New post-Brexit controls, due in July, are postponed amid rising inflation and supply chain disruption.

When Benito Mussolini founded, on March 23, 1919, the organization that would become the National Fascist Party, Italy’s top newspaper relegated the news to a blurb, roughly the same space devoted to the theft of 64 cases of soap. That’s where Antonio Scurati’s novel M: Son of the Century starts. It ends on January 3, 1925, the date commonly considered the beginning of Mussolini’s authoritarian reign, when he claimed responsibility for the murder of the Socialist lawmaker Giacomo Matteotti. By then, Il Duce had already been the prime minister of Italy for two years, and violent repression of the opposition was rampant, but it was the first time he owned up to it as the head of government, throwing off the mask. “If fascism has been a band of criminals, I am the leader of this criminal band,” he boasted to Parliament. The lawmakers cheered.

M: Son of the Century is the tale of how democracy can die to the sound of such thunderous applause. And, among its insights, it points to an unlikely enabler for Mussolini’s rise: the liberal establishment, the educated urban elite who assumed that they could control the rabble-rousing leader for their own ends.

The book is an ambitious exploration of the rise of fascism in Italy. It’s a self-styled “documentary novel,” a phrase used in a note in the original Italian edition to stress that all characters and events are based on historical documentation. And while this is largely true of Scurati’s technique, the book’s most interesting feature is the liberty he takes to venture into the mind of Mussolini himself.

The reader follows the titular M, experiencing from his perspective both his engineered grasp of power and the miscalculations of his opponents. Other members of Mussolini’s inner circle get close-ups as well, such as his lover and mentor Margherita Sarfatti and the party’s hitman Amerigo Dùmini. In these pages, the Fascisti transform from a group on the margins with slightly socialist leanings into the violent, long arm of an effort to squash the surging power of the left at a revolutionary moment in Europe. Much of the book covers the squadrismo agrario, the campaign of terror unleashed by Fascist militias against poor farmers trying to unionize.

[Read: An American authoritarian]

M: Son of the Century was a literary and political sensation in Italy, winning the country’s major book prize. Many readers viewed it as a cautionary tale about the nation’s current vulnerability to authoritarianism, especially because it came out in 2018, when the far right was on the rise (a sequel was published in 2020, a third and fourth volume are in the works, and, naturally, a TV adaptation will start filming next year). The critic Luca Mastrantonio called it a “literary inoculation” against “new populisms.”

For readers in the United States, the lessons will feel poignant as well. Translated into English by Anne Milano Appel, the book illustrates how a ruling class, embodied by Italy’s Liberal Party, was complicit in bringing Mussolini to power. It makes an interesting case study at a time when elites across the democratic world tend to think of themselves as a bulwark against populist, antidemocratic forces.

Scurati wrote his novel, he says, largely in response to the fading of a certain postwar consensus, one that perceived fascism as the ultimate evil. This shift has opened the gates to a nostalgic far right previously kept at bay, but it has also, ironically, allowed a novelist to explore the regime from within—which would have been nearly taboo decades ago—rather than from the viewpoint of its victims. “I wanted to do something to rebuild anti-fascism and its democratic principles on new foundations,” Scurati told me in a telephone interview. “I wanted the reader to have a strengthened repulsion of fascism, but at the end of the book, not at the beginning.”

This intent is evident from the novel’s structure, a mosaic of short chapters, each dedicated to a single historical event. Mussolini is depicted as a brute—at one point, he describes the prostitutes he often visits as “flesh and blood urinals”—and a ruthless tactician, devoid of any belief or ideology, but with a special talent for capitalizing on chaos: “We fire out ideas we do not have, then immediately sink back into silence.”

Scurati apportions guilt for Mussolini’s rise to a wide swath of Italy’s interwar society. The Socialists, the Catholics, the press, all appear here as democratic forces that were either too fainthearted or too shortsighted to stop Mussolini. But the shortcoming that shocks the most is that of the borghesia liberale, the liberal bourgeoisie, imbued with 19th-century ideals—a love of nation, individualism, and an economy free of government intervention. This ruling class had dominated the largely poor and illiterate country since its national unification as a modern state in 1861.

[Read: Americans are losing sight of what fascism means]

But, as historians have pointed out, the gradual introduction of universal male suffrage following World War I had scared this old guard, who felt threatened by the new spirit of populism, most pronounced on the left. Antonio Salandra, a senior Liberal politician who later supported Mussolini, put it succinctly: “Liberalism was overwhelmed by democracy.”

Even if Mussolini’s movement eventually gained traction with the popular masses, an electoral alliance with these elites allowed him into Parliament in the first place. When the Fascist Party first ran for general elections, in 1919, it didn’t get any seats. For the following elections, in 1921, it formed a joint list with the Liberal Union, obtaining 19 percent of the votes and placing third. By the time Mussolini launched his infamous March on Rome, in 1922, prompting the king to nominate him prime minister, his Liberal allies were mostly on board.

In Scurati’s account, this establishment is drawn into Mussolini’s arms by a combination of myopia and fear. On one hand, the bourgeoisie felt their world sinking; on the other, they deluded themselves into thinking that Mussolini would stop the wave of violence he had launched, if only they appeased him. Their plan, Scurati writes, was “to curb fascist lawlessness, considered a passing phenomenon, by tethering it to the constitutional arch.” But Mussolini had a “counterplan: to stir up disorder to show that only he can remedy it. Unleash the squadristi with one hand and then rein them in with the other.”

