When Your Ally Starts Campaigning In Your House.

I remember a discussion we had during our international relations class, back when we still called the system “unipolar”. Someone asked what the world would look like if it slid back toward multipolarity. What framework would we use? How would we know we were already there?

Looking back, one of my last essays on disinformation and cognitive warfare, and my master’s thesis on the weaponisation of TikTok amidst a declining world power and a rising one, were research and quiet answers to that question. In Beyond the Firehose and Protection in the Hybrid Zone, I used Russian “firehose” propaganda, platform weaponisation, and sharp power case studies to sketch how a multipolar world behaves from ground level, not through summit communiqués, but through feeds, narratives, and the protective bubbles around people.

In those earlier pieces, the hybrid zone was the space around a person and their lifestyle, where physical, digital, and cognitive risks overlap. Here I widen the lens. The same hybrid zone logic applies at the level of alliances and regions. What happens around one person or one company is only a small fragment of what is happening around whole states and, increasingly, around Europe as a political actor.

This essay is the next step. I look at the new US National Security Strategy, the twenty-eight-point Ukraine peace plan, Trump’s economic statecraft, Russia’s outreach to India, Musk’s fight with the European Union, NATO’s anti hybrid posture and the Latin American front, and I run them through the IR toolbox: structural realism, complex interdependence, structural power, sharp power, public opinion and a bit of political psychology.

I write this from a European position. I believe in democratic values, human rights, the rule of law, checks and balances, accountable institutions, and the unglamorous idea that rules should constrain power rather than shield it. That does not mean the European Union is perfect. It means I treat a functioning, self-correcting European project as a security asset, a credible powerhouse among big powers struggling over a new world order, not as a problem to be removed.

A campaign document in strategic clothing

When I read the new US National Security Strategy, I do not just see a security document. I see a campaign text aimed at the European public. Like any campaign, it defines a target audience, frames an opponent, tests narratives that already circulate online, and signals where future resources and attention will go.

Europe is presented as a continent on the edge of “civilisational erasure”, weakened by migration, bureaucracy, and liberal norms. The text praises the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” and explicitly calls on Washington to “cultivate resistance” to Europe’s current trajectory from inside EU member states (United States Government 2025). The storyline that Europe is bureaucratic, authoritarian, and in decline does not stay on paper. It is picked up by influencers, party media, and platform ecosystems that already live on outrage.

We saw the dress rehearsal in February 2025, when US Vice President JD Vance took the stage at the Munich Security Conference and told a stunned room that the main threat to Europe was “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” (Vance 2025). The strategy gives that line policy weight and institutional language.

At the same time, private envoy talks led by Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner took place in Moscow. The day before, Putin appeared in uniform and blamed Europe for the breakdown, claiming Brussels had threatened to retaliate hard forhybrid threats. Twenty-four hours later, he landed in India to sign oil and defence deals, stage warm leader photo-ops and selfies, and project a simple message: Russia is not isolated, only repositioned within a non-Western BRICS camp.

Brussels then hit X with a Digital Services Act penalty over systemic content-moderation failures, including illegal content and disinformation. Elon Musk replied that the EU should effectively be abolished and “sovereignty” returned to nation-states. He cast the EU as an unelected censor standing between “the people” and free speech, while sidestepping the EU’s elected Parliament and the member-state Council.

Add one more layer. NATO’s Warsaw Summit in 2016 put hybrid warfare and cyber operations firmly on the agenda and stated that serious cyber operations could, in principle, trigger collective defence (NATO 2016). Russia then escalated with cyber-attacks, disinformation, and energy pressure around Ukraine, calibrated to stay below a clear Article 5 threshold. The Kushner (and Wikoff) era in both the Trump administration experimented with personalised delegations and leader-to-leader diplomacy, chasing quick wins and gains. Now, a US strategy seems to be emerging that revives spheres-of-influence language and recasts Europe itself as the problem.

Seen from intelligence and international relations, this is not noise. It is a pattern where states, platforms, and billionaires operate on the same board. Are aligning. 

Waltz, poles, and the structural irritant called Europe.

Kenneth Waltz offers a practical initial framework. In Theory of International Politics, he describes an international system defined by anarchy and by the distribution of capabilities between major powers, where states are pushed into self-help and balancing behaviour by structure rather than by the morality of leaders (Waltz 1979). In “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” he argues that great powers still balance against concentrations of power and that multipolar systems with several comparable centres are more prone to miscalculation than bipolar ones, due to shifting alliances and information uncertainty (Waltz 2000).

