How foreign powers are gaslighting Americans

China hosted talks in Beijing on Friday with the deputy foreign ministers of Russia and Iran to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. China said sanctions on Iran should be lifted.Credit...Pool photo

How foreign powers are gaslighting Americans

Opinion -Washindton Post-Oct7th2025

Russia, China and Iran pay no price for spreading false claims about the U.S.

By L. Gordon Crovitz

L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is co-CEO of NewsGuard, which assesses the reliability of news sources and claims spreading online.

The United States has unilaterally disarmed in the information wars. The Trump administration has ended key efforts to defend against Russian, Chinese and Iranian targeting of Americans with false claims.

This disarmament includes largely dismantling the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was the leading U.S. intelligence operation charged with “mitigating threats to democracy and U.S. national interests,” including efforts by adversaries to influence popular opinion. The U.S. also recently canceled a cooperation agreement with European allies to identify and expose disinformation operations targeting Americans and their allies. The Trump administration defends its abdication by claiming it is countering censorship, but warning of false claims by hostile governments provides Americans with more information, not less.

Adversaries take advantage of U.S. unilateral disarmament on foreign propaganda by gaslighting Americans. Several Chinese state-controlled propaganda outlets, including Xinhua-owned newspaper Reference News, last month tried to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel by posting a video claiming two U.S. military pilots had been arrested at the Pentagon after they refused to fly U.S. munitions to Israel. This was false. The video actually showed two veterans at a congressional hearing protesting Israeli actions in Gaza. Pro-Iran social media accounts falsely claimed that the Trump administration limited the movements of Iranian delegates to the recent U.N. General Assembly by banning their use of restrooms. The accounts spread an AI-generated image of Iranian officials standing in front of a UN-marked restroom door, blocked by a police officer holding a “No Entry” sign.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, state-backed media in Russia and Iran along with China’s online proxies flooded the internet with falsehoods. Analysts at NewsGuard, the information reliability organization where I work, discovered 6,200 mentions of Kirk the week following his killing across the official outlets and social media accounts of the three nations. Russia blamed Ukraine for the killing. Iran blamed Israel’s Mossad. Pro-China accounts mocked the U.S. The goal was the same: Weaponize American grief, deepen domestic division and weaken Western alliances.