A commonly held view is that Liberals sided with Fascists to stop the meteoritic rise of Socialists. But that’s only part of the story. The 1919 elections, the first in which all adult males had the right to vote, marked the true beginning of public participation in Italian politics. It also resulted in the sudden ascent of another populist party, a Catholic movement called Popolari, that placed second. Unlike the Socialists, some of whom were admirers of the Communist revolution in Russia, the Popolari were hardly an insurrectionist force. And yet the Liberals felt almost equally threatened by them, both because they saw a religious party as a danger to the secular state and because it gave a voice to the lower classes in some rural areas.

Scurati is approaching this tension as a novelist—and a fictional interpretation is of course an exaggeration of historical reality, no matter how grounded by documentation—but seeing these events from Mussolini’s perspective gives him access to an essential truth about this crucial hinge moment: that the Liberals feared the people, and this fear could easily be taken advantage of. “Liberals sided with Mussolini because they saw fascism as an antidote against mass parties,” Giovanni Dessì, a professor of the history of political thought at Tor Vergata University of Rome, told me. “They were a political class of intellectual elites; the last thing they wanted was that the masses could start participating in the res publica.”

The borghesia liberale of 1920s Italy was, of course, very different from the liberal elites of contemporary democracies. But the group’s grievances echoed the lamentations that still resurface, in some circles, whenever popular elections produce what today’s elites consider nefarious outcomes. Think of the reactions to Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, which prompted commentators such as Andrew Sullivan to wonder, as the headline of his article on the latter’s campaign put it, whether “democracies end when they are too democratic,” and popularized theses like that of the philosopher Jason Brennan, who advocated granting more political representation to the knowledgeable (his book Against Democracy came out after Brexit but before Trump).

As Scurati dramatizes, Liberals thought they could use Mussolini to restore order but ended up fostering even more chaos. They thought they could incorporate Mussolini into the liberal order, but they found themselves incorporated into fascism instead. As Mussolini said in both real life and Scurati’s novel, “We will absorb liberals and liberalism because by the use of violence we have buried all previous methods.”

During a recent conference at the University of Chicago, former President Barack Obama reflected on the role disinformation played during his presidency. He was subject to flagrant lies—that he was born in Kenya, for instance, and put “death panels” in his health-care overhaul. But he served relatively early in the era of the smartphone and social-media, and he now believes that he underestimated the vulnerability of democracies to false information that is intended to mislead.

The premise that disinformation is among the biggest threats to democracy is now ubiquitous. The conference where Obama was interviewed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” was co-hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which is led by David Axelrod. Various other official events, initiatives, and reports addressing this issue are sponsored by the European Union, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the Brookings Institution, New America, the Center for American Progress, the Clinton Foundation, the Aspen Institute, The New York Times, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and beyond.

Seeing so many powerful institutions elevate roughly the same narrative raises concerns that what skeptics call “Big Disinformation” or “the Disinformation Industrial Complex” is trendy groupthink that could itself distort national priorities or perceptions of reality––and perhaps lead to infringements on free speech and freedom of the press. Abroad, disinformation is regularly invoked as a pretext to suppress dissent. “The concept is undefined and open to abuse,” says Irene Khan, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion, “and because the size and nature of the problem is contested in the absence of sufficient data and research, state responses have often been problematic and heavy handed and had a detrimental impact on human rights.”

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Disinformation is the story of our age]

Skeptical scrutiny of disinformation claims is prudent, especially as the work of disinformation initiatives inspires legislation—something that has already begun. Lies can threaten democracy. So can flawed efforts to combat them.

Still, the case for concern over disinformation is persuasive. Our constant connection to internet discourse and the platforms that mediate it are recent developments, as destabilizing in their own way as the rise of the printing press, television, and radio were in earlier eras.

Today’s ever-changing algorithms would probably sow confusion and polarization in civic debates even if we were all consuming exactly the same feeds. But everyone’s digital reality is unique. And foreign governments, scammers, and outrage-entrepreneurs are trying to harm, trick, or manipulate us, taking advantage of powerful new tools such as deepfakes and artificial intelligence as quickly as they advance. How can a free country respond at scale, with due epistemic modesty and without infringing on civil liberties or otherwise doing more harm than good?

Obama has some good instincts on the subject. Perhaps cognizant of how “disinformation” can be invoked to undermine civic deliberation, he prefaced his remarks by emphasizing his unwavering support for a free-speech culture. “I am close to a First Amendment absolutist,” he told Goldberg. “I believe in the idea of not just free speech, but also that you deal with bad speech with good speech, that the exceptions to that are very narrow.” What’s more, he said, he wants to avoid a society of manners where “we feel like our feelings are hurt” and that we will “wilt” because of the words of others. “I want us all, as citizens, to be in the habit of hearing things that we disagree with,” he said, “and be able to answer with our words.”

