has slashed diplomatic and financial support for the country’s [Moldova’s] fight against Russian influence, even as the Kremlin has conducted what researchers and European officials described as an intense campaign to sway that country’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sept. 28.
“The Russians now are able to basically control the information environment in Moldova in a way that they could only have dreamed a year ago,” Thomas O. Melia, a former official at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Myers.
The situation in Moldova is an example of the consequences of the Trump administration’s methodical dismantling of U.S. capabilities to promote democracy since the end of the Cold War. The administration has cut foreign assistance and did away with other instruments of American influence such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, which were an essential element of the geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union.
“This kind of reckless, wanton destruction of all elements of America’s soft power,” Melia told Myers, “is clearly leaving the field vacant for others to rush in unopposed.”
Moldova is a small country of 2.4 million people. But the current Russian influence campaign there is important, because it is the first such campaign to take place after the Trump administration has unilaterally disarmed by dismantling the U.S. capabilities to track, thwart, and respond to such Russian efforts.
In a paper Elias Yousif and Rachel Stohl wrote for the Stimson Center in April, they stressed that “for the United States, Moldova represents an often-overlooked frontline in Russia’s efforts to reshape the European security environment. Moscow has used Moldova as a testing ground for hybrid warfare operations, drawing lessons that are likely to shape similar efforts across the continent.”
But there is an attendant danger to the Trump administration’s stripping the United States of the means with which to check Russia’s influence campaigns at home and abroad: other adversaries of the United States – think China – have been emulating Russia’s influence campaigns to advance their interests and undermine the interests of the United States.
Trump may have ordered the dismantling of specific U.S. capabilities – in effect, a unilateral and unreciprocated disarmament — because of his inexplicable affinity with Putin and apparent preference of Russia to Western democracies. But the door he leaves wide open for Russia to allow it to increase its influence is the same open door which China, Iran, North Korea, and other adversaries of the United States will readily, and gratefully, exploit.
Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire.