Seen from that altitude, the European Union is not a lifestyle project. It is a structural challenge. A consolidated economic and regulatory bloc of more than 400 million people is a potential pole in its own right. For Moscow, that is uncomfortable because it prefers a neighbourhood of divided, influenceable states. For Washington, that is rediscovering spheres of influence, a strong EU is equally inconvenient because it limits the room for bilateral deals and side payments (Waltz 1979; Waltz 2000).

Here, the NSS and much of the Russian rhetoric converge on key themes. Both talk about “restoring sovereignty” against Brussels. Both promote nationalist forces inside EU states as authentic and EU institutions as overreaching. The flags and long-term objectives differ. The structural irritant is the same.

The limitation is that Waltz wrote in a world where most meaningful power sat in state capitals, not in private digital infrastructures and tweet diplomacy. That is not the world my case studies of disinformation and platform weaponisation live in, which is why another layer is needed.

Strange, structural power, and why fragmentation is a business model

To capture that dimension, Susan Strange’s work on structural power becomes essential. In The Retreat of the State, she argues that authority has been leaking away from governments toward markets, firms, and impersonal financial and knowledge structures, including the systems that shape what people know and how they interpret events. The key question is not only who commands armies, but who controls credit, production networks, and the frames through which people interpret reality (Strange 1996).

If you read current events through Strange, the EU versus Musk is not a culture war spectacle. It is a structural power fight. The EU is one of the few regulators capable of setting binding rules for data, competition, and platform behaviour at a continental scale. X, Meta, Alphabet, and others rely on business models that thrive on asymmetry and opacity. For them, twenty-seven small regulators who can be played off against each other are better than one heavy, coherent bloc.

You can see the same logic in the hard economic levers. Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, including 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminium from Europe, in ways that could push some European exports towardzero and predictably invite EU retaliation (Mattoo and Staiger 2019; Yeung 2022). In the current pattern, these tools also sit alongside US pressure on Europe’s digital rulebook, with deregulation at home and tougher bargaining abroad jointly favouring US-based tech and energy firms by squeezing competitors and discouraging aggressive regulators.

Replacing a strong EU negotiating position with a patchwork of bilateral deals between individual capitals and highly personalised, transactional foreign administrations weakens oversight, invites regulatory divergence, and creates more room for short-term or private gains over shared European interests. Fragmentation shifts leverage away from Brussels toward larger external actors and toward non-state players who can exploit the gaps.

So when Musk responds to a DSA fine by mocking EU legitimacy and suggesting that power should be “returned” to member states, I do not hear a philosopher of sovereignty. I hear a structural actor arguing for a landscape that fits his bargaining strengths!

Fragmentation is suitable for platforms that want to arbitrage legal regimes. It is good for large financial interests. It is perfect for authoritarian states that prefer bilateral leverage to continental constraints.

Relative gains and tariff wars

During a lecture I followed this year on international economics, Professor Dr H. Sander at Cologne University of Applied Sciences explained trade wars in a way that stuck with me. Trade war thinking is often about relative gains, not absolute ones. In a tariff war, both sides can become poorer in absolute terms, but a government may still escalate if it believes it will lose less than the other side and emerge with more relative power.

International relations scholars have long argued that states worry about relative gains because today’s surplus can be tomorrow’s tanks. Even liberal institutionalists such as Keohane and Nye acknowledge that distribution matters inside interdependence, not just total welfare (Keohane and Nye 1977). Economists have also argued that Trump’s trade actions can be read as a shift from rules-based to power-based tariff bargaining (Mattoo and Staiger 2019). And recent survey evidence suggests that relative-gains considerations can shape public trade preferences, though support for policies that clearly impose losses on a trade partner may be tempered by fairness and other-regarding concerns (Yeung 2022). Trump’s pattern of tariffs, especially when directed at allies and neighbours, fits this logic. The idea is not ‘everyone wins’. It is ‘we can afford the pain more than you can, and if your dependence increases, so does our leverage’.

In a Strange-style reading, tariffs and sanctions are not just trade policy. They are tools inside a broader structural power game.

Soft power, sharp power, and suspicious minds.

The next element is information, public opinion, and perception management.

Joseph Nye’s soft power is about attraction: getting what you want because others admire your culture, your values, and your policies (Nye 2004). Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig’s sharp power is its subversive counterpart. It describes how authoritarian regimes use media, culture, and education to pierce and manipulate open societies, narrowing the space for independent thinking and criticism rather than winning hearts (Walker and Ludwig 2017).

On the democratic side, Eugene Wittkopf’s work on public opinion and foreign policy shows how mass attitudes cluster into different “faces of internationalism”, from more militant to more cooperative, and how those clusters shape what leaders can sell at home (Wittkopf 1990). Public opinion is not just background noise. It is part of the operating system of foreign policy.