Then, reflecting an emerging consensus in the Democratic Party, he called for new laws to be imposed on digital-communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Their designs “monetize anger, resentment, conflict, division,” he alleged––yet are opaque, embedding nontransparent editorial choices that sometimes spark violence. He wants us all to understand those choices better. What algorithms do these platforms use? Are botnets gaming them? How do they microtarget ads?  “A democracy can rightly expect them to show us,” Obama insisted, noting, for example, our expectation that meat-processing plants open their doors to food-safety inspectors.

[Obama: I understand the threat of disinformation]

The most concerning downsides of anti-disinformation laws arguably disappear if they merely better inform us about the information flows we consume and refrain from infringing on the free exchange of ideas (including obvious misinformation, such as ivermectin being a near-perfect COVID-19 prophylactic). But if Big Disinformation is to benefit Western democracies and justify the resources being lavished on it, rather than merely avoiding the worst harms done in the name of fighting disinformation elsewhere in the world, it must clear additional hurdles, some of which may prove especially difficult in establishment institutions with ideological monocultures.

Here are four of those hurdles:

1. Define terms rigorously. The leaders of nonprofit organizations aimed at combatting disinformation and journalists assigned to cover a “disinformation beat” may be tempted, or perhaps unconsciously inclined, to treat more and more social ills as disinformation problems. The struggle against that distorting tendency requires a clear delineation between objections to falsehoods intended to mislead and various other objections. For example, if in 2024 a foreign government covertly buys YouTube ads telling undecided voters that Kamala Harris was born outside of the United States, that would fall under disinformation. But if the ads instead declared that Harris presided over efforts to block the release of a wrongly convicted man from prison on procedural grounds, that would not be disinformation––it is true, though one could characterize it as unlawful foreign interference.

Obama is right that social media monetizes anger while making a lot of users angry. But is “disinformation” the right label for that design? Most tweets that make me angry aren’t willful falsehoods. If all false Tweets were eliminated from the platform tomorrow, Twitter could still run an algorithm that optimizes engagement and therefore winds up elevating polarizing opinions, profiting off anger every bit as much in the bargain. Conversely, Twitter could presumably elevate factually false Tweets that make most people happy.

2. Study alternative accounts of what ails us. Many attendees at the Chicago conference blamed the January 6 insurrection on disinformation spread by tech companies. They noted that Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election spread partly through social media, helping to fuel the “Stop the Steal” rally. However, any president who shouted for months that an election was stolen could have rallied a similar number of allies to the capital–with or without modern social networks. The significant problem was electing an unpatriotic narcissist president, not bad algorithms spreading willful lies on social media (many people spreading false claims about Election 2020 really believed what they were saying). In light of Karen Stenner’s thesis in The Authoritarian Dynamic, it may even be that merely by spreading true but polarizing news and diverse perspectives, social media activates latent predispositions toward authoritarianism––an account of rising polarization and violence that has very different implications than a disinformation problem.

The more carefully one defines disinformation and analyzes it alongside other factors, the more unclear it becomes that fighting disinformation is a solution to a given ill. Better outcomes may require focusing elsewhere––for example, on fielding better anti-authoritarian candidates.

3. Earn back trust with a bigger tent. Disinformation seems to be a bigger problem on the right than on the left in the Trump era. The storming of the Capitol, dying from COVID because of lack of vaccination, and the Q phenomenon have no analogs of equal consequence on the left. Still, the left has significant disinformation and misinformation problems too, and any solution to disinformation will require cooperation beyond the center-left.

And many outside the center-left may be skeptical of Big Disinformation because of the dearth of ideological diversity at many anti-disinformation efforts. Diversity of thought would make these efforts less error prone, less vulnerable to ideological capture, and likelier to gain broader buy-in. Skepticism is further fueled by denigrating as “disinformation” assertions, like the New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop, that turn out to be true; supposed fact-checking efforts that fail to rigorously distinguish among facts, analysis, and opinion; and the invocation of subject-area expertise to disguise value judgments, as some in the public-health community did during the George Floyd protests.

The timing of Big Disinformation’s rise is also suggestive of double standards that narrow its appeal. Neither lies nor misinformation nor their distribution at scale is new, so it’s noteworthy that disinformation became public enemy number one not after (say) the absence of Ahmed Chalabi’s promised weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the CIA torture cover-up, lies about mass surveillance, or mortgage-backed securities dubiously rated AAA, but because of a series of populist challenges to establishment actors. Among the many factors that perhaps help to explain Trump’s election, Brexit, the January 6 insurrection, and vaccine hesitancy, centering “disinformation” implies liars and greed-motivated algorithms are to blame––so why reckon with establishment failures? If the people knew the truth, this framework implies, they’d have behaved differently! Even now that Big Disinformation is here, you don’t see its adherents talking much about years of deliberately misleading reports from Afghanistan, a flagrant undermining of democracy.

And additional efforts are needed to reassure Americans that the center-left isn’t trying to invoke disinformation in order to narrow democratic debate. Consider an exchange at the conference in Chicago, where a young woman posed this question to Senator Amy Klobuchar:

You introduced the bill today that would punish social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter for having health misinformation on their platforms. And I’m going to ask you, if I were to say that there are only two sexes, male and female, would that be considered misinformation that you think should be banned speech on social-media platforms?

