When the Department of War ordered 30 American universities to conduct immediate reviews of their foreign partnerships this week, the names that drew attention were predictable: Harvard, MIT, New York University, Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. But the more revealing part of the Pentagon’s announcement may have been a three-word phrase buried in its explanation: “rebranded Confucius Institutes.”

The universities must examine active institutional ties and collaborations with foreign entities identified under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, as well as organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes. They have until Aug. 31 to report their findings and mitigation efforts, with future federal research funding potentially at stake.

The Pentagon has not publicly explained what it considers a rebranded Confucius Institute or identified which relationship prompted the selection of each individual university. But a Crosscurrents review of federal and university records shows that, at some of the schools, closing a Confucius Institute did not end the underlying relationship with its Chinese university partner. At others, universities on the audit list maintain or recently documented academic relationships with Chinese institutions that now appear on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

The Pentagon describes Section 1286 as a federal restricted-party list targeting unwanted foreign influence on Department-funded research and says the listed entities have been confirmed as engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national-security interests. Beginning in fiscal year 2026, Pentagon funds cannot support fundamental research involving collaboration with a listed entity. The picture that emerges is more complicated than the disappearance of the Confucius Institute name. In some cases, the sign came down. The partnership remained.

The Wuhan Program That Survived the Confucius Institute

Stony Brook University offers one of the clearest examples. Its Confucius Institute was established in 2008 as a partnership between Stony Brook and China’s Hanban, while also maintaining a relationship with Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, or ZUEL, in Wuhan, according to a 2015 university document.

In 2016, Stony Brook promoted a month-long study-abroad program in Wuhan that the university said was organized by International Academic Programs and the Confucius Institute. Students met counterparts at ZUEL, while participants also received funding from the Chinese government, according to a university profile. The Confucius Institute later closed. The Wuhan program did not disappear.

Stony Brook’s current study-abroad page continues to advertise “Summer in Wuhan.” It says participants receive a scholarship from and are hosted by ZUEL. More remarkably, the university still describes ZUEL as the “partner university of SBU’s Confucius Institute.” The continuity is unusually direct.

Before the institute closed, Stony Brook’s Confucius Institute helped organize the Wuhan program involving ZUEL. Years after the institute disappeared, the university still advertises the program with the same Chinese institution, while its own webpage continues to identify ZUEL through the old Confucius Institute relationship.

That does not establish that the Pentagon considers the Wuhan program a “rebranded Confucius Institute,” nor has the department publicly identified ZUEL as the reason Stony Brook was selected for audit. It does show why simply counting how many Confucius Institutes formally closed can miss what happened afterward.

The Chinese Partner Stayed at South Carolina

The University of South Carolina presents another form of continuity.

As recently as May 2020, USC described its Confucius Institute as a collaboration among the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, Beijing Language and Culture University, or BLCU, and the Chinese Ministry of Education.

In February 2021, USC’s Board of Trustees approved termination of the Confucius Institute. Board records said the recommendation reflected changes in university priorities and strategic direction. But USC’s relationship with BLCU did not disappear from its academic programming. A current USC international-business page says its Chinese-language faculty is “normally” reinforced by four visiting instructors from Beijing Language and Culture University.

That is noteworthy because providing Chinese-language instructors was historically one of the functions of the Confucius Institute system. A Government Accountability Office review found that Hanban and American universities jointly funded the institutes, while Confucius Institute arrangements commonly included Chinese teachers and other instructional support.

The public record reviewed by Crosscurrents does not establish who currently selects or pays the BLCU instructors, or whether their present arrangement is administratively descended from USC’s former Confucius Institute.

What can be established is narrower: the Chinese university that participated in USC’s former Confucius Institute continues to be identified on a current university webpage as a source of visiting Chinese-language instructors.

Washington Already Knew the Partnerships Survived

The phenomenon is much broader than Stony Brook or South Carolina. In 2023, the GAO surveyed 74 American institutions that had closed Confucius Institutes. Forty-three of the 74 said they still maintained a partnership with the same Chinese institution associated with their former Confucius Institute. Twenty of those schools described the relationship as diminished or dormant, particularly because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nine institutions told GAO they were still receiving support for Chinese-language, cultural or academic programs from their former Chinese Confucius Institute partner. That support included visiting or exchange scholars, Chinese-language staff, language tutors and joint or dual-degree programs. GAO also noted that some partnerships predated the Confucius Institutes themselves and continued after their closure.

In other words, three years before the Pentagon used the phrase “rebranded Confucius Institutes,” a federal investigation had already documented that shutting down the institutes often did not mean severing ties with the Chinese universities behind them. The Confucius Institute network largely disappeared as a brand. The underlying university relationships did not universally disappear with it.

The Other Half of the Pentagon’s Audit

The Pentagon’s Aug. 17 announcement points to a second category of relationships that may be even more consequential for research security. Its audits also target active collaborations involving foreign institutions appearing on the Section 1286 list. The Pentagon says the list identifies foreign entities it has confirmed as engaging in activities threatening U.S. national-security interests. Effective in fiscal year 2026, Pentagon money cannot be used for fundamental research involving collaboration with those institutions, including research using their equipment.

Several universities among the 30 now being audited have publicly documented academic relationships with universities on that list. The University of Cincinnati, for example, currently operates a Joint Co-op Institute with Chongqing University. Cincinnati says students receive degrees from both institutions, while the partnership also serves as a platform for increased faculty research cooperation. Its current program pages say approximately 450 students are enrolled. Chongqing University appears on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

At the University of Minnesota, a live Carlson School page advertises an Executive MBA in China offered in partnership with Lingnan College at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen University is also on Section 1286.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale provides another example, although the public documentation available for that program is older. In 2019, SIU announced a collaborative aviation degree program with Shenyang Aerospace University, involving jointly designed coursework, degrees from both universities and a faculty exchange component. SIU had previously announced an articulation agreement focused on avionics and aircraft maintenance. Shenyang Aerospace University now appears on Section 1286.

The available public records reviewed for this article do not establish whether the SIU program remains operational in 2026. Its documented relationship nevertheless provides another potential point of relevance to the Pentagon’s audit, without establishing that it was the reason SIU was selected.

When a Former Confucius Partner Lands on the Pentagon List

At UCLA, the two strands of the story intersect. UCLA records show that its former Confucius Institute worked with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A 2014 UCLA page identified the institute’s associate director as coming from Shanghai Jiao Tong, while former Chancellor Gene Block described a program bringing graduate students from the university to Los Angeles through the Confucius Institute. (UCLA) Shanghai Jiao Tong University is now on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

And UCLA’s relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong has extended beyond Chinese-language or cultural programming. In a June 30, 2025 CV, UCLA computer scientist Demetri Terzopoulos listed himself as co-director of the SJTU-UCLA Joint Center for Machine Perception and Inference, a position he dated from June 2018 to “present” at the time the CV was prepared. Because that CV is dated 2025, Crosscurrents cannot establish from the document alone that the center remains operational in August 2026.

Still, the historical overlap is notable: the Chinese university involved in UCLA’s former Confucius Institute is now itself on the Pentagon’s research-security list, while a UCLA professor was still listing a joint machine-perception center with it in 2025. There is no public evidence that the center caused UCLA to appear among the 30 universities, and the existence of the partnership does not establish that prohibited Pentagon-funded research occurred through it.

Penn State shows a similar pattern. Its former Confucius Institute relationship involved Dalian University of Technology, and Penn State records also document the creation of a separate Joint Center for Energy Research with Dalian covering collaborative research in energy science and technology. Dalian University of Technology now appears on Section 1286.

More recent evidence shows that the universities’ researchers continued to collaborate after the Confucius Institute era. In February 2025, Penn State reported on research co-led by scientists at Penn State and Dalian University of Technology. The article said the work was supported by Chinese funding sources and quoted the Dalian corresponding author expressing interest in additional work with Penn State.The point is not that Confucius Institute language programs transformed into sensitive research laboratories. They did not.

It is that Confucius Institutes frequently existed within larger university-to-university relationships, and some of the same Chinese institutional partners remained connected to American universities after the politically controversial Confucius Institute brand disappeared.

Portland State Was Told Cooperation Could Continue in a “New Mode”

Portland State University provides another revealing glimpse of the transition. Its Confucius Institute partnered with Soochow University. According to correspondence published by the National Association of Scholars, Chinese International Education Foundation President Yang Wei responded to Portland State’s closure by expressing hope that PSU and Soochow could continue cooperating in Chinese-language teaching in a “new mode.” (NAS)

NAS is an advocacy organization, and Crosscurrents has not independently obtained the underlying correspondence. The claim should therefore be understood as NAS’s account of the documents it reviewed. The wording is nonetheless particularly relevant now that the Pentagon is explicitly directing universities to examine organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.”

Portland State today also maintains substantial academic programs with other Chinese institutions. Its engineering college lists current dual-degree partnerships, including the Portland Institute at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. PSU describes that program as involving telecommunications and electronics degrees and graduate study, while another university page calls the relationship a “deep and integrated collaboration.”

Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications was not Portland State’s former Confucius Institute partner, and the Portland Institute should not be characterized as a renamed Confucius Institute on the evidence reviewed here. Instead, Portland State illustrates the broader transformation: one China-linked institutional structure closed while extensive academic cooperation with Chinese universities continued through other channels.

Why These 30?

That may ultimately be the more important question raised by the Pentagon’s announcement. The first wave of coverage understandably focused on prestigious universities. But a list containing Harvard and MIT alongside Bryant University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Portland State University and other less obvious institutions suggests the department was not simply assembling a roster of elite research schools.

The Pentagon says the institutions received notifications concerning “active institutional ties and collaborations” involving Section 1286 entities and organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes. The universities were directed to audit identified collaborations, assess the exposure of sensitive or export-controlled research and implement mitigation measures, including terminating problematic partnerships where necessary.

The public record offers clues as to the kinds of relationships that may warrant scrutiny, although it does not reveal the Pentagon’s institution-by-institution reasoning. At Stony Brook, a program once organized in part by its Confucius Institute continues with the same Chinese university partner. At South Carolina, a current webpage says its Chinese-language faculty is normally supplemented by visiting instructors from the former Confucius Institute’s Chinese university partner.

At UCLA and Penn State, Chinese universities involved in their former Confucius Institute relationships now appear on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list, while other academic collaborations with those institutions continued after the CI era.

At Cincinnati, a current joint engineering institute involves a Section 1286-listed university. Minnesota maintains a live webpage advertising an MBA partnership with another. SIU has documented an aviation program with a third. None of those facts establishes why the Pentagon selected a particular American university, nor does inclusion among the 30 establish wrongdoing.

But collectively, the records demonstrate something that the disappearance of Confucius Institute signs could obscure. Years ago, American universities closed a highly visible network of Chinese government-backed institutes. The Pentagon is now looking at what remained after the signs came down.

A Hong Kong foundation with longstanding ties to senior Chinese political figures sponsored at least 54 American journalists on trips to China between 2010 and 2018, placing reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, NPR, Bloomberg, Politico and Reuters in meetings arranged with help from China’s Foreign Ministry. The foundation’s own records say the program sought to deepen American journalists’ understanding of China and included discussions about how media coverage of each country could be “improved.” In separate descriptions of its overseas outreach, the foundation said it sought to promote positive stories about Hong Kong and mainland China.

The trips raise questions about how Beijing-aligned organizations cultivate the foreign journalists responsible for interpreting China for American audiences.

Inside the Journalist Exchange

The names were compiled by investigative reporter from archived delegation records published by the Better Hong Kong Foundation, which describes itself as an independent nonprofit promoting understanding of Hong Kong.

The participants included senior reporters, producers and editors. Among those identified were CNN supervising news editor Saeed Ahmed, NPR investigative editor Robert Little, Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Stromberg, New York Times staff editor Juliet Lapidos, Politico Magazine deputy editor Elizabeth Ralph and Reuters correspondents Valerie Volcovici and Diane Bartz. Other delegations included journalists from Bloomberg, NBC News, Barron’s, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, The Boston Globe, Newsweek and MSNBC.