At the micro level, Rob Brotherton’s work on conspiracy psychology is a useful reminder that the public does not consume narratives as blank slates. In Suspicious Minds, he shows how cognitive biases like proportionality bias, pattern perception, and intentionality bias make people especially receptive to grand, plot-based explanations in times of uncertainty (Brotherton 2015). Big events feel like they must have big, intentional causes. Someone must be pulling the strings.

In a drifting, multipolar world where events feel increasingly out of control, those tendencies become a structural vulnerability. Sharp power and platform dynamics do not create suspicion. They harvest and weaponise it.

Put those lenses together, then look again at the NSS. It borrows heavily from far-right narratives about migration and identity, labels EU policy as “anti-democratic” when it regulates platforms or climate, and openly endorses “patriotic European parties” that should help Washington “cultivate resistance” inside EU states (United States Government 2025). This is not a neutral analysis. It is narrative engineering that aims to tilt European public opinion clusters and make a coalition between American culture warriors and European nationalists against Brussels feel natural.

If a Russian or Chinese doctrine paper about the EU used this language, we would call it foreign information manipulation. Here it comes on Allied letterhead. The method is similar. The colours are different.

Sharp power gives us the tactic. To see the delivery system, you have to look at the platforms that carry it.

TikTok and programmable attention as a case study

In my master’s thesis, An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Weaponisation of TikTok, I treated TikTok as a programmable attention system rather than a neutral entertainment app (Rifesser 2023). The For You feed is an influence surface. The algorithm decides what rises and what sinks, and that decision is not neutral. It can be nudged by state actors, commercial actors, tech billionaires, and social movements. A million small content choices, reinforced by design, build a particular picture of the world in users’ heads.

From an intelligence perspective, the interesting part is not a single clip but pattern detection across millions of microsignals, precisely the kind of “connecting the dots” problem that modern intelligence analysis and the critical thinking literature deal with.

Project that onto the current moment. On one side, you have an American strategy and surrounding rhetoric that frame “real Europeans” as conservative nationalists under assault from Brussels and migrants (United States Government 2025). On another, you have Russian and Chinese sharp power campaigns that push anti-Western and anti-EU narratives, often through the same platforms. On a third, you have platform owners who dislike regulation and therefore have structural incentives to amplify anti-EU and anti-regulator frames.

In my previous essays, I used disinformation and soft power theory as a tool to understand how rising and declining powers operate in a shifting system. The NSS, Putin’s photo-ops in Delhi, Musk’s attacks on the EU, and NATO’s hybrid doctrine fit that sketch. Financial interests, energy interests, and platform interests can all coexist quite comfortably with illiberal nationalism, as long as it does not interfere with capital flows, energy contracts, and moderation policies. What many of them do not like is a strong, value-driven EU that tries to regulate data, competition, artificial intelligence, dark money, and green transitions at a structural level.

If these interests keep drifting together, you get a system where the most natural coalition is not “democracies versus autocracies”, but “extractive actors and platforms versus any institution that tells them no”.

The mutual benefit is simple. Political leaders get narrative cover and money. Platforms get deregulation and access. The cost is carried by citizens.

Spheres of influence in the hemisphere

The same logic is visible south of the Rio Grande.

Ideas of spheres of influence and protected “backyards” are not new. They run through the history of the Monroe Doctrine and the many interventions that followed it, from the late nineteenth century to the Cold War (United States Department of State 2022; Bryne 2020). The Doctrine drew a line between a European sphere and an American one and was later used to justify a very broad US role in the Western Hemisphere.

Recent US practice in Latin America is widely read as a revival of that tradition. The United States has increased naval deployments near Venezuela and carried out lethal operations against alleged narco vessels, while signalling that it is prepared to use force to shape outcomes in Caracas. At the same time, the administration has supported major bailout and swap arrangements for governments such as Argentina, pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández from a 45-year US drug trafficking sentence, and maintained close ties with ideologically aligned figures, including Jair Bolsonaro, while rewarding other leaders like Bukele and Noboa with political support and security cooperation. Critics in the region describe this as less a neutral security posture than the construction of a network of loyalists in Washington’s “backyard”, held together by financial, legal, and security favours rather than by shared rules. Monroe 2.0?

Seen through Waltz, this is a classic sphere of influence behaviour. Through Strange’s lens, it is financial statecraft: using bailouts, swap lines, tariffs, and sanctions to build a network of loyalty under US leadership. It is loyalty under coercion rather than a partnership of equals, and it sends a clear message to Europe about how this administration views hierarchies and regional orders.

The twenty-eight-point peace plan

The Ukraine front ties these threads together.