Here is Klobuchar’s answer:

Okay, I’m not going to get into what misinformation––first of all, I think the bill you’re talking about is different than the one we’ve mostly been talking about, so I want to make that clear. We’ve been talking about the competition bill, but there is another bill that I have on vaccine misinformation––it is that specific––in a public-health crisis. You wonder why you get that specific? It’s because we’re trying to find carve-outs. That’s what I did with [U.S. Senator] Ben Ray Luján, that you can’t have immunity as a social-media company if you are broadcasting vaccine misinformation. There is another bill that Mark Warner did that is about just misinformation in general and hate speech and those kinds of things.

And I think one of the things Deval [Patrick] is getting at is that, a lot of times, the content fight—and Kara [Swisher] was getting at this—starts to dominate the world here, and one of the things I’ve been so heartened by is some of my Republican co-sponsors on this bill who have different views than me on some of the internet content issues have united that this is a good place to start, and have not turned it into some of these disputes about the internet. So that’s why we have focused on competition policy.

Are you clear on her position?

A more reassuring answer would have been, “No, of course I don’t think the government should punish a social-media company for a user arguing that there are only two sexes, male and female. We always want Americans to be freely able to discuss contested issues of our time.”

To overcome all this skepticism and earn broader trust, Big Disinformation should cultivate a reputation for free-speech values, nonpartisanship, and ideological neutrality––for example, caring as much about willful falsehoods spread in service of outcomes the establishment likes, such as staying in Afghanistan, as about outcomes they don’t, such as vaccine hesitancy. The attitude can’t be, Stop disinformation to stop Trump in 2024. It must be, Stop disinformation as an end in itself, as doing so will be better on the whole.

4. Rebuild a culture of critical thinking. Some Americans are taught to prioritize separating fact from appeals to emotion, looking for evidence to support claims, identifying errors in chains of reasoning, separating the truth of an argument from the identity of the person making it, and evaluating the plausibility of all arguments. Such habits of mind are helpful in staying resilient against disinformation, but competing approaches are more and more preferred. Other young people are acculturated to prioritize moral clarity and outrage at injustice, or “cultural competencies” such as “reading the room,” avoiding microaggressions, and centering the identity of the speaker, perhaps by applying privilege or intersectional analysis and deferring as “allies” to the purportedly marginalized.

The latter outlooks are not without insights, but they are not especially helpful in staying resilient against disinformation––especially if bad actors pose as marginalized people, which is not an imagined hypothetical but a documented Russian-troll tactic. “These malicious accounts tweeted a mixture of sentiments to cultivate followers and manipulate U.S. narratives about race, racial tensions and police conduct,” The Washington Post reported two summers ago. I’ve wondered if they are partly responsible for the fact that although a couple dozen unarmed Black men are killed by police in a given year, a majority of very liberal people believe that figure is 1,000 or more.

“The Russians built manipulative Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages, created pro-Muslim and pro-Christian groups, and let them expand via growth from real users,” Samuel Woolley, the author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth, told The Economist. “The goal was to divide and conquer as much as it was to dupe and convince.” Anyone engaged in a politics of identity-based solidarity, whether with “Black lives” or “Blue lives” or Christians or Muslims, was presumably likelier to be subject to that disinformation effort and to be vulnerable to it, as allies aren’t supposed to skeptically evaluate claims and demand evidence.

Americans should strive to treat everyone with dignity. To make the next generation more resilient to disinformation spread on social media and to short-circuit foreign and domestic attempts to leverage race and religion to divide us, we should also shift back toward prioritizing dispassionate analysis of statements, regardless of the speaker’s perceived identity, as a valuable habit of mind, not a microaggressive example of insensitivity.  

I’ll conclude with two examples of public-policy remedies proposed at the Chicago conference. First, one that I’d oppose: In the University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone’s telling, social media threatens democracy by feeding users whatever they want to see, reaffirming their views. He favors a law mandating that a site like Facebook or Twitter must serve randomly chosen or balanced content. “The fairness doctrine did that,” he recalled. “If the radio or TV station presents one side, it has to present the other … People moved relatively towards the middle because they heard both sides.” I mistrust any law that would require government or tech companies to categorize content by ideological viewpoint and decide what must be amplified and diminished.

The journalist ​​Cecilia Kang favors a contrasting approach to regulation––an approach that I am inclined to prefer as well. “One of the most promising things that I’ve seen,” she said in Chicago, is the disinformation conversation “move away from ‘Let’s regulate types of speech that are on platforms’ towards ‘Let’s look at the system, at the design of the technologies, and think about if there are ways to regulate how things get amplified very quickly, whether companies should disclose when things go viral and how they go viral, and give consumers control of that.’”

For example, Frances Haugen, the data engineer and Facebook whistleblower, argued in Chicago that merely forcing people to click on an article and read it before sharing it cuts down on the spread of misinformation.

[Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’]

Haugen went on to observe that many people believe the solution to bad speech is good speech and raised a problem with the “good speech” remedy: under the status quo, that is sometimes impossible. The practice of narrowcasting information via advertising––so that some information is seen exclusively by a very narrow group, such as one that shares a particular occupation––has become common. “Part of why my team got formed was they caught Russians targeting information at police officers,” she explained. If Facebook offers the ability to narrowcast content through advertising, she said, “it should have to publish what the most popular thousand posts are every week in each of those 600 segments in the United States,” so outsiders can evaluate what others are hearing and have the opportunity to counter misinformation or disinformation. “I believe that if we wish to have a democracy, we have to see what those targeted information streams are,” she continued, “because we’re living in divergent realities and we can’t even go in there and pay for ads to counter that speech if we don’t know the speech is taking place.”