The available records do not establish that the journalists accepted cash payments, surrendered editorial control or knowingly participated in a Chinese influence operation. They do, however, show that the foundation paid for or sponsored access-intensive trips constructed with the assistance of Chinese government bodies.

Beijing Curated the Access

The Better Hong Kong Foundation states that it began inviting American journalists to China and Hong Kong in 1996 and sponsored and organized their travel. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped arrange meetings with central and municipal officials.

During the 2018 exchange, six senior American journalists traveled through Beijing, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Dongguan, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Their itinerary included China’s Foreign Ministry, CCP-controlled Global Times, the All-China Journalists Association, government-linked policy institutes and selected technology and industrial sites.

The delegation also met Tung Chee-hwa and C.Y. Leung while both men served as vice chairmen of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or CPPCC.

Earlier trips followed the same structure. The foundation’s account of its 2010 exchange shows journalists meeting officials from the ministries of foreign affairs, commerce and health, visiting Baidu and state-linked research institutions, and attending dinners hosted by government representatives.

The program concluded with American and Chinese journalists discussing how reporting about each country could be “improved.”

The United Front Connection

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identifies the CPPCC as part of China’s United Front system, describing it as an advisory body the Party-state uses to coordinate with influential figures in business, academia, religion and other sectors. The congressionally created U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) describes United Front work as an effort to cultivate influential people and institutions, weaken opposition to Communist Party policies and advance narratives favorable to Beijing.

The Commission says the United Front Work Department contributes significantly to overseas operations involving political influence, intelligence collection and technology transfer. It separately identifies the CPPCC as an institution through which the Party-state coordinates with influential figures outside the Communist Party to carry out United Front work.

The foundation has even used the term “united front” to describe its own overseas advocacy, although not explicitly as a reference to the Communist Party’s formal United Front system. In a 2005 press release, its chief executive called one overseas delegation a “united front” that would deliver a single strong message and convey a positive image internationally.

That does not prove every foundation program was secretly controlled by the Communist Party. It does place the journalist exchanges within a broader political ecosystem designed to shape how influential foreign audiences understand China.

Access Without Adequate Scrutiny

Sponsored reporting trips are not inherently improper. News organizations routinely send journalists on travel financed by governments, corporations and advocacy groups, provided the arrangement is disclosed and editorial independence is protected.

The concern here is the combination of foreign-linked funding, government-selected access and an explicitly stated ambition to improve coverage. Beijing did not need to dictate an article for the program to be useful. It could determine which officials journalists met, which companies they toured and which version of China they encountered.

The foundation’s archives establish who traveled and who arranged the access. What remains unclear is how each newsroom reviewed the sponsorship, what disclosures accompanied the resulting coverage and whether participating outlets later examined the political relationships behind the program.

Those are questions the news organizations should now answer publicly.

An investigation released this week uncovered that at least two Iranian nationals identified in federal court records as non-U.S. citizens were registered to vote in Michigan’s August 4, 2026 primary election—and that election workers at polling locations confirmed their registrations and were prepared to provide them with ballots.

One of the individuals, Afshin Masheli, is a convicted sex offender who entered the United States on a visitor visa from Iran in 1991 and later became a lawful permanent resident. After convictions for first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2003, an immigration judge ordered his removal to Iran in 2005—a final order that has remained in effect since 2007. The second individual, Fazlollah Haritash, is an Iranian national convicted in May 2023 of accosting a child for immoral purposes and child sexually abusive activity; Michigan’s public sex offender registry lists him as currently incarcerated.

Both men have been featured on the Department of Homeland Security’s “Worst of the Worst” list—a public database launched in December 2025 highlighting criminal non-citizens arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

O’Keefe Media Group’s undercover journalists visited polling locations associated with both voter registrations on primary day. At McDonald Elementary School in Dearborn, an election worker confirmed that a registration under Masheli’s name appeared in the poll book. When the undercover operative stated he was not a U.S. citizen and asked if he could still vote, the worker replied: “All I know is you’re registered to vote here.” When the operative added that he was a convicted sex offender, a supervisor interjected: “If your name is here, you can vote. I’m sorry, the rest of the information is not important to me.”

At a second location—a mosque serving as a polling place in Farmington Hills—an election worker similarly confirmed that Haritash’s name appeared on the voter rolls and directed the operative to the correct voting station.

Federal Records Document Non-Citizen Status

U.S. District Court documents from January 2026 confirm the core facts of Masheli’s immigration status. The court opinion states he “is a native and citizen of Iran” who was admitted on a visitor visa with authorization to remain until June 1992. After becoming a lawful permanent resident in 1995, he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct in 2003, charged with removability, and ordered removed to Iran following a May 2005 immigration court hearing.

The critical detail: Masheli has been subject to a final order of removal since July 2007—nearly 19 years—yet remained in the United States. ICE released him on supervision in 2007, re-detained him briefly in 2010, then released him again. He was re-arrested in June 2025, but a federal judge ordered his release in January 2026 after finding the government failed to demonstrate that removal to Iran was “reasonably foreseeable.”

This presents a disturbing paradox: an individual under a final order of deportation to a country the United States considers an adversary and convicted of serious sex crimes—was living freely in Michigan under ICE supervision. And during that time, Michigan’s voter registration system allowed him to register and maintain active voter status.

Michigan voter roll data accessed by investigators indicated Masheli voted in 2016, 2020, and 2024. When confronted on camera on August 4, Masheli initially denied voting recently, then acknowledged he may have voted “three election, four election ago” when presented with the documented voting history.

How Michigan’s System Failed

Michigan requires all voter registration applicants to attest under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens. Federal law imposes the same requirement at multiple points: when registering, when applying for an absentee ballot, when returning that ballot, and when requesting a ballot in person. Penalties for false statements include prison time, fines, and deportation.

The state’s automatic voter registration system at the Department of Motor Vehicles does not permit registration when an applicant provides non-citizen documents. Secretary of State employees “can’t override the system or add them to the voter registration list another way,” according to the Secretary of State’s website.

Yet the system clearly failed in these cases. How did individuals with final removal orders—documented in federal court filings and DHS databases—end up on Michigan’s voter rolls?

One possibility: both individuals at some point held lawful permanent resident status before their criminal convictions triggered removal proceedings. If they registered to vote during that window — when they possessed green cards and state-issued identification — Michigan’s front-end verification systems would not have flagged them. The breakdown occurred on the back end: after federal immigration judges ordered their removal, Michigan’s voter rolls were never updated to reflect their changed legal status.

A Michigan Department of State review completed in April 2025 found this exact problem. Comparing 7.9 million driving records to 7.2 million registered voters, the state identified 15 individuals who appeared to be non-citizens and had cast ballots in the 2024 general election—representing 0.00028% of the more than 5.7 million votes cast. Thirteen cases were referred to the Attorney General for potential prosecution.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced the state was establishing “an ongoing review process to identify possible cases of noncitizens improperly registered to vote so those records can be cancelled.” But that review clearly did not catch Masheli or Haritash before the August 2026 primary.

What Happens Next

The Department of Justice has indicated it intends to “take swift action” on cases where non-citizens remain on voter rolls. Whether that includes criminal prosecutions of election officials as Dhillon’s letters threatened or simply increased federal oversight remains unclear.

Michigan Secretary of State Benson has defended the state’s processes as “open and transparent” and committed to working with the legislature on additional security measures. In February 2026, she announced plans for the Michigan Election Security Act, which would codify ongoing reviews comparing motor vehicle records to voter rolls.

But codifying a review process that already failed to catch these cases offers limited reassurance. The fundamental problem is the lack of real-time integration between federal immigration databases and state voter rolls. Until ICE removal orders, federal court rulings on citizenship status, and state voter registration systems are linked—until there is an automatic trigger that removes individuals from the rolls when a federal judge orders them deported—gaps will remain.

And in those gaps, Iranian nationals with criminal records and pending deportations will continue to receive voter registration cards in the mail, see their names in poll books, and—if they choose—cast ballots in American elections.

That’s not a hypothetical concern. It happened in Michigan in 2016, 2020, 2024, and was poised to happen again in August 2026. The question is whether Michigan—and other states—will close the loopholes before the 2026 midterms, or whether this investigation will be dismissed as an isolated incident while the underlying systems remain unchanged.

Seven major foreign influence operations spanning 25 million social media posts weren’t primarily spreading hate speech, according to a new data-driven study by computer science professor Dr. Emilio Ferrara from the University of Southern California. Rather, Dr. Ferrara argues, they were manufacturing divisiveness by exploiting America’s existing fault lines.

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The finding follows a long-standing practice of how adversaries weaponize social media. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other state actors weren’t flooding platforms with slurs and dehumanizing rhetoric, the research discovered. Only 18.7% of hostile content qualified as genuine hate speech or identity-based attacks coupled with dehumanizing or inciting language. The rest? Strategic amplification of partisan and geopolitical tensions designed to fracture social cohesion without crossing the line into overt hatred.

The Measurement Error

For years, researchers and policymakers have quantified foreign influence operations through “toxicity” and “hate” rates. But Dr. Ferrara’s analysis of X’s Information Operations archive reveals a fundamental flaw: the detectors measuring “hate” actually capture a broader construct, one of hostile or divisive out-group targeting.

Ferrara’s team analyzed 25.08 million tweets from 8,275 accounts attributed to seven government-backed campaigns. Using a validated two-stage detection system, they typed each hostile post into three categories: identity hate (attacks on protected groups), partisan divisiveness (inflammatory political rhetoric), and geopolitical invective (foreign policy attacks).

The composition varied dramatically. Russian operations (RU-op and IRA) concentrated on identity hate—68% and 61% respectively. Iran’s campaigns focused on geopolitical invective (64% and 51%). Venezuela’s operations overwhelmingly targeted domestic political opponents (94% and 75% partisan content).

“Reporting all of it as hate therefore overstates hate roughly twofold,” the study concluded.

The Identification-Imitation-Amplification Pattern

The strategy mirrors what some intelligence analysts now call the “Identification-Imitation-Amplification” framework. Foreign actors don’t create divisions but rather they identify existing polarized groups and divisive issues, then amplify them through fictional personas that imitate authentic community members.

“CEIOs necessitate as the first step, identifying divisive issues, as well as polarised groups and targeting them with specifically crafted messages to reinforce their pre-conceived beliefs,” according to research published in Intelligence and National Security. The goal isn’t promoting ethnic or religious hatred directly, it’s deepening in-group loyalty while intensifying out-group hostility.

A separate analysis of 56.3 million posts from 18 state-linked operations found that while toxic content represented just 1.53% of total posts, it generated disproportionately high engagement—20.63 interactions per post versus 3.46 for non-toxic content. Russian operations particularly leveraged this dynamic, with toxic posts averaging 86.08 engagements.

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Strategic Implications

Content moderation focused narrowly on hate speech misses the broader manipulation. The real threat isn’t slurs but the strategic presentation of selective truths designed to deepen existing fractures in democratic societies.

As Ferrara’s study notes, three independent expert annotators could only agree moderately on where divisiveness ends and hate begins. That ambiguity is precisely what adversaries exploit—operating in the gray zone where content inflames without quite crossing into prohibitable hatred.

The campaigns aren’t about hate. They’re about fracture.

Vic Mellor, a Republican congressional candidate who has served as a longtime aide and informal chief of staff to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in mid-June for work involving Cuban government entities and officials.

The registration was filed on June 16, less than three weeks after Mellor traveled to Havana and attended two lengthy dinners with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson and former bodyguard of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro. Rodríguez Castro has been reported to hold the rank of lieutenant colonel in Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior.

Mellor’s registration statement names three foreign principals: the “General Directorate of Personal Security,” the “Minister of Visas,” and the “Minister of America Relations.” An accompanying exhibit identifies the General Directorate of Personal Security as a Cuban government entity within the Ministry of the Interior and names Rodríguez Castro as the official with whom Mellor engaged.