The US-backed twenty-eight-point plan for peace in Ukraine, drafted in Washington and reportedly incorporating Moscow’s proposals, called on Ukraine to renounce NATO membership, cede extensive territory, including Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk, and accept limits on its armed forces, among other concessions. Many officials reportedly expected Kyiv to reject it. European and Ukrainian diplomacy have since sought to strip out the worst elements, but the underlying template remains visible in transatlantic debates.

Critics in Europe and in US policy circles have described this as a deal that privileges material gain over sovereignty, dressed up as “peace”: stabilise Russian territorial gains, limit Ukrainian sovereignty, reduce European security commitments, and reopen business channels, all while presenting it as ending the war quickly.

There is no clean way to test that accusation, but the plan clearly downplays international law, human rights, and democratic self-determination in favour of freezing a balance of power more favourable to Moscow and, in the short term, cheaper (and more advantageous) for Washington. It fits the broader pattern where transactional deals and relative gainslogic take precedence over norms and allied trust.

Taken together, Warsaw’s hybrid turn, Russian hybrid operations across Europe, hardliners in Washington who openly cast Brussels as a problem, Trump’s personalised diplomacy, Putin’s hedging in India, Musk’s fight with the DSA, the Latin American Monroe revival, and the twenty-eight-point Ukraine plan sketch a single picture. Major powers and platforms are re-drawing spheres of influence in hard power, finance, lawfare, and information at the same time. The question is where that leaves Europe.

The EU question and the mirror test

That brings me back to the question at the edge of these notes. Should the EU be abolished and powers “given back” to the member states? Is the EU simply too strong for Washington, its tech billionaires, Moscow, and Beijing? Or is it not strong enough yet?

If I apply Musk’s logic consistently, the next step would be to abolish the United States as a federal entity and restore full sovereignty to California, Texas, Alabama, and the rest. No more federal Supreme Court. No more dollars. No more unified trade policy. Each state is negotiating directly with China, Russia, the EU, and the platforms.

Waltz would probably raise an eyebrow. Breaking a pole into fifty units does not increase its ability to balance. It increases vulnerability to manipulation and miscalculation (Waltz 1979; Waltz 2000). The same logic applies to a Europe of twenty-seven fully detached nation-states in a world of continental powers and global platforms.

From Strange’s perspective, abolishing the EU would be a gift to structural power. Markets, global capital, and global platforms thrive when regulators are small, divided, and desperate for investment. Without a strong EU, no one in Europe would have written the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, or the draft AI Act. Those instruments are exactly where democratic values still connect to code, capital, and data.

From Walker, Ludwig, and Wittkopf’s perspective, a fragmented Europe would be a paradise for sharp power. Capturing or heavily influencing one ministry in one small capital is much cheaper than shifting a whole EU regulation. Public opinion would be easier to tilt country by country, especially if platforms faced fewer constraints and more incentives to push content that undermines “Brussels”.

At this point, one can reasonably argue, even in dry academic language, that this pattern benefits a narrow elite. It rewards a circle of leaders and business networks who profit from volatility, arbitrage, and personalised deals. It is hard to see how it serves long-term European security or the democratic public that carries the cost.

History does not offer clean templates, but it does offer warnings. Settlements and bargains that privilege short-term gain and humiliation over dignity and law have a habit of unravelling. They leave behind resentment, revisionism, and a sense that the rules are written for someone else. In a period of shifting power, that is an expensive kind of instability to manufacture on purpose.

So when I connect the dots, using the same mindset I applied to Russian disinformation and TikTok, the picture is not “financial interests replace democratic values” in the abstract. It is more concrete. If democracies do not defend their values structurally, in institutions, regulations, economic policy, and platform design, then financial and platform interests will align wherever resistance is weakest. That alignment often sits closer to nationalist, weakly regulated environments than to messy, high-friction Brussels.

Protection logic in a multipolar world

For Europe, the point is not to walk away from the alliance with the United States or to deny the Russian threat. It is to stop behaving like a stage, confront internal threats, strengthen its base, and act like a global powerhouse.

Being a stage means letting others write the script, set the lights, and use your audience while you provide scenery. Being an actor means having your own lines, your own interests, and your own red lines, even when the director is a friend.

States, markets, and platforms are all playing in the same hybrid zone, and some of them, including allies, have started campaigning in the house.

In close protection, the world of executive protection, you do not abandon a client when they make bad choices. You change posture. You clarify your mandate. You map the hybrid zone around them with clear eyes, including friends who bring risk as well as enemies who bring danger.

At the European level, the client is not Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or Silicon Valley. It is the citizens inside the perimeter. Protecting them in this environment means at least three things.