A law forcing transparency to enable meeting bad speech with good would address actual disinformation, in an ideologically neutral manner, inviting critical thinking to override groupthink.

More intriguing still is the prospect of new platforms where design transparency is built in from the start––and preventing or identifying and undermining disinformation is a priority. Are there potential platforms of that sort that people would want to use as much as Facebook or Twitter? The nonprofit sector offers some precedent for hope. “Fund a wave of experimentation in building social networks that we govern, that we control, that are noncommercial, that are non-surveillant, and actually work to benefit us as individuals and citizens,” the media scholar Ethan Zuckerman said in Chicago. Perhaps Big Disinformation should attempt to create rather than to regulate.

In the aftermath of Brexit, the UK is grappling with a dwindling talent pool. A new visa program, aimed at recent graduates from the world’s top universities, aims to give British businesses access to an influx of skilled young workers.

What is the High Potential Individual visa?

The UK’s High Potential Individual (HPI) visa will be open to applicants beginning May 30. Introduced as part of a broader post-Brexit government strategy to make the country more globally competitive, the program offers visas to people who completed a degree from a qualifying university outside the UK within the last five years. It’s available to people of any nationality who are at least 18 years of age.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic warfare that followed have reopened the question of whether the dollar’s trade dominance is drawing to an end. What would it take for global commerce to take place outside the US financial system, upending the status quo that has governed it for much of the last century?

That moment has been anticipated for decades, with the euro and the yuan put forward as potential successors to the dollar. The traditional argument has been that as these rival economies grow larger than the US, their financial gravity will lead them to gradually usurp the role of the American financial system. By and large, that hasn’t happened since the euro went into use in 1999 and China joined the world trade system in 2001.

Each of those currencies has its drawbacks, according to Federal Reserve economists: The euro still sits uncomfortably on top of a confederation of independent states, not a single fiscally-integrated government, with unpredictable results, as Brexit showed. China, meanwhile, does not allow its currency to trade freely or be managed by independent institutions, which makes it less attractive than the US dollar.

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More than a month on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggesting that the wheels have fallen off Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has become commonplace. Russia’s playbook is outdated and has failed to adapt; Moscow has been stunned either by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s great skill as a media operator or by the viral ferocity of Kyiv’s own digital fighters.

As the researcher Sinan Aral wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine and its partisans are running circles around Putin and his propagandists in the battle for hearts and minds, both in Ukraine and abroad.” Even Russia’s lurch back into Soviet-style information control seems to be nothing but a retreat from the gleeful, postmodern, fact-defying dance of digital propaganda in which it had been so masterful. My personal social-media feeds stand as testament to how each of these observations might, individually, be true: They feature wall-to-wall Zelensky, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and farmers towing tanks. I know absolutely no one who thinks the invasion is anything but an outrage.

Despite this, it’s far too early to declare information victory. If anything, this apparent consensus—that Ukraine has won the online war—might be obscuring where battles over the invasion are really raging.

My pro-Ukrainian online world was punctured on March 2, when I saw two hashtags trending on Twitter: #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia. Very quickly, disinformation researchers began to see suspicious patterns associated with the hashtags, arguing that both bots and “engagement farming” were being used. A deep dive on the profile picture used by one account propagating the hashtags led to a Polish Facebook group dedicated to dating scams. At least in part, the early signs indicated that a deliberate, if hidden, effort was under way to make these hashtags trend.

The pro-invasion hashtags were enough to make my colleagues and I take notice. By March 9, just under 10,000 Twitter accounts had shared one of the hashtags at least five times, an especially engaged, active “core.” So we decided to do our own research into these accounts: Who was behind them? And what were they doing?

The way we typically do this on Twitter is by placing accounts on a map based on who they follow, retweet, or like—so-called engagement graphs. These allow researchers to determine how genuine a set of accounts might be, and whether they seem to be working in some measure of coordination. But a new generation of powerful models has emerged, allowing us to go further, analyzing how these accounts use language in a much more general sense—turns of phrase, hashtags, and really everything else, too. This opens up new opportunities to understand how accounts interact on social-media platforms.

We fed the last 200 tweets from each of the 10,000 accounts into these new models to create a linguistic fingerprint of the users, and then plotted the accounts on a graph. This might sound convoluted, and in a sense it is (you can read our 38-page white paper if you’d like), but what this process really does is put Twitter accounts that tend to use similar language close together on a map. The power here is in turning linguistic similarity into something not only measurable, but visible. And language is what Twitter is all about.

From there, we compiled a roster of randomly selected accounts from across our new map and delved into them, to try to draw out what set each of the different clusters of accounts apart. What struck us immediately was how clearly each cluster seemed to relate to geography—to the purported national identities and languages that the accounts used.

There was a dense knot of accounts identified as Indian that largely retweeted a stream of messaging in English and Hindi supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Another group used Urdu, Sindhi, and Farsi, with users primarily identifying as Iranian or Pakistani. One node was ostensibly from South Africa but included Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Kenyan users talking about public health, fuel shortages in Nigeria, and former South African President Jacob Zuma. A final cluster was the only one not characterized by language or geography. Accounts in this grouping sent the fewest tweets and had the fewest followers; many had been created either on the day of Russia’s invasion or on March 2, the day of a key United Nations vote condemning the invasion—and when I saw those hashtags suddenly trend.