The filing describes Mellor’s activities as including “providing social media strategy/content suggestions,” preparing and disseminating informational materials, and working to “bridge communication gaps between Cubans and Americans.”

Mellor reported receiving no money or other thing of value for the work through June 16. The paperwork identifies an oral agreement or understanding dated May 29, although it elsewhere states, “There is no agreement or understanding.”

Foreign Work Alongside a Congressional Campaign

Mellor’s engagement with Cuban officials comes as he campaigns for the Republican nomination in Rhode Island’s Democratic-leaning 2nd Congressional District. The Cook Political Report rates the district Solid Democratic with a D+4 partisan index.

A Woonsocket native, Mellor returned to Rhode Island after living in Florida for approximately three decades and established a residence in Warwick ahead of his campaign. His residency has since become a subject of political scrutiny.

Mellor withdrew from consideration for the Rhode Island Republican Party’s endorsement after its nominating committee recommended his opponent, Stephen Skoly. Skoly subsequently won the convention endorsement in a 44–19 vote.

Mellor’s campaign has also been overwhelmingly self-funded. Through March 31, it reported approximately $606,486 in receipts, including roughly $587,377 contributed by Mellor himself. Democratic incumbent Rep. Seth Magaziner’s campaign reported approximately $1.25 million through June 30.

Flynn’s Separate Foreign Representation

Mellor’s filing follows Flynn’s own registration for foreign representation work.

Flynn filed a short-form FARA registration in October 2025 as a consultant to RRB Strategies for work benefiting Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity. His filing listed a fee of $100,000 per month, and subsequent disclosures documented a $100,000 payment for one month of services.

The work included providing strategic advice and analysis and seeking sanctions relief connected to Milorad Dodik, the former leader of Republika Srpska and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Flynn’s disclosed foreign principal was Republika Srpska through a U.S. consulting firm. Mellor’s filing identifies Cuban government entities and officials.

Both men now operate as registered foreign agents while retaining visible roles in Republican and Trump-aligned political circles.

Mellor Casts His Role as Unpaid Outreach

Mellor told the Providence Journal that he was unpaid and acting as “a salesman for the state of Rhode Island,” seeking to position the state for potential trade opportunities if Cuba eventually “opens up for business.”

He described his role as “giving them some insight on how to do the communications with the United States government,” and clarified that when he used the word “we,” he was referring only to himself.

A State Department spokesperson told USA TODAY that Mellor “is not authorized to speak on behalf of the United States government and is not involved in anything the administration is doing.”

Contact With Castro’s Grandson Draws Scrutiny

The timing is politically sensitive. In May, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that Raúl Castro and five others were involved in the February 24, 1996, shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Four people were killed, including three U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration has also tightened sanctions on Cuba as the island faces a worsening economic and humanitarian crisis.

Mellor said he saw no conflict between his contacts with Rodríguez Castro and the indictment of the elder Castro.

“Raúl Castro, the grandfather, has been indicted,” Mellor said. “I haven’t spoken to him. I haven’t seen him. I’m speaking with Raúl Castro, the grandson.”

A Foreign Agent Running for Congress

Federal law generally prohibits Members of Congress from serving as agents of foreign principals required to register under FARA. Mellor would therefore have to terminate the relationship before serving in Congress if elected.

Mellor and Flynn are now both registered for foreign representation work, one involving communist Cuba and the other involving the Bosnian Serb government, while continuing to operate within Trump-aligned political networks.

Since 2023, federal investigators have been seeking extensive Apple data associated with a senior Republican congressional staffer suspected of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Qatar, according to court filings obtained by Forbes.

The Justice Department ordered Apple to provide location history, stored communications associated with WhatsApp and Signal, and email messages dating back to 2020—while imposing a gag order lasting until 2029. Apple successfully challenged the prolonged non-disclosure order in 2025 and notified the user.

The staffer’s identity and the investigation’s current status remain undisclosed, but court filings indicate the probe involves “at least one unregistered foreign agent, and the government of Qatar.” The investigation follows several legally distinct cases involving efforts to advance Qatari interests in Washington—ranging from undisclosed lobbying and revolving-door violations to bribery convictions.

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Bennett and Watts: The Shadow Campaign

In January 2024, the Justice Department secured deferred prosecution agreements with Barry Bennett and Doug Watts, two Trump-aligned political operatives who ran a covert influence campaign for Qatar in 2017. Qatar paid Bennett’s firm, Avenue Strategies Global, $2.1 million for lobbying services, approximately $773,000 of which financed a shadow entity that operated without FARA registration.

Although Bennett’s firm was registered to represent Qatar, its filings concealed the creation and financing of the ostensibly independent campaign. Watts and the entity he operated were not registered under FARA. The covert operation published op-eds in major newspapers, produced a documentary aired on national television, and directed 3,000 phone calls urging members of Congress to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition fighting in Yemen. Bennett paid a $100,000 fine; Watts paid $25,000.

Diplomats and Generals Cross the Line

Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Olson pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating federal revolving-door prohibitions by illegally advising Qatar within one year of leaving government service. Olson helped Qatar lobby for U.S. Customs preclearance facilities in Doha and advocated for Qatari interests during the 2017 Gulf diplomatic crisis while receiving $20,000 monthly payments from a businessman. He was sentenced to three years’ probation and a $93,350 fine in 2023.

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, former president of the Brookings Institution, faced FBI seizure of his electronic data in 2022 over allegations he lobbied for Qatar without registering as a foreign agent. An FBI affidavit cited “substantial evidence” that Allen violated FARA by advising Qatar on influencing U.S. policy during the 2017 crisis while simultaneously pursuing multimillion-dollar business deals with Doha. Allen denied wrongdoing and resigned from Brookings. The Justice Department closed the investigation without charges in January 2023.

Bribery and Foreign Influence

Former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2025 for a sprawling bribery, obstruction, and foreign-agent scheme. One branch of the case involved developer Fred Daibes, who provided Menendez with gold bars while seeking an investment from a fund tied to Qatar. Menendez made public statements praising Qatar and sent them to Daibes for transmission to Qatari officials connected to the investment fund. The broader scheme also involved bribes from other actors related to separate favors, including Egypt-focused foreign-agent conduct.

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Former Republican Congressman Jeff Miller, who chaired the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, registered as a foreign agent for Qatar just seven months after leaving Congress in 2017. Campaign Legal Center argued the registration suggested he may have performed prohibited advocacy during the one-year cooling-off period and asked DOJ to investigate, though no public prosecution appears to have followed.

What FARA Requires

Enacted in 1938, the Foreign Agents Registration Act requires certain people and organizations acting under the direction or control of foreign principals to register with the Justice Department when they perform covered political, lobbying, public-relations, or representational activities in the United States.

Registration does not prohibit the activity—it requires disclosure of the foreign relationship, the work performed, and related receipts and expenditures. Violations can result in fines and imprisonment.

The Republican staffer investigation suggests that suspected undisclosed foreign influence involving Qatar remained under active federal scrutiny through at least 2025.

On April 27, 2026, inside Moscow’s House of Unions, Vladimir Putin sent greetings to the inaugural forum of Sovintern, an “international socialist platform” claiming representatives from more than 100 parties and movements across 70 countries.

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The event was organized by A Just Russia, a Kremlin-aligned party that four years earlier had been expelled from the Socialist International for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now that same party was building a rival international — one that explicitly endorses Moscow’s “special military operation,” frames the war as anti-colonial resistance, and expresses solidarity with the Russian Federation.

What Sovintern Actually Is

The Robert Lansing Institute describes Sovintern as a project initiated by Sergey Mironov, leader of A Just Russia, under the banner of “Socialism 2.0.” Co-initiators include the Workers Party of Britain, the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Serbia’s Movement of Socialists, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, and the American Communist Party. The institute argues Sovintern should be understood not as an autonomous ideological movement but as a Kremlin-aligned influence platform.

Putin’s greeting was not ceremonial. In it, he emphasized Russia’s efforts to “expand meaningful dialogue among constructive national political forces” and praised participants as “committed to social justice, sovereign development, and traditional spiritual and moral values.”

Modern Russia is not the Soviet Union. Putin does not govern as a revolutionary Marxist. His regime is personalist, nationalist, and imperial, shaped by the security services and increasingly civilizational in its rhetoric. But it understands ideology as infrastructure.

Hybrid Warfare, Ideological Edition

CEPA’s 2025 report on Russian hybrid threats argues that Moscow exploits existing vulnerabilities in Western societies — polarization, inequality, Soviet nostalgia, mistrust of institutions — rather than inventing them from scratch.

Sovintern fits neatly into that pattern. It is not a tank column or bot farm. It is a softer machine: conferences, declarations, party-to-party relationships, online platforms, and curated delegations. The object is not to seize power next year. It is to seed arguments, normalize narratives, identify sympathetic nodes, and give Moscow-aligned positions the appearance of international legitimacy.

The United States has already seen fragments of this model. In 2022, the Justice Department charged Russian legislator Aleksandr Babakov and two staff members with conspiring to run what prosecutors described as a “global foreign influence and disinformation network” to advance Russian interests. Babakov is also a senior A Just Russia figure associated with the party’s international role.

The Real Danger

The danger is not that socialism returns. Democratic societies can argue about inequality and capitalism without every left-wing movement becoming a Kremlin proxy. Many socialists oppose Russian imperialism. Many left-wing parties have defended Ukraine.

The danger is more precise: Sovintern creates channels through which genuine grievances could be aligned with Russian strategic narratives. A young activist angry about inequality may enter through anti-capitalism and exit with Russian talking points on Ukraine. A postcolonial movement may begin with legitimate critique and find itself excusing Moscow’s imperial war.

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The West’s answer cannot be panic or censorship. It has to be clarity: foreign influence transparency, better mapping of party networks, serious attention to ideological laundering, and renewed confidence that democratic civilization can withstand critique without surrendering its institutions.

On August 4, Canada’s new Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act switches on a public registry showing who is acting with a foreign principal to influence Canadian political or governmental processes. A new commissioner, Anton Boegman, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia, will oversee it.

The law isn’t really aimed at spies in trench coats.

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Its real target is the respectable middle layer where modern influence lives: law firms, consultants, state-owned companies, sovereign wealth funds, and proxy organizations that can shape domestic politics without looking foreign at all. A foreign government doesn’t have to hack an election if it can quietly rent voices inside the target country’s own political conversation.

What Triggers Registration

The trigger isn’t mere contact with a foreign client. It’s an arrangement, under the direction of or in association with a foreign principal, to communicate with officials, disseminate information by any means including social media, distribute money, or provide services connected to a Canadian political or governmental process.

That definition reaches not just foreign states but foreign powers, state-linked economic entities, and anyone acting at their direction or for their benefit, meaning a Canadian firm advocating for a foreign state-owned bank or energy company may now have a registration problem.

A Global Movement

Canada isn’t alone.

• Australia’s Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme has required similar disclosure since 2018, though Australia’s own government has acknowledged the scheme failed to achieve its purpose and needs substantial reform.

• The UK’s two-tier Foreign Influence Registration Scheme flags Russia and Iran as enhanced-risk powers requiring extra disclosure; officials describe it as meant to provide transparency, deter covert state-threat activity, and give police and MI5 earlier chances to disrupt hostile operations.

• France, Singapore, and Taiwan have built their own versions too, from France’s High Authority for Transparency in Public Life to Singapore’s Foreign Interference Countermeasures Act to Taiwan’s Anti-Infiltration Act, each aimed at foreign efforts to shape domestic politics.

The American Pioneer That Fell Behind

The United States pioneered this model. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, was enacted in 1938 amid concern over Nazi, fascist, and communist propaganda, requiring agents of foreign principals to disclose their relationships and activities.

