Transnational challenges

Daniel L. Byman

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States has struggled to find the proper balance for counterterrorism in the greater Middle East. The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 helped Al Qaeda restore itself, while the Obama administration’s delayed intervention against ISIS in Syria after the civil war broke out in 2011 allowed the terrorist group to grow in strength and establish a caliphate, making it far more formidable when the United States eventually intervened in 2014. Less dramatically, but no less important, the United States has conducted military operations in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries in the name of counterterrorism and sustained military forces in Afghanistan for almost 20 years–interventions that critics have labeled “forever wars.”

There are arguments on both sides regarding whether to bolster or shrink counterterrorism. ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups have been hit hard, and their ability to strike the U.S. homeland and conduct sophisticated international operations is diminished. However, much of this diminishment is because of constant U.S. pressure–easing up too much risks allowing the groups to again become a threat. U.S. allies seek regular U.S. engagement too, and the Trump and Obama administrations’ caution on this score often led them to take reckless policy actions. At the same time, the American people are not eager to continue constant interventions and other challenges, such as the rise of China and a bellicose Russia, demand a U.S. response. Efforts to build stronger allied regimes and military forces have achieved at best limited success in most countries, making it hard to “hand off” the counterterrorism mission.

A devastating terrorist attack against the United States, particularly on U.S. soil, could dramatically change the political calculus for a Biden administration, greatly increasing pressure to expand the U.S. military role.  The collapse of an additional Middle Eastern state is another curveball, allowing terrorists a limited haven in which to operate. The United States would need to consider whether to take on greater risk by not intervening or engage in yet another regional conflict, working with a weak regional government and perhaps using U.S. military power unilaterally as well.

Chris Meserole

Proliferation of advanced drones and surveillance technologies. The drones will alter conflict dynamics in the region, while the surveillance tech threatens to make the Gulf even more repressive.

Not being aggressive enough in countering illiberal uses of tech. They need to pressure Israel into reigning in the NSO and Riyadh into not creating the kind of digital, open-air prisons for their Shi’ite population that Beijing created for Uyghur’s.

Biden team will need Europe when it comes to tech. The EU’s recent trade deal with China feels like the first curveball of many — I’m less optimistic now than I was a month ago that we’ll see meaningful alignment on tech globally.

Daniel L. Byman

Middle Eastern governments such as Egypt, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates actively use information campaigns against their enemies. Techniques include fake sites that masquerade as legitimate news sources or social media pages, modifying content of real news stories and disseminating them to cause confusion,  establishing fake personas to promote misleading stories or pose as legitimate reporters, blasting out retweets and “likes” to drown out critical voices and create pro-regime trends,  bullying critics with mobs of online trolls, and leaking damage information about rivals, among many other tricks. Social media is particularly useful for disinformation as it is cheap, allows a degree of deniability, enables regimes to reach a large audience yet at the same time differentiate its message, and is easy to exploit.

U.S. allies who are rivals, such as the UAE and Qatar, use these techniques to undermine each other, and allies like Iran also use them to damage the legitimacy of U.S. allies. At times fake reports bleed over into the U.S. information space, with genuine news services or other legitimate voices seizing on the information as genuine. Complicating this problem, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and most of the other entities are American companies but also multinational, raising openings for regulation but also limiting U.S. influence.

The United States and other Western governments should highlight misinformation, both publicizing it to discredit its purveyors and sharing specifics with the relevant social media companies. Often, de-platforming is necessary, as was done in October 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice worked with social media companies to take down fake Iranian websites. Governments should also assist social media companies in defending the accounts of dissidents and other potential targets. More broadly, the United States must design its foreign policy with social media in mind. This goes beyond ensuring that the State Department has a Twitter account and requires anticipating how other states will try to manipulate and deceive in order to undermine U.S. efforts.

Alexandra Siegel

State actors across the MENA region including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, the UAE, and Egypt are increasingly using online influence operations or coordinated disinformation campaigns to 1) advance their foreign policy goals in fragile contexts such as Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya; and 2) to discredit and harass domestic opposition. Detecting and combating such online influence operations is difficult as they often operate across multiple social media platforms—both through public and private encrypted communications.

An important first step toward mitigating potentially harmful online influence operations in the MENA region is promoting transparency and data sharing from social media platforms so that government and independent researchers with regional expertise can better understand the scope and potential offline consequences of these rapidly evolving efforts. Online platforms are currently governed by a patchwork of community standards, which particular influence operations may or may not clearly violate. Moreover, most efforts to combat coordinated disinformation campaigns have thus far been led by industry actors, with little government guidance. More comprehensive and real-time independent monitoring of the MENA online media sphere across diverse platforms will be crucial to identifying potentially harmful online influence campaigns and working to mitigate them.

Attempts to mitigate the harms posed by online influence operations often have unintended consequences. A major obstacle to combatting online influence operations is that regimes across the MENA region have often worked to coopt platform policies, declaring opposition or rival content to be disinformation, hate speech, or otherwise in violation of platforms’ terms of service. More generally, actors quickly adapt to new attempts at content moderation or shifting platform policies, altering their behavior to avoid suspension and to continue advancing their goals in the online sphere. Efforts supported by the Biden administration to combat online influence operations must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to respond to such efforts. Without more regular data availability and transparency across multiple platforms, attempts to combat influence operations will be unlikely to succeed.

State actors are increasingly outsourcing influence operations to digital marketing firms, obscuring their origins and giving regimes plausible deniability. While social media platforms have sometimes identified these actors when taking down influence operations, the full universe of actors that may be running or supporting state influence operations is constantly evolving. More cooperation between tech companies, independent researchers, and government actors necessary to work to combat this growing threat and mitigate its harms.