Although each cluster was linguistically different from the rest, they had patterns in common. All saw a small uptick in messages on the day of the invasion, and then a very sharp increase on March 2 and 3. And all but one (the South African cluster) were doing the same thing: frenetic amplification. Seventy to 80 percent of the accounts’ activity was retweeting others, and on the day of the UN vote, many published a parade of pro-invasion memes.

The memes pushed vivid anti-colonial and anti-Western imagery mixed with Putin strongman motifs and solidarity among the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Some applauded Russia’s great friendship toward India or Putin’s apparent role in African liberation movements, but many were really about the West, its own seeming hypocrisy, and the alleged aggression of NATO expansion.

This research casts a small and admittedly imperfect light on what might be happening. We focused on Twitter, and influence operations can use a number of parallel channels. These are our impressions as researchers; others looking at the same data might have found different things. I can point to suspicious patterns, but little is definite in this world, and nothing in our analysis lets me pin this unusual social-media activity directly on the Russian state.

Still, the early data are revealing, the activity suspicious. These accounts came alive for UN votes on the invasion, propelled in part, I suspect, by one or more “paid to engage” networks—groups of accounts that will shift their Twitter usage en masse to deliver retweets for a fee. But real people (we are unsure precisely how many) are also helping the hashtags trend. That interplay between organic and inauthentic activity is the most important subtlety of this research. It also gives us our most important conclusion.

Insofar as this was a coordinated campaign, we saw little attempt to address (or impersonate) Western social-media users. To the extent that we saw real people using the hashtag, very few were from the West.

Look beyond the West, and the information war feels a lot different. “We’ve seen many suspicious TikTok accounts parroting Russian ideology or valorizing Russian aggression in Southeast Asian languages such as Malay and Indonesian,” Ng Wei Kai, a journalist for Singapore’s The Straits Times newspaper, told me. “Comments sections on news accounts [are] flooded with pro-Russian views. Much of the content made in non-English languages also takes a mocking or warning tone about Singapore’s decision [to sanction Russia], as if to say, Don’t be like them; there will be consequences for the sanctions.” In India, as the journalist Tushar Dhara notes, the level of genuine sympathy for Russia can be striking. “There is genuine warmth for Russia and the Soviet Union, for its diplomatic and military support to India going back decades,” Dhara told me.

Zelensky’s great success in the information war has undeniably been to couch the conflict as one of Russia against not just Ukraine, but the West. That has helped him win an array of fans across Europe and North America, among both politicians and ordinary voters. But that success, the very reason that we in the West think Ukraine is winning the information war, is also the very reason it isn’t.

Disinformation campaigns are far more effective when they have a powerful truth at their core and use that truth to guide discussion. The blunt reality is that in many parts of the world, antipathy for the West is deep and sympathy for Russia is real. It is in these contexts where I’d expect influence operations to be targeted—and to work.

A mistake we in the West too often make is to suppose that our information spaces—English, French, and German Twitter and Facebook, for example—are far more universal than they are. Remainers the day before Britain’s Brexit vote, and Democrats the day before Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, didn’t simply feel as though they were beating the opposition; they didn’t think there was an opposition.

We’re in danger of making that same mistake over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The fact that we don’t see information warfare doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and it doesn’t mean we’ve won. It might just mean that ours is not the battleground on which it’s being fought.

Defenders of the West have a tendency to gaze wistfully at the past, lamenting how far today’s leaders have fallen. Where America and its allies used to build things, create institutions, and win wars, now they seek only to hold ground, conserve what they have, and escape conflicts.

Such nostalgic longing isn’t hard to understand. Immediately after World War II, Europe was in ruins, its industries and infrastructure destroyed. Without American intervention, much more of Europe could well have fallen under Soviet control. But in the space of a few years, the United States financed Europe’s recovery, committed to its defense, and pushed the continent toward ever-closer union. It was an extraordinary age.

These enormous changes were not simply the result of the leaders of the time coming together. “Men make history, but they do not make it as they please,” wrote Karl Marx. They make it, instead, under the circumstances given to them. At the end of the war, circumstances changed, global power shifted, allowing leaders to do great things. Today, a similar change may be under way—though it’s hard to see anything great resulting from it.

After World War II, the principal security threat to democracy shifted, almost overnight, from Germany to the Soviet Union. And this changed everything. To deal with the new reality, the U.S. realized, Germany—or at least the bit of Germany under Allied control—would need to be rebuilt as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The prospect of German reindustrialization and rearmament, however, reignited age-old French fears. Traditionally, to address this problem, France would ally itself with Britain. But in 1950, France took a historic leap in the dark, announcing the first step toward economic integration with Germany, laying the foundation for today’s European Union. Now that the U.S. had guaranteed European security, France could transfer its insurance policy from Britain and join with Germany in ways previously thought impossible.

The Soviet threat kept the U.S. in Europe. And the U.S. presence in Europe created the conditions for Europe to unite. Since 1950, the basic tenets of this security order have not changed. American power has guaranteed the security of the West, allowing Europe’s democracies to band closer together. In 1990, when the Soviet threat collapsed, the U.S. did not withdraw this security guarantee, but expanded it eastward, entrenching its hegemony.