Enforcement lagged for decades, though: a 2016 Justice Department inspector general report found that between 1966 and 2015, prosecutors brought only seven criminal FARA cases and sought no civil injunctive relief since 1991. It has picked up some since then, including a 2019 civil action that was DOJ’s first affirmative civil FARA case in nearly three decades, but a 1995 exemption still lets some foreign-principal work get routed through ordinary lobbying disclosure instead, so long as a foreign government or party isn’t the principal beneficiary.

The distinction matters: lobbying disclosure tells you someone is lobbying, while FARA is supposed to tell you when the underlying client is foreign. One discloses a professional activity; the other discloses a strategic relationship.

Foreign “Agent” vs. Foreign “Influence”

That gap matters because modern influence rarely looks foreign.

A think-tank report can look like scholarship; a lobbying push can look like grassroots concern.

A healthy disclosure regime shouldn’t treat every international relationship as suspicious; democracies need foreign students, researchers, and diaspora advocates. But it should reveal when domestic persuasion is being directed or financed by a foreign power, especially outside the elections that get all the attention.

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Sanctions policy, defense procurement, energy infrastructure, and university partnerships all attract quieter foreign interest, and the question that matters is not whether a foreign government may speak, but whether it may disguise its speech as someone else’s.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump on July 4 that Russian forces had captured the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka—a claim the Institute for the Study of War and Ukrainian forces on the ground immediately disputed as false.

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The fabricated victory announcement came three days before Trump’s NATO summit meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, was followed by a Russian ceasefire proposal Moscow knew Ukraine would reject, and represents what ISW assesses as a coordinated information operation designed to establish a false battlefield “reality” in Western decision-making circles. The episode reveals Russia’s cognitive warfare playbook: manufacture territorial claims, stage diplomatic gestures, then weaponize the refusals to frame Ukraine as the obstacle to peace.

A False Claim Delivered Directly to the White House

The claim didn’t emerge from battlefield reporting or military briefings. Putin staged a July 3 meeting with Russian military commanders, then repeated the Kostyantynivka narrative directly to Trump during a July 4 call that Kremlin aide Yuriy Ushakov confirmed lasted nearly 90 minutes. Ushakov told reporters Putin said Russian forces were “confidently advancing, liberating one settlement after another”—language designed for diplomatic and media consumption, not operational accuracy.

Zelensky responded hours later on X, calling the claim “just another Russian lie, an attempt to generate some kind of a news story.” Ukraine’s 19th Army Corps stated its forces maintain positions throughout Kostyantynivka and continue striking Russian infiltrators. ISW’s assessment, based on geolocated footage, found Russian units raised flags at scattered points but presented no evidence of consolidated control.

Fabricated Evidence and AI-Altered Footage

ISW noted that footage released by Russia’s Ministry of Defense may have been altered with artificial intelligence, consistent with what the think tank describes as a wider pattern of manipulated visuals used to manufacture territorial gains Russia has not achieved. The tactic isn’t new: Kremlin officials, ISW observed, “regularly aggrandize tactical Russian advances and present false and fabricated evidence as part of a wider cognitive warfare effort.”

The strategic target wasn’t the battlefield—it was the Trump administration’s perception of battlefield momentum. ISW assessed the Kremlin conducted “a targeted information campaign that aims to highlight the claimed Russian seizure of Kostyantynivka to the Trump administration and Western information space.” The timing, three days before the Ankara summit, was deliberate.

The Staged Ceasefire Trap

Moscow followed the false capture claim with a ceasefire proposal—nominally to retrieve fallen soldiers’ bodies—that Russia’s own defense ministry said Ukraine rejected before the truce window had even opened. ISW identified the sequence as part of a familiar pattern: announce a fabricated territorial gain, offer a short “humanitarian” pause calculated to be refused, then cite the refusal as evidence Ukraine obstructs peace efforts.

The operation unfolded while Russian forces sustained heavy bombardment: Ukrainian officials reported 125 drones and four missiles launched overnight July 4-5, and Zelensky said Russia fired approximately 2,200 strike drones, over 1,730 glide bombs, and 106 missiles in the preceding week. Russia’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, characterized the Trump-Putin call as “businesslike and highly constructive.”

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The question isn’t whether Russian troops eventually take the city. The question is whether Moscow’s information operations—rather than verified battlefield facts—establish the baseline for ceasefire negotiations. Putin’s July 4 call demonstrated Russia understands the cognitive battlefield may matter more than the ground one, especially when the audience is an incoming administration eager to broker a deal.

Qatar Foundation International (QFI) published a major research report in June 2026 examining its work with American K-12 Arabic teachers, just weeks after the organization announced it would “wind down operations” in the United States.

The timing of the 143-page study, titled “Teaching Arabic as a Global Language in U.S. K-12 Settings: How Do Teacher Identity and Critical Language Awareness Matter?,” comes as QFI faces scrutiny from federal investigators and members of Congress over allegations that it conducted a multi-decade influence operation in American schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) submitted findings to the U.S. Department of Education and multiple congressional committees in May 2026 documenting what it described as more than $65 million in funding across 220 programs between 2009 and 2025.

QFI promoted the new report on its Instagram account earlier this month, stating that “the report offers new insights into how K-12 Arabic teachers in the United States navigate Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Colloquial Arabic, teacher identity, and classroom practice.”

Qatar Foundation’s Institutional Structure

Qatar Foundation International is the U.S.-based member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. According to Influence Watch, QFI was originally founded in 2009 as a 501(c)(3) private foundation but terminated its nonprofit status in 2012 and transferred its remaining funds to Qatar Foundation, which is registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

A 2015 QFI memo, cited by Influence Watch, states that the U.S.-based group was formed “for the purpose advancing the vision of Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser and the vision of Qatar Foundation.” The memo identifies QFI’s CEO as Sheikha Hind bin Hamad Al-Thani, daughter of former Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

The New Report: Content and Authorship

The report was authored by Georgetown University Professor Lourdes Ortega, along with Saurav Goswami, Hina Ashraf, Rima Elabdali, and Esha Mukherjee. According to the study, it draws on 143 survey responses from Arabic teachers across K-12 and higher education, along with in-depth interviews with teachers working in U.S. K-12 contexts.

The report examines how teachers incorporate both Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial dialects into instruction, and identifies what it describes as three “meaningful reasons” for dialect integration: “to bond with and support heritage students, to foster greater out-of-class communicative competence, and to cultivate students’ love for the Arab world and Arab cultures.”

Based on its findings, the study produced five professional development modules for Arabic teachers titled “Critical Language Awareness in Arabic Language Teaching,” which QFI has made available to educators.

Congressional Investigation and Allegations

The report’s publication follows a May 2026 investigation by ISGAP that documented QFI’s activities across multiple layers of the U.S. education system. According to the ISGAP report, submitted to federal authorities and congressional committees, QFI’s activities “extended well beyond what QFI describes solely as Arabic language education,” and included curriculum development, teacher training, and partnerships with federally funded university programs.

The ISGAP investigation documented several specific allegations:

QFI’s curriculum platform Al-Masdar included a lesson titled “Express Your Loyalty to Qatar” featuring a YouTube video of Qatari bankers expressing loyalty to the country and its leaders, according to documentation reviewed by the Middle East Forum. Another lesson titled “Whose Terrorism?” asked students to debate whether “Israeli soldiers taunting and shooting children in Palestinian refugee camps, with the assistance of U.S. military aid” should be considered terrorism.

Teachers participating in QFI-funded professional development programs were required to produce lesson plans and submit them for review by QFI staff, according to the ISGAP report.

A New York City public school receiving QFI funding was found using classroom materials in which Israel was omitted from maps and replaced with “Palestine,” according to the report, which states this prompted a formal congressional inquiry.

QFI facilitated a program bringing United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) officials into U.S. public school classrooms through virtual partnerships with UNRWA schools, according to the investigation. The program, called “My Voice-My School,” reportedly culminated in advocacy projects that occupied one-third of the instructional year.

Bipartisan Congressional Response

The ISGAP findings drew responses from members of Congress across party lines.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) stated that the report documents “the institutional capture of our universities, K-12 schools, teacher training initiatives, and national educator networks by foreign adversaries who seek to control and manipulate the American education system.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) said: “American classrooms should never serve as vehicles for foreign government influence. When a regime like Qatar’s quietly shapes what is taught, who is invited to speak, and which ideas are amplified on our campuses, the American people have a right to know.”

Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA), chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, stated he looks forward to working with colleagues “to protect academic integrity from foreign agendas.”

Georgetown University’s Qatar Connections

Ortega, the lead author of the new QFI report is affiliated with Georgetown University, which has extensive financial ties to Qatar. According to Department of Education records cited by the Middle East Forum, Georgetown has received $333 million from Qatar since 2011, more than any other U.S. university.

Georgetown operates a branch campus in Doha — Georgetown University in Qatar —which was established in 2005 “in partnership with Qatar Foundation.” The campus is located on Qatar Foundation’s Education City complex.

According to Georgetown’s website, Professor Ortega received funding from Qatar Foundation International through its “Call for Research on Arabic as a Global Language” grant program.

QFI’s Closure and Qatar Foundation’s Continued Expansion

QFI informed partners in early June 2026 that it was “winding down its operations,” according to a leaked email. The email stated that QFI is “committed to ensuring an orderly transition for our community and working collaboratively so that existing programs may conclude or evolve responsibly with local institutions.”

The closure occurred one week after ISGAP published its report, according to ISGAP’s timeline.

While QFI winds down its U.S. operations, Qatar Foundation announced new study-abroad agreements with three Historically Black Colleges and Universities at the NAFSA 2026 international education conference: Hampton University, Xavier University of Louisiana, and Prairie View A&M University.

Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, stated: “While we welcome QFI’s apparent closure, the broader network of influence remains intact. Protecting American education cannot depend on the voluntary withdrawal of foreign-funded organizations.”

The publication of QFI’s report celebrating its teacher training work, released after the organization announced its closure and amid ongoing congressional scrutiny, has raised questions among researchers and lawmakers about transparency and accountability in foreign-funded educational programs.

Private Chinese technology firms working for provincial-level government clients used ChatGPT to generate social media content attacking American AI infrastructure, according to an OpenAI threat report released in June 2026. The operations — dubbed “Data Center Bandwagon” and “Tech and Tariffs” — targeted legitimate debates about electricity costs and U.S. trade policy, attempting to covertly insert foreign influence into domestic American discourse.

The campaigns failed to gain traction, but they revealed a troubling pattern: China is deploying the same playbook it used to undermine U.S. rare earths companies in 2022, now adapted for AI — a sector Beijing elevated as a strategic priority in its 15th Five-Year Plan. The timing is striking: just days before OpenAI’s disclosure, House Republicans requested FBI and White House investigations into whether foreign actors were fueling anti-data center activism. The report provides documented evidence that PRC-origin actors attempted to exploit U.S. debates over data centers and technology policy, while also showing vocabulary and tasking patterns consistent with China’s domestic public-security and public-opinion monitoring ecosystem.

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A Commercial Ecosystem Serving Party-State Priorities

OpenAI identified the Data Center Bandwagon operators as “likely part of a social media operations team at a private Chinese technology company conducting work for Chinese provincial-level government clients.” This points to China’s commercial 舆情 (yuqing) — public opinion monitoring — industry, where private firms compete for propaganda department contracts to shape narratives domestically and abroad.

The operators uploaded their own work reports to ChatGPT for editing, inadvertently leaking an operational playbook. One document focused specifically on Facebook strategy: building “real, trustworthy and daily life personas,” creating cover content about lifestyle and current affairs, deploying dual-track organic posting plus paid ads, using cross-account interactions to fake engagement, and maintaining backup accounts to evade platform detection. OpenAI summarizes the document but has not published it in full, a rare primary-source glimpse into how Chinese government contractors operationalize influence on Western platforms.