First, Europe needs to match its economic weight with credible hard power. That means sustained, coordinated defence spending, interoperable forces, and an industrial base that can actually produce what strategies promise, not as a vanity project, but so that deterrence and support to partners do not depend entirely on election cycles elsewhere.

Second, it needs to harden its own information and institutional perimeter. That is less glamorous than buying jets. It means independent media, serious investment in digital literacy, resilient electoral systems, enforcement against dark money, and a regulatory spine on platforms and artificial intelligence. Sharp power works best against soft institutions.

Third, it needs to behave like a strategic unit when dealing with allies and rivals. A UNITED Europe that speaks with one voice on sanctions, trade, technology controls, and critical infrastructure has far more leverage than twenty-seven capitals cutting side deals. Unity is not a slogan. It is a security multiplier.

The real task now is to build the analytical, regulatory, and strategic muscles to protect citizens’ ability to decide, in a system that is increasingly wired for someone else to decide for them. Hearts and minds are still contested long before any battle has begun, and much of that contest now runs through the information sphere.

That, for me, is what this multipolar world looks like up close. Not a neat new Cold War. A crowded hybrid zone where the balance of power, the balance of platforms, and the balance of narratives all operate simultaneously. The shifting domains I wrote about in protection work are not a side story to this system. They are where ordinary people feel the pressure in daily life, and they are where any serious red line on sharp power and disinformation will have to be drawn.

There is an old strategist’s line that in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity. The current disorder is not only a risk. It is also a chance for Europe to decide whether it wants to remain a stage for other people’s campaigns, or to steady itself, stand up and act as a united security actor in its own right.

Brief critical reflection on this article

Three caveats about this analysis.

First, it is openly European and pro-democratic, and a moment in time. I do not pretend to be neutral between a Europe that seeks to regulate power and one that lets power regulate it. A different IR scholar, especially a hard realist or an ardent sovereigntist, could argue that a weaker EU gives middle powers more manoeuvre space and that Brussels itself can be a source of dysfunction. This article does not fully explore that counterargument.

Second, it may outweigh platforms and billionaires. Strange is right that structural power matters, and Musk is a useful symbol, but states still control armies, borders, and central banks. At the same time, hearts and minds are often shapedlong before any battle begins. The analysis risks making platforms look omnipotent when, in reality, they are very powerful in one domain and highly vulnerable in others, including regulatory oversight, antitrust enforcement, and public backlash.

Third, it uses theory and cases selectively. Waltz, Strange, Nye, Walker, Ludwig, Brotherton, and Wittkopf support the story I want to tell. Other traditions, for example, English School ideas of international society, postcolonial critiques, or Marxist readings of capitalism and empire, could enrich or challenge the picture. A full academic treatment would need to bring those in and interrogate the Latin America and Ukraine examples more systematically.

This text is not a final model of the system, and we could include much more for a deeper, broader analysis. It is a personal reading from last week that combines almost twenty years of security practice with the IR, psychology, and intelligence theory I studied to open a debate about how to understand the current multi-level, multidimensional shift. Others will map the same landscape differently. If this article does nothing more than give practitioners and scholars a sharper language with which to argue about Europe, power, and platforms, it has already done its job.

References

Brotherton, R. (2015) Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. London, Bloomsbury Sigma.

Bryne, A. (2020) The Monroe Doctrine and United States National Security in the Early Twentieth Century. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan. (SpringerLink)

Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J. S. (1977) Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston, Little, Brown.

Mattoo, A. and Staiger, R. W. (2019) “Trade Wars: What do they Mean, Why are they Happening now, What are the Costs”, NBER Working Paper 25762.

NATO (2016) Warsaw Summit Communiqué. North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Nye, J. S. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York, PublicAffairs.

Rifesser, B. (2023) An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Weaponisation of TikTok. Master’s thesis, via ResearchGate.

Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

United States Department of State (2022) “Monroe Doctrine, 1823”, Office of the Historian. (history.state.gov)

United States Government (2025) National Security Strategy of the United States. Washington DC.

Vance, J. D. (2025) Speech at the Munich Security Conference, Munich, 15 February.

Walker, C. and Ludwig, J. (2017) Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence. Washington DC, National Endowment for Democracy.

Waltz, K. N. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading MA, Addison Wesley.

Waltz, K. N. (2000) “Structural Realism after the Cold War”, International Security, 25(1), pp. 5–41.

Wittkopf, E. R. (1990) Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. Durham NC, Duke University Press.

Yeung, E. S. F. (2022) “Relative Gains in the Shadow of a Trade War”, International Organization, 76(4), pp. 924–951.