In one sense, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February appears to have reinforced the foundations of this American order—NATO seems more united, the democracies of Europe and North America are working together to oppose Moscow’s expansionism, and many are ramping up their defense capabilities. Looking at the world more broadly, however, the underlying reality has changed, just as it did after World War II. Today, even as Russia stalks NATO’s border, a new, far larger threat to the American-led order looms farther to the east: China.

Beijing may not seek a world revolution, as the Soviet Union did, but it seeks regional dominance, control of global trade routes, and Taiwan. Its autocratic state-capitalism model offers inspiration to opponents of democracy, and as it has grown in power, it has begun to see Washington and its allies as seeking to constrain its strength.

Indeed, fully understanding the invasion of Ukraine is impossible without considering the geopolitical environment in which it is taking place. Russia is emboldened in its quest to recapture lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and the calculation that American power is giving way.

In fact, China’s rise challenges the notion of the West itself. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat to Western Europe, China threatens America’s liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others. Suddenly to think of the West comprising only the two sides of the North Atlantic no longer makes much sense. If there is a “West” today—a free world allied to the U.S.—it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.

To understand this world, you only have to look at those that have sanctioned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, a group that extends beyond Europe to include Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. And yet there is nothing institutional that ties this world together, beyond the base reality of American power. Like the Holy Roman Empire that was once dismissed as being neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire, the Western alliance today is neither Western nor an alliance.

So, as in the late 1940s, the principal strategic threat to the Western world has shifted, creating a whole new set of problems. States opposed to the American order feel empowered. Yet unlike in the ’40s, Western institutions show little sign of changing to meet the new reality. The old order has been so solidly constructed that it appears to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to muster the energy, ambition, or imagination to build anything new.

It is now a common argument that if the leading military powers in the Western world—the U.S., Britain, and France—had shown more commitment to their mission, the world would be safer and more orderly. If they had intervened to enforce Barack Obama’s red line in Syria, or had corralled a wider coalition to punish Vladimir Putin’s earlier incursions into Ukraine, the U.S. would still be dominant, its adversaries too scared to emerge from their shelters.

There are many versions of this argument. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that the biggest problem for the U.S. was that it had lost its self-belief. In The Atlantic, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the weakening of American democracy at home was to blame. Outside the U.S., former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalled a bygone period characterized by “a strong center ground where, at least on foreign and defense policy, politics tended to follow a reasonable path of consensus.”

The problem with all such arguments is that they rarely offer an explanation as to why the West lost its faith in itself and became so apparently dysfunctional. Bad leaders did not emerge from nowhere, nor did voters suddenly became stupid.

Since the turn of the century, the U.S. and its allies have lost one war, failed in at least one other, and seen the American-centered financial system implode, imposing huge costs on ordinary voters, many of whom have seen their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate. All the while, the West’s central foreign-policy calculation—that trade and engagement with China and Russia would see these two powers liberalize, democratize, and take their place in the (American-led) international order—has collapsed under the weight of its absurdly utopian assumptions. What’s more, the policies that led to these failures were supported by the apparently functioning political consensus that Blair, Clinton, and others now believe needs to be resurrected to protect Western strength.

The debate is eerily similar to that of the 1960s and ’70s as America stumbled ever further into the abyss in Vietnam, convinced it could correct whatever mistakes it had made if it only showed more commitment. The war in Vietnam had bipartisan support, just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did decades later. The same is true of the policy to normalize trade with China. And yet all of these policies contributed to the world that exists today and to public antipathy toward free trade, globalization, and military interventions abroad. You cannot blame voters for their loss of faith in a system that has failed them and enriched a country that Western leaders now say is the main threat to global democracy.

Calls for the U.S. to simply rediscover its belief in itself are based on the fallacy that if it does so, the world can somehow return to the rules-based order that existed before Donald Trump and Brexit, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, when American power was unquestioned and Western democracies were sensible and functioning.

The truth is that this order gave us Trump and Brexit, and facilitated the rise of Putin and Xi. The world that confronts the West today exists not because the West had too little faith in itself, but because it had too much.

In May 1950, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman announced his intention to integrate France’s coal and steel production with Germany’s, outside either country’s national control. The proposal was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, now considered a founding father of the European Union. Schuman said that such a step was necessary because of the mounting threats to the democratic world. “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it,” he declared.

The dangers were coming from the east. Soviet-backed Communists had seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and were making gains elsewhere. In the U.S., pressure was mounting for a collective European response to the continent’s crises. Monnet argued that the only way to stop the cycle of Franco-German antipathy from reasserting itself was to remove the source of tension—Germany’s industrial might. France could not simply requisition German coal and steel production, so Monnet suggested that it be Europeanized, managed by a new High Authority that looked out for the interests of Europe generally, not Germany or France specifically.

The proposal’s genius was that it created a policy out of a need, but did so in a way that smuggled a revolutionary idea into a living, breathing institution. The policy itself was small enough to be politically acceptable—Monnet was proposing not the creation of a United States of Europe, but cooperation between France and Germany in coal and steel. Yet it was based on a radical idea: supranationalism. Suddenly, under Monnet’s plan, national interests would become common interests, and so German power and wealth would not become an existential threat to France.