Public-Security Vocabulary and Stability-Maintenance Clues

The Tech and Tariffs cluster displayed vocabulary consistent with China’s Ministry of Public Security: operators requested “public opinion risk assessments concerning protests, school-bullying incidents, crowd movements in Shanghai, police-related incidents, petitioning activity and traffic enforcement.” One user asked ChatGPT to design a system to scrape “harmful” information from “key persons” (重点人员) — a term standard in Chinese policing for surveillance targets.

OpenAI said it could not establish the operators’ “precise institutional affiliation,” but the terminology is consistent with China’s stability-maintenance and public-security vocabulary, 维稳/weiwen), work conducted by provincial Public Security Bureaus. The overlap suggests possible connective tissue between China’s domestic public-security ecosystem and foreign influence activity, Although OpenAI did not prove direct institutional command, a pattern consistent with OpenAI’s October 2025 disruption of an individual linked to Chinese law enforcement who targeted dissidents and planned “cyber special operations” against Japan’s prime minister.

Weaponizing Legitimate Local Journalism

Data Center Bandwagon operators asked ChatGPT to create content based on reporting from Southern Maryland Chronicle, a regional outlet covering legitimate concerns about PJM Interconnection capacity auction prices. The operators used real journalism about electricity rate increases, PJM prices surged 833 percent due to projected data center demand, to anchor AI-generated commentary that framed data centers as burdens on ordinary families.

The tactic is sophisticated: exploit credible local reporting to lend authenticity to foreign narratives. It mirrors the 2022 Spamouflage/DRAGONBRIDGE campaign, where Chinese-linked accounts posed as Texas residents opposing Lynas Rare Earths facilities, leveraging legitimate environmental concerns to undermine U.S. efforts to reduce rare earths dependence on China.

Coordinated Infrastructure Across Multiple Campaigns

OpenAI noted account-level overlap between Tech and Tariffs and Operation Nine-Emdash Line — a separate campaign targeting the Philippines with fabricated imagery of President Marcos using drugs. One X account posted both ChatGPT-generated Trump cartoons and Marcos content, suggesting shared tasking or centralized coordination.

The report also identified a “ChatGPT compromise” sub-network — accounts spreading fabricated claims that ChatGPT user data had been leaked, impersonating victims with stories like “Doxxed through ChatGPT. Reputation destroyed, job lost.” These accounts repeatedly interacted with Tech and Tariffs content, amplifying anti-OpenAI narratives. The false-flag operation parallels DRAGONBRIDGE’s attacks on rare earths companies, demonstrating a template for targeting U.S. strategic industries.

Congressional Investigation Already Underway

On June 4, 2026, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), along with Reps. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) and John Joyce (R-Pa.), requested FBI and White House investigations into whether “Chinese Communist Party-backed entities and other foreign adversaries” were influencing American data center debates. The letter cited reports from the Bitcoin Policy Institute documenting how “foreign state media, the CCP-aligned Singham network, and foreign-billionaire funding are routed through U.S. nonprofits.”

OpenAI’s June 2026 report, released days after the congressional request, substantiates a narrower but important concern: PRC-origin actors attempted to exploit American debates over data centers, electricity prices, tariffs, and technology policy. The report does not prove every element raised in the House letter, including claims about nonprofit funding networks, but it does show that foreign influence operators were already trying to insert themselves into the same domestic fights lawmakers had flagged.

The Bigger Pattern: A Playbook for Strategic Industries

OpenAI explicitly compares this operation to the rare earths campaigns, noting both occurred after China securitized those sectors in Five-Year Plans. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021) prioritized rare earths; the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) elevated AI as a strategic technology, mentioning it over 50 times and launching a nationwide “AI+” initiative.

The pattern is replicable: identify a U.S. strategic industry where China faces competition, wait for legitimate local controversies, then amplify them using inauthentic accounts to slow American progress. Likely next targets include semiconductors, critical minerals, and defense technology, any sector where local concerns about water use, energy demand, or environmental impacts can be weaponized.

The campaigns generated little engagement, but their significance lies in what they reveal about intent. As OpenAI concludes, “foreign influence operations have long sought to latch onto existing local issues and sincerely held beliefs, using them to build credibility, amplify divisions or exacerbate public distrust.” In the race for AI dominance, the operation resembles the pro-PRC playbook used against U.S. rare-earths companies in 2022 — and American communities debating data center impacts are the battleground.

The United Kingdom’s Foreign Affairs Committee has concluded that Russia’s hybrid operations amount to the behavior of “a state at war against the West,” and the British government’s formal response, published on 8 June 2026, confirms the assessment in unusually direct language. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper described the threat as “an industrial-scale attack on the UK’s and our allies’ information environment.”

The response also discloses, for the first time, that Kremlin-linked influence firms were used in plans to interfere in Armenian politics and push power toward pro-Russian figures. Together, the two documents map a sprawling architecture of state-backed and non-state information warfare: Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and jihadist. It also lay outs the West’s emerging counter-offensive: 96 sanctions designations in 19 months, a 42 percent boost to BBC World Service funding, and new defense pacts with France, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine.

The Committee’s chair, Dame Emily Thornberry, said she was “shocked to learn just how widespread organised disinformation has become. It is the new warfare and open liberal democracies are sitting ducks.” The original report, released in March 2026, estimated that Russia spends roughly €30 million a week — €1.5 billion a year — on state propaganda alone.

Russia: the Doppelganger machine and the Armenia plot

At the center of the Kremlin’s operation is the Social Design Agency, a Moscow PR firm the UK designated in October 2024 as the entity behind the Doppelganger network, which the Committee report says used 228 domains and coordinated inauthentic networks across nine languages to impersonate outlets including Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Fox News. Cardiff University researchers identified Doppelganger activity amplifying false rumors about the Princess of Wales before her cancer diagnosis was announced.

On 11 May 2026, the UK sanctioned a further 56 actors, including 49 SDA employees, and publicly exposed for the first time the SDA’s role in “interfere[ing] in the Armenian elections in favour of pro-Russian figures.” A second Kremlin-funded firm, ANO Dialog, was identified as having “coordinated with Russian intelligence on interference plans aimed at Armenian domestic politics.”

The broader Russian ecosystem the UK has sanctioned since October 2024 includes Rybar LLC, a Rostec-funded outlet that the BBC documented is producing war-themed comic books to sell Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to children; Storm-1516, an AI-driven network that EU researchers say fabricates videos targeting European politicians; and the Centre for Geopolitical Expertise, founded by Aleksandr Dugin.

In Moldova, the UK sanctioned Evrazia, a network run by fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, after Moldovan police found that roughly 130,000 citizens received a total of $15 million in bribes to vote against EU accession in 2024. London later sanctioned entities tied to the A7 network and its ruble-backed A7A5 cryptocurrency, which UK officials said was linked to sanctions evasion and information-interference activity.

In February 2026, the UK sanctioned the Georgian channels Imedi TV and POSTV for amplifying Kremlin narratives, and in July 2025 it designated African Initiative, a Russian intelligence-staffed “content mill” pushing health conspiracies across West Africa.

China: the “Three Warfares” and the Taiwan surge

China’s operations follow the People’s Liberation Army’s doctrine of “Three Warfares” — public opinion, psychological, and legal — supported by a global coordinated influence network that researchers call Spamouflage, or Dragonbridge, which harasses regime critics across X, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

The UK government acknowledged Taiwan’s National Security Bureau finding that Chinese misinformation aimed at the island rose 60 percent in a single year. The Foreign Secretary told Parliament that London “will not sacrifice our national security for economic growth” and pointed to a new Counter-Political Interference and Espionage Action Plan unveiled in March.

Iran: “Enhanced Tier” and Endless Mayfly

Iran is designated in the “Enhanced Tier” of the UK’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme — the highest threat category — and London has sanctioned 36 Iranian individuals and entities for malign activity. Tehran’s signature operation, which the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab named “Endless Mayfly,” fabricates news articles impersonating legitimate outlets and feeds them to real journalists in an attempt to launder Iranian narratives into Western media.

Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center reported that Iranian government-connected actors used cyber-enabled influence campaigns around the 2024 U.S. presidential election, including hack-and-leak activity, covert personas, and AI-enabled content.

The government acknowledged that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and affiliated entities continue to drive Iran’s information operations, with the FCDO Iran Unit’s “deep experience in Iranian tactics, techniques and procedures” central to the UK’s response. Freedom House documented that Iran was among three states responsible for 11 incidents of physical transnational repression on UK soil between 2014 and 2024 — paired with online harassment, deepfake intimidation, and threats against the families of UK-based dissidents.

Non-state actors: Daesh, al-Shabaab, and the comms war

The Committee’s inquiry also examined non-state actors, finding that jihadist organizations remain prolific disinformation producers even after losing territory. The UN warned earlier this year that the threat from Daesh has “increased steadily” since its last report, with the group expanding its use of artificial intelligence and encrypted platforms to recruit. Researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have catalogued 93 unofficial Islamic State outlets operating across mainstream platforms and encrypted messaging apps.

Al-Shabaab’s online operation has evolved in parallel. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue previously documented al-Shabaab and Islamic State propaganda ecosystems on Facebook, while Somali officials have warned that misinformation and disinformation threaten national cohesion and can incite violence.

The Western counter-offensive

The government committed £148 million a year for the next three years to the BBC World Service, a 42 percent increase. London is also building out a defense-and-security architecture aimed squarely at hybrid threats: the UK–EU Security and Defence Partnership, the Lancaster House Declaration with France, the Kensington Treaty with Germany, a forthcoming UK–Poland treaty, and the UK–Ukraine 100 Year Partnership, whose Article 7 covers foreign information manipulation.

The blunt message from London is that the information war is no longer a future risk. As Thornberry put it: “If Russia is already conducting information warfare against the West, the UK must be ready to defend itself.”

The Stanford Review reported on June 1, 2026 that a whistleblower had leaked Stanford University’s non-public foreign-funding disclosures, including a 2025 restricted gift of at least $3 million from a donor recorded only as “Chen Yuan” of China, for directed research at the Hoover Institution. The disclosure was filed under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires federally funded universities to report single-source foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year.

The Review argued the name, nationality, and apparent capacity best matched Chen Yuan, the former president of the China Development Bank and chairman of the China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC) — an organization the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has identified as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas United Front influence apparatus.

Hoover Institution forcefully disputed the identification as “innuendo and speculation,” said it was a case of mistaken identity, and announced it had notified Stanford’s general counsel, federal and local authorities, the Department of Education, and the leadership of congressional China committees about what it described as misuse of leaked confidential reporting information.

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The Disputed Donor

The Review’s argument is built on what the disclosure shows and what it does not. The filing names “Chen Yuan” with country “China” and a 2025 restricted gift exceeding $3 million for Hoover-directed research, routed through a San Francisco law firm. The Review noted that few private Chinese donors with that name have the documented financial profile to make such a gift, and concluded the most plausible match was the senior banker who runs CAIFC.

Hoover’s statement said the Review had it wrong and that China scholar Glenn Tiffert warned the publication before it ran the piece. Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg told Newsweek the magazine stood by its reporting, saying Hoover’s pre-publication responses were “cryptic” rather than a flat denial. Hoover has demanded a retraction.

What CAIFC Is

Regardless of which Chen Yuan signed the check, CAIFC itself is not a generic friendship society. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission described the organization as part of a People’s Liberation Army-linked united front network that targets foreign elites to shape political environments favorable to Beijing.

The House Select Committee on the CCP’s primer on the United Front describes the system as the Party’s mechanism for “co-opting sources of opposition” abroad. CAIFC is named in the foundational Hoover-published 2018 report China’s Influence and American Interests — co-authored by Hoover’s own senior fellows — as one of the front organizations through which Beijing pursues that work.

The Broader Pattern

The single disputed gift is not the only finding in the leaked file. According to the Stanford Review’s reporting, Stanford’s Section 117 disclosures also record:

• $254,000 from BOE in 2019

• $250,000 in Huawei-related contracts or gifts in 2019–2020

• $1.5 million from State Grid in 2019

• $1.1 million from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018

• $380,000 from CNPC across 2023–2026

• $3.9 million from JD.com from 2018–2021

• $4.75 million from the Guangdong Qitian Institute from 2019–2023

Each of these can be defended in isolation as legitimate scientific collaboration. None individually proves influence. Taken together they describe an entry pattern in which Chinese state-owned enterprises, party-linked academies, and tech firms appear repeatedly across Stanford’s energy, engineering, information-systems, and executive-education portfolios.

The Disclosure Gap

Section 117 answers one question: was the foreign money reported? The Department of Education’s latest data covers more than 8,300 transactions worth over $5.2 billion in 2025 alone — bringing total reported foreign funding since 1986 to $67.6 billion. The statute does not require universities to identify ultimate donors, intermediaries, restrictions, recipient labs, or the relationship of the funding to sensitive research. The Stanford story exists in that gap.

The university filed paperwork that named “Chen Yuan.” The paperwork could not, by itself, tell the Stanford Review or Hoover or the public which Chen Yuan it was, what restrictions came with the $3 million, which Hoover scholars or projects it touched, or whether the donor had any further ties to the United Front system Hoover itself has published landmark research about.

The Stakes

The Department of Education in 2026 opened a Section 117 investigation into UC Berkeley over its own foreign-funding disclosures. The Stanford Review whistleblower file now puts the same statutory framework — and Hoover, one of the country’s most prominent institutions studying authoritarian influence operations — squarely in front of the same regulators.

Hoover’s referral of the matter to the Department of Education ensures federal review will happen. Whether the donor on the disputed gift is the CAIFC chairman or another individual sharing his name, the leaked file establishes a separate, documented question: a U.S. elite research institution accepted millions of dollars from Chinese state-linked entities under a disclosure regime designed to be inspectable, but whose architecture made the most important questions about that money impossible to answer from the public record.

In May 2026, the Kremlin convened what it billed as an “anti-Munich” — an International Security Forum at a concert venue outside Moscow, drawing 4,500 invitees from 120 countries. The event was orchestrated by Russia’s Security Council and its Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, and headlined by SVR chief Sergey Naryshkin. But as Russian investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov revealed in a Center for European Policy Analysis report, the most telling detail was how Moscow recruited its guest list.

Alongside its embassies and state media, the Kremlin once again leaned on a third, older pillar: the Russian Orthodox Church. Western counterintelligence agencies — in Stockholm, Helsinki, Sofia, and Washington — have spent the past three years documenting that this is not a metaphor. The Moscow Patriarchate, they say, is operating as a deployed asset of Russian intelligence on Western soil, and the targets include American clergy, NATO infrastructure, and the broader Christian community of the West.

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The FBI’s warning to American parishes

In the spring of 2023, the FBI quietly warned Russian and Greek Orthodox parishes across the United States that Russian intelligence was using their churches as a recruitment platform. The warning centered on Dmitry Petrovsky, a senior official in the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (DECR). When U.S. Customs and Border Protection searched Petrovsky’s laptop on entry in 2021, agents recovered detailed dossiers on prominent American Orthodox priests — including biographical information on their family members, which the FBI assessed could be used for blackmail.

One file, marked “confidential,” laid out the operational protocol: “It is possible to involve employees of the Russian Orthodox Church in operational activities exclusively with the direct sanction of the patriarch.” The document explicitly referenced cooperation between the church and the SVR, GRU, and FSB. There are more than 2,000 Orthodox Christian parishes in the United States.

The church beside the NATO airport

In Sweden, the pattern is even starker. The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God opened in November 2023 — built just 300 meters from Stockholm-Västerås Airport, which became a NATO strategic hub after Sweden’s accession. Its 22-meter spire violated a 10-meter local zoning cap imposed because of the airport’s proximity. Construction was financed by a foundation run by Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation. A Westinghouse nuclear fuel assembly plant sits roughly four kilometers away.

Two weeks after consecration, Sweden’s domestic security agency SAPO issued a public warning that the Moscow Patriarchate in Sweden was being used “as a platform for intelligence-gathering and other activities threatening national security.” Swedish reporters identified one of the diplomats who attended the consecration, Vladimir Lyapin, as a Russian intelligence officer. The parish priest, Pavel Makarenko — convicted in 2021 of aggravated accounting fraud as CEO of a Russian-owned shell firm — had reportedly been awarded a medal for “good service” by the SVR. The city of Västerås is now weighing expropriation of the property.

A continent-wide pattern

Sweden is not an outlier. Finland shut down the Russian Orthodox church in Turku in August 2022 — it sat next to the Pansio naval base, home of the Finnish coastal fleet. In September 2023, Bulgarian authorities expelled Archimandrite Vasian, head of the ROC in the country, on national-security grounds; he is also persona non grata in North Macedonia.

Open-source researchers geolocated Russian churches in Trondheim, Norway — within roughly one kilometer of the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy and a submarine bunker.

The man at the top was KGB

The institutional history makes the current operations less surprising. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the entire Russian Orthodox Church, served as a KGB officer under the codename “Mikhailov” during his posting at the World Council of Churches in Geneva beginning in 1971, according to declassified Swiss federal police records reported by two Swiss newspapers and corroborated by Soviet archive material. The Foreign Policy Research Institute concluded that the Soviet-era system in which the patriarchate operated as a subordinate of state security “endured” after 1991.

On March 27, 2024, the Moscow Patriarchate adopted an official doctrine declaring Russia’s war in Ukraine a “holy war” against “the collective West” — formally codifying the church as an instrument of state confrontation with Western democracies.

What it means for the West

The picture that emerges from CEPA, the FBI, SAPO, and counterintelligence services across NATO is consistent: the Russian Orthodox Church abroad is not a passive religious body that the Kremlin occasionally exploits. It is, by its own internal protocols, a deployable intelligence platform — one that has been used to surveil American clergy, position assets next to NATO airfields and nuclear facilities, and project Kremlin influence into Christian communities from Stockholm to Sofia to suburban America.

With Patriarch Kirill having now declared the West a metaphysical enemy, the question facing Washington and its allies is no longer whether the church is a foreign-influence vehicle. It is what to do about the more than 2,000 parishes already operating inside the United States.

A May 2026 report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom documents how China enacted three laws in less than one year that together constitute “an escalation in the CCP’s systematic, ongoing, and egregious efforts to make all religion and belief throughout China entirely subservient to CCP ideology.”

The laws—revisions to the Public Security Administration Punishments Law (June 2025), an Online Code of Conduct for Religious Professionals (September 2025), and the Ethnic Unity and Progress Law (March 2026) — create what USCIRF characterizes as a legal architecture enabling “forced ethnoreligious assimilation nationwide by all levels of government — including the military.” The enforcement mechanism is already operational: at 2:00 a.m. on October 12, 2025, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri and 27 other leaders of Zion Church were arrested across multiple provinces, just 30 days after the internet code took effect.

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The USCIRF Finding: Three Laws, One System

The USCIRF report identifies the June 2025 Public Security Administration Law as the first time China included “illegal religious activities” within the scope of administrative punishments. Article 31, effective January 1, 2026, permits detention of 10 to 15 days and fines up to 2,000 RMB for organizing or inciting “illegal religious activities.” USCIRF notes this “in effect targets unregistered religious groups, such as Protestant house churches—thereby placing an additional layer of pressure on them to register and subject themselves to the authorities’ efforts to compel them to promote CCP ideology.”

The September 2025 Online Code restricted online religious activity exclusively to organizations holding government licenses. Article 13 banned livestreams, WeChat groups, and online services for unlicensed groups. Article 8 codified transnational repression, stating that “religious professionals must not collude with foreign forces through the internet.”

The March 2026 Ethnic Unity and Progress Law, adopted March 12 and effective July 1, drew particular alarm from USCIRF for its scope. Eight UN Special Rapporteurs sent a formal letter April 16, 2026, expressing concern that the law violates multiple international treaties. USCIRF highlights Article 46 as explicitly requiring religious groups to “persist in the direction of Sinicization” and Article 63 as codifying extraterritorial pursuit of critics.

Case Study: Pastor Jin and the 30-Day Timeline

USCIRF cites Pastor Ezra Jin’s arrest as direct evidence that “Chinese authorities invoked this new code” for enforcement. On October 10, 2025, police arrested Jin and 27 other Zion Church leaders across Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and six other cities for “illegal use of information networks”— one month after the code’s release.

The arrest violated Article 17 of the code itself, which stipulates violators should receive warnings before penalties. USCIRF notes that “authorities gave no such warning to Pastor Jin or other members of the Zion Church before their detention.” Eighteen remain formally arrested under Criminal Law Article 287-1, facing potential sentences up to three years.

Zion Church had survived previous persecution. In 2018, the church refused government demands to install 23 facial recognition cameras. Police seized the building on September 9, 2018. The church adapted through hybrid online-offline meetings, eventually reaching 5,000 members in 40 cities. The September 2025 code eliminated that survival strategy. Grace Jin Drexel testified before USCIRF in January 2026 that detainees are forced to sleep on floor mats, subjected to sleep deprivation, and denied adequate medical care despite serious health conditions.

From Regional Atrocities to National Policy

USCIRF emphasizes that the Ethnic Unity Law “marks a clear departure from past pretenses to provide for regional ‘autonomy’” by nationalizing practices previously confined to borderlands. Tibet enacted ethnic unity regulations in 2020; Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia followed in 2021. Carl Minzner at the Council on Foreign Relations describes this trajectory as originating with the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference.

Article 15 mandates Mandarin from preschool forward. USCIRF reports that “long prior to this law, the CCP had overseen the removal of millions of Tibetan Buddhist and Uyghur children from their homes to place them in boarding schools.” UN experts warned in February 2023 that approximately one million Tibetan children were affected by forced assimilation through residential schools. In Xinjiang, boarding enrollment increased by 382,000 between 2017 and 2019.

Article 20 prohibits parents from instilling ideas “not conducive to improving ethnic unity” in minors. USCIRF observes this “denies them the right to foster religious upbringing in their own homes and impart traditions to their own children.” Article 48 potentially legitimizes “Chinese military operations against ethnoreligious groups and religious organizations that are not in full compliance with CCP ideology.”

The Vulnerable Population

China has 44 million Christians registered in state-approved churches. “Tens of millions” more are estimated to worship in illegal house churches. The three-law system creates escalating enforcement: administrative punishment (10-15 days detention), criminal prosecution (up to 3 years), and systematic pressure to register and submit to state ideology.

Transnational Reach

Article 63 permits pursuing “legal responsibility” against individuals “outside the mainland territory” who “undermine ethnic unity.” USCIRF notes this “codifies and further entrenches the Chinese government’s already extensive engagement in transnational repression.”

Freedom House describes China as conducting “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Safeguard Defenders documented Operation Fox Hunt in more than 50 countries. The Department of Justice convicted a Fox Hunt leader in March 2025. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists interviewed more than 100 victims in 23 countries in 2025. What was covert is now explicit statutory authority.

What happened to Uyghurs and Tibetans is now the codified framework for 1.4 billion people. Pastor Jin’s arrest 30 days after the internet code demonstrates operational readiness. The question is no longer whether China will enforce these laws. The question is whether the international community will respond before the Xinjiang model becomes the China model — for everyone.

From May 26-29, Russia will host the first International Security Forum under the auspices of its Security Council — an event that transcends typical defense exhibitions to establish a comprehensive worldview casting the West as an existential threat. With delegations from over 180 countries and 26 international organizations invited, the forum represents Moscow’s most ambitious attempt yet to formalize an anti-Western ideological framework and export it to partners across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The forum’s program reveals a striking inversion of Western security narratives. Where Washington and Brussels emphasize democratic resilience and counter-disinformation, Moscow positions itself as defender of sovereignty against covert interference. A panel titled “Disinformation and Manipulation as Tools of the West’s Hybrid War against the Global Majority for Maintaining Hegemony” frames information warfare as a Western weapon, while another session on “Countering Neocolonialism as a Priority for Ensuring Security of the Global Majority Countries” elevates anti-colonial rhetoric to national security priority. The term “Global Majority,” appearing throughout the program, signals deliberate ideological alignment with the Global South against what Russia characterizes as Western hegemony.