Once planted, this idea grew into what is the European Union today, in which German economic might is managed through a common market, with common rules and a common currency set by a common institution. Germany is the undisputed leader of the EU, the biggest, wealthiest, and most productive economy on the continent, yet France and Germany remain the closest of allies.

Today, the challenge might not be solely European, but the lesson of Europe’s 20th century revolution has much to teach the wider democratic world as it faces up to the new challenge of the 21st century. The lesson for Western leaders is to find a similar combination of pragmatism and idealism based on a reasonable analysis of the global balance of power. Once again, the West must extract a policy from a need—the need to protect U.S.-backed liberal democracy from the threat posed by authoritarian adversaries. But what is the idea that will give any such policy life?

So many of the ideas that are currently being discussed come with their own set of problems. The most obvious power play America can make to contain China’s rise, for example, is to seek to split up its emerging alliance with Russia. Many European diplomats have long expected that, to do so, the U.S. will attempt to reset relations with Moscow in a kind of “reverse Nixon,” mirroring the former president’s successful policy in the 1970s to split China from Russia. But such a policy, debatable only a few months ago, now seems almost impossible—destroyed by Putin’s bloody megalomania.

An alternative would be to accept the reality of this new authoritarian axis and endeavor to protect Western democracies from it. The problem is, the more the West builds a democratic alliance against China and Russia, as U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested, the more the West strengthens the very alliance that it fears. And if the world descends into a new cold war, the West will be forced to buddy up to decidedly undemocratic regimes, just as it did last time. India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—two flawed democratic allies and a problematic autocratic friend—show the impossibility of constructing a Manichaean good-versus-evil world of democracy against authoritarianism.

Other policies put forward include an American withdrawal from Europe to allow the U.S. to concentrate on its confrontation with China, leaving the EU to deal with Russia. Critics of this vision told me that any such withdrawal would not necessarily push Europe to fill the void, but instead might see the EU pull itself apart, as it so often did before America extended its security blanket.

A less radical suggestion is for the U.S. to become the center of the Venn diagram where the two circles of Europe and Asia overlap—an offshore balancing power that has a foot on each side of the world, guaranteeing stability but allowing Europe to take the lead in the West while it corrals a new, more cohesive alliance in the East. Some analysts have even spoken of a NATO of the East. The problem here, though, is that there appears to be little appetite in Asia for its own NATO, little appetite in the U.S. to become even more committed to other countries’ defense, and little appetite in Europe to seriously step forward and allow such a notion to be viable.

There are endless reasons that every new policy idea put forward over the years has amounted to nothing. And yet, what remains clear is that not building anything new to meet the reality of the changing circumstances risks allowing Chinese power to grow even more.

Jean Monnet is perhaps little known in the U.S., but in European capitals, he is studied intently. His great insight was to ignore the temptation for grand reorderings in preference for small, manageable, and politically feasible steps. Why can’t the same happen now? Chinese power is based on economic might, supported by the country’s integration into the world economy. Yet little unites the wider Western world—America, Europe, Japan, Australia, as well as others—economically, certainly compared with the kind of military cooperation that has been established by NATO.

This economic hole has to be filled if the West is to mean anything. Greater economic tools need to be available with which the free-world can defend itself. One idea put forward to me by Stephen Wertheim, a U.S. foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was for a new grouping that could marshal Western resources to protect smaller allies susceptible to Chinese economic pressure. Such an organization could manage a fund, for example, to protect against sudden threats from Beijing. In time, this bloc could grow to make it less attractive for countries to do deals with Chinese companies in areas sensitive to core Western interests, such as defense, natural resources, and emerging technologies.

Any such proposal, whether this or something else entirely, relies on what Monnet deemed the greatest attribute in a political leader: generosity. It requires the U.S., EU, Japan, Britain, and others put aside their economic competition, as France and Germany did in 1950, to create an institution based on an idea—an idea that is, to a large extent, a fiction: that of “the West.”

To work, such an entity must be built on more than simple altruism of the big for the small, but on self interest. If the U.S. genuinely sees China as a threat to the democratic order, it is in its interests to build something that protects and empowers that very order. NATO doesn’t do that, AUKUS—the naval submarine pact between Australia, Britain, and the U.S.—doesn’t do that. Even the G7, which comes closest, doesn’t quite do that, excluding South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand for starters. Deepening the Western world’s economic cooperation does not mean stifling one country over another, either. After 1950, freed of the fear of each other’s industrial success and protected militarily by the U.S., Germany and France both saw economic booms.

Ultimately, whatever new organization or framework—if any—is created to empower the broader Western world in its rivalry with China must reflect the reality of power as it exists today. It must build on shared interests, not utopian idealism. To do otherwise would be to remake the mistakes of the past 20 years, when hubristic assumptions about the triumph of a universal liberal order wormed their way into policy making, with disastrous consequences.

Gazing wistfully at the past can have its benefits, so long as doing so does not descend into nostalgic longing for a lost golden era that did not exist. In 1948, George Marshall, the statesman behind the Marshall Plan, warned that unless the U.S. intervened in Europe, the struggle for democracy would be lost by default. The challenge is much the same today, but the solution will have to be very different.