Civil Society as Security Threat

A dedicated round table titled “NGOs as a Tool for Undermining National Security” reframes civil society, a cornerstone of Western foreign policy, as an instrument of subversion. This session sits alongside discussions of terrorism, hybrid warfare, and weapons systems, effectively placing humanitarian organizations, watchdog groups, and development actors in the same conceptual category as security threats. The message to partners in Africa and Asia is unmistakable: sovereignty requires insulation from independent actors of any kind.

The investigative collective All Eyes on Wagner has documented how Russia’s SVR-controlled organization Africa Politology has lobbied for foreign-agent laws in the Sahel and Central African Republic, with playbooks that include suppression of media and civil society voices. In the CAR, Wagner Group operatives have arrested staff from humanitarian organizations, subjecting them to hostile campaigns.

Ukraine and the Neo-Nazi Narrative

The forum places Ukraine at the center of its ideological architecture. Two sessions explicitly address “Terrorist Methods of the Kyiv regime on the Background of the Spread of neo-Nazism in Ukraine” and “War Crimes of the Kyiv regime: Recording and Systematization.” These panels are framed not as debatable interpretations but as established facts, reinforced by exhibitions featuring films from Russia Today’s documentary section and photographs from conflict zones. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will present an exhibition specifically on “War Crimes of the Kyiv regime,” suggesting the forum aims less at dialogue than at codifying a singular interpretation for international allies.

This narrative has echoed in Russian diplomatic statements, with Foreign Ministry declarations describing the “Kiev regime” as demonstrating “human-hating neo-Nazi nature” following terrorist attacks. By presenting these characterizations alongside legitimate security discussions, the forum seeks to normalize and internationalize Moscow’s framing of the conflict.

The Russian Apparatus on Display

The forum brings together a comprehensive array of Russian state agencies rarely assembled in one venue. Participating organizations include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, Federal Security Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, EMERCOM (Emergency Situations Ministry), and Rossotrudnichestvo—the cultural agency that opens Russian cultural centers abroad and operates as a soft power arm of Russian influence.

State corporations Rostec, Rosatom, and Roscosmos will showcase defense technologies, while Rosoboronexport—Russia’s state arms export agency—will present “Russian products for the protection of the population, installations, and land.” The Patriot Park will host exhibitions of “advanced Russian weapon systems and captured equipment,” turning portions of the forum into a weapons showcase for potential buyers.

Global South Outreach

The forum explicitly targets countries outside the traditional Western alliance. Invitations have been extended to “150+ countries of the Global South and East, the CIS, CSTO, EAEU, SCO,” with bilateral and multilateral meetings planned including Russia-Central Asia sessions and Russia-ASEAN events. The forum will operate in eight languages — Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Serbian, English, French, and Spanish — with simultaneous translation, signaling serious investment in accessibility for diverse delegations.

Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, who chairs the forum, has indicated that topics were chosen “focusing on the opinions shared by countries of the Global South,” suggesting Moscow has tailored the agenda to resonate with grievances about Western intervention and neo-colonial practices. TV BRICS International Media Network—a Russia-backed media organization with partners including state-affiliated outlets CGTN, Xinhua, and China Radio International, serves as the forum’s international media partner.

The speaker and guest lists for the event have not yet been made public.

A September 2025 trip by American, British, and Canadian conservative influencers to Moldova and Moscow was absorbed into a Russian information operation targeting Moldova’s parliamentary elections, according to an investigation published this week by Alliance4Europe and VSquare.

The delegation — led by Charles Bausman, founder of the pro-Kremlin outlet Russia Insider — visited Moldova from September 14-16, then traveled to Moscow through September 23. Within days, their statements appeared in “Salt and Light,” a newspaper distributed across Moldova that authorities later identified as part of “Operation Matushka,” a persistent Russian disinformation campaign.

The report does not claim the influencers knowingly participated in election interference. But the timing and amplification pattern raise questions about how religious ultra-conservatives can be instrumentalized, wittingly or not, in foreign influence operations.

The mechanics of amplification

Moldovan police raided an unauthorized printing facility on September 23, confiscating over 200,000 copies of newspapers including Salt and Light’s Romanian and Russian editions. The publications contained “propagandistic content” designed to “destabilize the information space and incite on religious grounds,” according to the Chișinău Police Department’s investigation officer.

Salt and Light newspapers included QR codes linking to Telegram and Facebook accounts that initially shared religious content such as parish activities, quizzes and then shifted toward election messaging. One post described how the foreign bloggers were “shocked by certain reports of violations of believers’ rights and plan to bring them to the attention of a broad international audience.”

The Russian Orthodox Church acknowledged facilitating the Moscow segment through its Department for External Church Relations. A press release on the church’s website confirmed the delegation met with “representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, state authorities, and public associations” and visited religious sites including the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius.

Who made the trip

The delegation included John-Henry Westen, CEO of LifeSiteNews, which joined the Pentagon press corps in October 2025 after major outlets withdrew over new access restrictions. Westen has appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and attended a “Catholic Prayer for Trump” gala at Mar-a-Lago in 2025.

James Delingpole, former editor of Breitbart London and columnist for The Telegraph and The Spectator, also participated. Conrad Franz, co-host of the World War Now podcast who previously worked for religious-right podcaster Steve Turley, discussed the trip on the Counterflow podcast, stating: “The Orthodox Church in Moldova, which is canonically under the Moscow patriarchate, they are being heavily persecuted by the state there.”

Bausman himself fled to Russia after attending the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, leaving behind nearly $1 million in U.S. property, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has since appeared as a commentator on Tsargrad TV, owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.

The sanctions connection

The investigation identified multiple links between delegation members and sanctioned Russian figures. Westen served on the CitizenGo Board of Trustees alongside Alexey Komov, a close associate of Malofeev who represents the World Congress of Families in Russia. Leaked emails suggest Bausman sought funding for Russia Insider from Malofeev through Komov, though Malofeev has denied financial connections.

Westen’s name appeared on a 2014 list of foreign participants in the Moscow Large Families Forum co-sponsored by Malofeev. According to leaked documents, his trip was partially funded by the Andrew the First-Called Foundation, led by sanctioned Russian oligarch Vladimir Yakunin.

The European Commission’s 2024 report on Moldova found that “religious freedom is generally respected” and identified no evidence of violations—contradicting the delegation’s central claim.

What came next

Moldova’s September 28 elections delivered the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity a single-party majority with 50.2% of the vote. But the election occurred amid extensive interference: Moldovan authorities reported that tens of millions of dollars flowed from Russian bank Promsvyazbank to approximately 138,000 individuals — roughly 10% of the active electorate.

Operation Matushka, identified by EU DisinfoLab as connected to the larger Doppelgänger campaign run by sanctioned Russian companies Struktura and Social Design Agency, specializes in creating fake content that impersonates trusted sources. The operation has targeted 80 organizations across 10 countries and 10 languages, with activity intensifying around European elections.

After the Moscow visit, LifeSiteNews published an article describing Russia as “the leader of an ideological revolution” while “the West is sinking deeper into a spiritual crisis.” Westen gave an interview to SPAS TV, a Russian Orthodox Church-owned station sanctioned for spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda, which LifeSiteNews TV later promoted.

The pattern underneath

The case illustrates a recurring vulnerability: how genuine religious conviction can be channeled into geopolitical messaging without explicit coordination. The delegation members appear to have sincerely believed they were documenting religious persecution. The Russian Orthodox Church provided logistical support and amplification. Local networks then weaponized the resulting content in a coordinated information campaign.

None of the delegation members responded to requests for comment from investigators.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute notes that the Russian Orthodox Church “has become a central pillar of the Kremlin’s political and informational warfare strategy, shaping narratives by fusing spirituality with nationalism.” The Moldova operation demonstrates how this fusion operates across borders—turning American conservative media figures into inadvertent amplifiers of Kremlin messaging, whether or not they understand their role in the mechanism.

A new report documents an unprecedented surge in state executions around the same period Iran killed thousands of protesters in the streets. Together, they reveal the hydraulic logic of authoritarian violence.

In January 2026, security forces in Iran killed thousands of people in the streets during nationwide protests. The exact number remains contested- the government admits to 3,117 deaths, medical networks estimate over 30,000, while Opposition Media, Iran International Cited leaked documents suggesting a death toll exceeding 36,500. . Eyewitnesses described bodies transported in ice-cream trucks, mass burials in graveyards, and forensic facilities so overwhelmed they turned corpses away. The Iranian government shut down the internet on January 8th to conceal the scale of the killing.

What received far less attention is what happened quietly, behind prison walls, throughout the entire preceding year.

According to data compiled by Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) and ECPM, Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025- a 68% increase over 2024 and the highest annual total recorded since 1989. That’s an average of four to five executions every single day, all year long. And critically: 93% of these executions were never publicly announced. Only 113 of the 1,639 killings were acknowledged by official sources.

I’ve been trying to understand how these two phenomena, the street massacres and the hidden execution surge, fit together in a deeper way. The answer reveals something important about how regimes in crisis deploy violence: not randomly, but hydraulically, with different types of killing serving distinct strategic functions.

The Quiet Machine

The execution data shows extraordinary precision in who gets killed behind closed doors. Nearly half of those executed in 2025, 795 people, were convicted of drug-related offenses. Another 747 died under qisas laws (retribution-in-kind for murder). Security-related charges accounted for 57 executions: protesters, political prisoners, accused spies, and one person convicted of financial corruption.

But these legal categories obscure the pattern. Iran’s execution apparatus systematically targets the economically marginal and ethnically minoritized. The Baluch people represent somewhere between 2-6% of Iran’s population but accounted for 9% of all executions in 2025. Afghan nationals- foreign workers with minimal legal protection- made up 84 executions, compared to just 16 in 2022.

The drug cases are especially revealing. Of 795 people executed for drug offenses, authorities publicly announced exactly three. The rest died in secret. Many were subsistence smugglers working the mountainous borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, the kind of dangerous, poorly-paid labor people take when they have no alternatives. The report documents brothers Gholamhossein and Ebrahim Khalilifar, executed March 1st. Ahmad Ali Mehripour, killed August 30th. Dozens more names, each representing someone whose poverty made them expendable.

What doesn’t make sense until you look at the procedural details: these weren’t careful judicial processes that happened to result in death sentences. The Revolutionary Courts- which handle national security cases and are staffed by ideologically vetted judges- issued 52% of the death sentences carried out in 2025. These courts routinely rely on confessions extracted under torture, “knowledge of the judge” (elm-e-qazi), or “sworn oaths” (qassameh) rather than material evidence. Due process violations occur not as exceptions but as standard practice, often violating even the Islamic Republic’s own laws.

Two Machines, Different Functions

Here’s the pattern that emerges when you place the street violence and prison executions side by side: the street killings are spectacular, concentrated, and directed at active resistance. The prison executions are hidden, continuous, and directed at structurally vulnerable populations.

January 2026’s massacre served an immediate suppression function. Security forces positioned on rooftops fired rifles at protesters’ heads and torsos. Videos verified by Amnesty International show systematic targeting of crowds. Medical staff reported injuries designed to maim and kill—close-range gunshots, stab wounds to eyes and genitals. One doctor, part of an informal network of 80 medical professionals who documented the violence, told The Guardian: “I am on the verge of a psychological collapse. They’ve mass murdered people. No one can imagine… I saw just blood, blood and blood.”

The executions throughout 2025 served a different purpose: maintaining baseline fear within marginalized communities, demonstrating the state’s continued capacity to kill selectively, and clearing prisons of people the regime considers socially disposable. The secrecy matters—these deaths don’t generate international headlines, but they absolutely register within families, neighborhoods, and ethnic communities who understand the targeting isn’t random.

This explains something otherwise puzzling: why execution rates would increase by 68% during a year when the regime faced mounting crises including economic collapse, renewed protests, and regional military pressure. From a strictly rational calculus, you’d expect a government under siege to minimize controversial actions. Instead, Iran averaged nearly five executions per day.

The logic becomes clearer when you understand these as complementary tools. Street massacres require international bandwidth to conceal, hence the internet shutdown, the mass burials, the refrigerated trucks moving corpses at night. You can only deploy that level of spectacular violence occasionally. Prison executions, by contrast, happen continuously with minimal international attention, especially when 93% aren’t announced. They maintain steady-state terror between the spectacular interventions.

Resistance from Inside

The most surprising element in the report is the scale of internal resistance to executions, even during this period of extreme repression. A movement called “No Death Penalty Tuesdays,” prisoners staging weekly hunger strikes on the day transfers to solitary for execution typically occur, has spread from a single prison to 56 facilities nationwide.

In October 2025, more than 1,500 prisoners on death row for drug offenses in Ghezelhesar Prison staged a six-day strike. Some sewed their mouths shut. They successfully forced authorities to temporarily halt drug-related executions at that facility. This happened while the regime was preparing for the January crackdown. While security forces planned street massacres, prisoners were organizing collective resistance behind walls.

There’s also the “forgiveness movement.” Under Sharia law, families of murder victims can choose forgiveness or accept diya (blood money) instead of execution. In 2025, IHRNGO documented 566 cases where families chose forgiveness. The most prominent involved Goli Kouhkan, a Baluch woman who had been a child bride. A sustained campaign raised 80,000 euros for blood money, and plaintiffs agreed to forgo execution.

But 2025 marked a watershed: for the first time in 11 years, the number of qisas executions (747) exceeded forgiveness cases. The machinery accelerated faster than the resistance could counter it.

What This Means for Transitions

The report arrives at a genuinely uncertain moment. The Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy among most Iranians and faces external military pressure. IHRNGO Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam frames the stakes clearly: if the regime survives, mass executions will likely intensify as authorities reassert control. If political change occurs, the abolition of the death penalty must be central to any transition.

This isn’t abstract moralizing. The report includes a foreword by Nasrin Sotoudeh, one of Iran’s most prominent human rights lawyers, drawing direct parallels to executions following the 1979 revolution. Officials from the previous regime were killed without fair trials in what was presented as revolutionary justice. “The cycle of violence did not end,” Sotoudeh writes, “and the execution machine went on to claim the lives of others, including those who had contributed to the revolution’s victory.”

On April 1st, 2026, three weeks after writing that foreword, Sotoudeh was arrested at her home. As of this writing, she remains held incommunicado.

The execution of protesters resumed on March 19th with three people arrested during January protests. In the following days, authorities killed at least ten more: four protesters and six political prisoners from the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the most disproportionately represented political group on death row. Hundreds of detained protesters remain at risk.

Here’s what the international response has been: muted. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime maintains cooperation with Iranian drug-control agencies despite 795 people being executed for drug offenses- a 58% increase over 2024. This cooperation provides political legitimacy to institutions directly involved in the killings. A UN Fact-Finding Mission expert noted that if these executions “form part of a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population, as a matter of policy, then those responsible—including the judges who impose capital punishment—may be held accountable for crimes against humanity.”

Iran has now demonstrated two functioning death machines: one spectacular and concentrated for moments of acute threat, one hidden and continuous for baseline control. The street massacres received international attention because they couldn’t be fully concealed despite the internet shutdown. The 1,639 executions throughout 2025 happened largely unnoticed, which was precisely the point.

The prisoners organizing hunger strikes understand something the international community apparently doesn’t: these two systems work together. You can’t address one without addressing the other. Breaking the cycle requires more than stopping street violence during protests. It requires dismantling the entire infrastructure of state killing—the one everyone sees and the one almost nobody notices.

Whether anyone is prepared to make that demand is another question entirely.

When oil traders watch shipping lanes, they measure risk in nautical miles. The narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz—21 miles across—sounds manageable until the actual shipping lanes in each direction are just two miles wide, separated by a two-mile buffer zone. That’s 1.2 miles of navigable water carrying 20% of the world’s oil. A single explosive mine floating in the wrong place doesn’t just threaten one tanker; it threatens the entire flow.

Iran demonstrated this leverage last week when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to “set ablaze” any vessel using the strait. Within hours, hundreds of tankers came to a halt. Oil prices spiked from $69 to $119 per barrel in three days—the fastest surge since the 1970s oil shocks—before Trump’s hints of de-escalation sent them tumbling back to $90. The price spike matters, but the speed matters more: a credible threat to a 1.2-mile corridor can disrupt global energy markets faster than any policy response can contain it.

This is why arguments for reducing Middle Eastern engagement consistently stumble over basic arithmetic. Alternative routes keep appearing in policy briefs as theoretical solutions, yet the numbers reveal why they cannot substitute for an open Hormuz. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline can carry 5 million barrels per day, and the UAE’s Fujairah pipeline adds another 1.8 million. Against Hormuz’s current 20 million barrels daily—with Saudi Arabia alone exporting 5.5 million barrels through the strait—these alternatives represent supplemental capacity, not replacement infrastructure. Operating both pipelines at maximum capacity wouldn’t cover a single week of normal Hormuz traffic.

The gap between theory and reality widens further under operational scrutiny. The UAE recently upgraded refineries to process more crude domestically, meaning its bypass pipeline now runs near capacity during normal operations. Saudi Arabia increased use of its East-West route last year to circumvent Red Sea disruptions near Bab al-Mandeb. The “slack capacity” that appears in strategic assessments has already been absorbed. Building new pipelines requires 18 months minimum at costs exceeding hundreds of millions—timescales that make them irrelevant to crisis response and barely adequate for long-term hedging.

Storage constraints accelerate the cascade. Qatar’s energy minister warned that if Hormuz remains closed, Gulf producers will reach storage capacity within weeks, forcing oilfield shutdowns. Restarting a major field after shutdown takes weeks or months, not days. The temporary becomes prolonged through mechanical necessity, not political choice. A three-week closure could mean three-month supply disruptions regardless of diplomatic breakthroughs.

This physical reality explains why “letting the region sort itself out” proposals collapse under examination. When 84% of Hormuz oil flows to Asian markets—with China importing 5.4 million barrels daily through the strait—American withdrawal wouldn’t reduce U.S. exposure to price shocks. It would simply transfer control over those shocks to actors with different interests. China’s response illustrates what states do when facing irreplaceable chokepoints they cannot control: build 1.2 billion barrels of strategic stockpiles representing three to four months of buffer capacity. Stockpiling absorbs short-term disruption; it doesn’t eliminate structural vulnerability.

The United States released 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last week, dropping reserves to their lowest level since 1982. Even with reduced Gulf imports—the U.S. imported just 0.5 million barrels daily from Persian Gulf producers in 2024, only 2% of consumption—price shocks from Hormuz disruptions hit American consumers as hard as Asian ones. Oil trades globally; regional isolation doesn’t insulate from global price movements. The reserve release demonstrates this constraint: distance from physical dependence doesn’t create distance from economic exposure.

Geography determines the available moves. The Strait of Malacca carries slightly more oil—23.2 million barrels daily—but connects to alternative routes through the Sunda and Lombok straits. Hormuz has no such redundancy. Pipeline capacity exists but cannot scale to need. Some version of naval presence maintaining open shipping lanes isn’t a preference reflecting ideology; it’s a response to the fact that the global economy runs on diesel, jet fuel, and petrochemicals that flow through corridors narrow enough to close with tactical weapons.

The question isn’t whether this dependency is wise—that’s a debate for timescales measured in decades of infrastructure investment. The question is what happens when the only actor positioned to keep those corridors open decides the cost isn’t worth it. The answer arrived last week in the form of $50 price swings across three days.

When U.S. and Israeli warplanes began Operation Epic Fury on Saturday morning, they struck nuclear facilities in Tehran and Isfahan. But just as many bombs fell on missile production sites and launch facilities scattered across Iran. To understand why, you need a map and a compass.

The 1,200-Mile Circle

Draw a 1,200-mile radius from Iran’s missile bases. Inside that circle sits almost everything that matters in the Middle East: 40,000 U.S. troops spread across bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, and Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure at Ras Tanura and Abqaiq. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global oil passes daily. Dubai’s financial district. Every major energy chokepoint between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

Iran doesn’t need nuclear weapons to hold these targets at risk. It already does, with the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 missiles, depending on whose count you trust. Most are short- and medium-range systems: Shahab-3s, Sejjils, Qadr missiles with ranges between 500 and 1,200 miles. They can’t reach Washington or even Europe. They don’t need to.

America’s Bases in the Crosshairs

Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar sits 615 miles from Iranian launch sites. It houses 10,000 American troops and serves as forward headquarters for U.S. Central Command, which is the nerve center for all American military operations in the region. When Iran retaliated for Epic Fury on Saturday afternoon, one of its first targets was Al Udeid. Qatari missile defenses intercepted the strike, but the message was clear: Iran can reach the bases that launch strikes against it.

Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, sits 500 miles away. Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base, a staging ground for combat operations: 400 miles. The UAE’s Al Dhafra Air Base, which houses advanced fighter squadrons: 700 miles. Iranian missiles hit targets in at least five countries within hours of Epic Fury’s first wave. Not because Iran’s missile technology is sophisticated—many of these systems are liquid-fueled and take hours to prepare, making them vulnerable to preemptive strikes—but because the geography is unforgiving.

This explains why Operation Epic Fury prioritized missile infrastructure alongside nuclear sites. When Pentagon planners talk about Iran’s “threat radius,” they’re not being abstract. They mean the physical distance Iranian projectiles can travel, overlaid on the map of American commitments. It’s why Gulf states that host U.S. bases now face Iranian retaliation, why Saudi Arabia and the UAE (both of which allowed Epic Fury aircraft to use their airspace) issued statements about defending their territories with “all necessary measures.”

The Targets That Couldn’t Be Hit

The radius also explains decisions about what didn’t get hit. Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, on the southern coast, survived Epic Fury intact. Not because it’s unimportant, but because Russian technicians operate it, and striking the reactor means killing Russians and creating radiological fallout that would drift across the Gulf. Every target inside that 1,200-mile circle matters to someone: American troops, Saudi oil infrastructure, Emirati ports. The reactor sits squarely in the middle of that circle, which makes it effectively untouchable despite being nuclear.

Israel understands this geography intimately. Tel Aviv sits roughly 1,000 miles from Iran’s western launch sites—just within range of Iran’s Shahab-3 and Sejjil-2 missiles. During Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Saturday, Israeli and U.S. missile defenses intercepted dozens of ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli cities. The interception worked, but the attempt demonstrated what Iranian military planners have known for years: they don’t need nuclear warheads to threaten Israel. Conventional explosives on ballistic missiles, launched in sufficient numbers, create their own form of deterrence.

The Geometry of Deterrence

This is why the phrase “Iranian nuclear capability” misses half the strategic picture. Yes, Iran was enriching uranium to 60 percent, a short technical step from weapons-grade material. Yes, dismantling that program was Operation Epic Fury’s stated objective. But the missiles matter just as much, perhaps more. A nuclear Iran with no delivery systems is a regional problem. A non-nuclear Iran with 2,000 ballistic missiles that can hit every U.S. base and oil facility in the Middle East is also a regional problem—just a different one.

The map explains why negotiations collapsed in Geneva three weeks ago, why Epic Fury targeted missile sites as aggressively as enrichment facilities, why Gulf states that allowed overflight are now facing retaliation, and why this conflict won’t end with destroyed centrifuges. Draw that 1,200-mile circle. Everything inside it is connected to everything else by Iranian missile range. That’s not speculation or analysis. That’s geometry.