America Went Silent — and Iran Won the Meme War
The cost of dismantling every information weapon we had
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For years, people inside the national security community warned that America’s information infrastructure was one of its most under appreciated strategic assets. Not the bombs, not the bases, not the carrier groups — though those matter enormously — but the quieter architecture of influence: the broadcasters, the counter-disinformation centers, the public diplomacy programs. The “I” in the DIME model — Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic — is not decorative. It is load-bearing. Strip it out, and the structure becomes unstable.
We are now watching that instability play out in real time.
Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has methodically dismantled virtually every institutional instrument the United States had for competing in the global information space. Voice of America, which had been broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to an estimated 354 million people weekly, went silent for the first time in 83 years. The administration also terminated funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The Global Engagement Center — which I helped establish — lost its congressional authorization in December 2024 and was then formally shuttered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025, with its successor office eliminated as well. In February, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and election interference — was dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was disbanded, the Woodrow Wilson Center was effectively shut down, and the US Institute of Peace was ordered dismantled — DOGE physically forced its way into the headquarters and removed board members. USAID, which administered approximately 60 percent of US foreign assistance, was gutted, with over 80 percent of its portfolio canceled. The Fulbright program took severe cuts. Language training programs at universities lost Defense Department funding.
The right-wing argument for all of this rests on a fundamental and willful confusion. The theory goes that these agencies were really instruments of domestic censorship — government apparatuses designed to suppress conservative American voices at home. Marco Rubio announced the GEC’s closure by declaring that it had been used to “actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.” For that claim, officials at the Global Engagement Center have offered denials, and there is no evidence to support it. A federal appeals court, in examining lawsuits targeting the GEC, found no evidence that its officials had coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content. The narrative that these agencies were turned against the American people was politically useful and factually hollow.
I say this not as an abstract critic but as someone who was involved in creating the Global Engagement Center. The mission was specific and outward-facing: recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation aimed at undermining American interests and those of our allies. The GEC was tracking Russian narratives around Ukraine, Chinese influence campaigns in Africa and Southeast Asia, and Iranian disinformation targeting American audiences. It was not reading your tweets. It was watching what the Kremlin, the IRGC, and the Chinese Communist Party were doing to shape perceptions overseas and at home — because those are not separate theaters anymore.
The people who tore this infrastructure down either do not understand the modern information environment or, more troublingly, are comfortable with the vacuum their decisions created. Chinese state media openly celebrated the closure of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin called it “truly gratifying.” When your adversaries are that publicly pleased by a policy decision, it is worth pausing to ask who it actually serves.
Those of us who worked in this space assumed we would have some lag time — that the consequences of these closures would take years to fully materialize. Institutions take time to wind down, adversaries take time to scale up, and global audiences don’t shift overnight. We were wrong about the timeline. The effects have arrived with startling speed, and we are seeing them most vividly in the current conflict with Iran.
Pro-Iran groups, almost certainly linked to the government in Tehran, have deployed AI to produce English-language propaganda targeting American audiences — slick, culturally fluent memes and videos racking up millions of views across social platforms. They have portrayed President Trump as old, out of step, and internationally isolated. They have weaponized the Epstein files, Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, and infighting within the MAGA coalition. One series of AI-generated videos presents Trump and Netanyahu as Lego minifigures. In one, an Iranian military commander raps over imagery of Trump falling into a target. After a ceasefire was announced, the account posted simply: “Iran won! Trump surrendered.”
The videos are, admittedly, sometimes funny. They are also deeply ironic. The regime producing them has imposed a near-total internet blackout on its own citizens. X and most major social platforms have been blocked inside Iran for years, accessible only via VPN — and most ordinary Iranians have barely had access to the internet at all since the outbreak of the conflict in February. The culture these videos depict Iranians defending — the references to American pop culture, the fluency in meme language, the appeal to human rights — is precisely the culture the Islamic Republic murders people for embracing inside its own borders. Women are killed for not wearing the hijab properly. Protesters are tortured and executed. This is the regime now winning the meme war.
Analysts say the sophistication of these videos — the bandwidth, the production quality, the cultural knowledge of the American internet — indicates these creators are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime. It is state propaganda dressed in the aesthetic of organic content. And it is working in part because the US and Israel do not appear to be engaging in anything comparable for external audiences — the White House’s memes are aimed domestically, at Americans who already support the administration. Nobody is reaching the swing audiences in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa who are forming their views about this conflict in real time.
Ridicule and satire are especially potent in this environment because they are captivating and very difficult to counter. A factual rebuttal to a Lego animation almost inevitably looks plodding, humorless, and tonally mismatched. You can’t win a meme war by holding a press conference. You need infrastructure, institutional knowledge, cultural fluency, and the operational capacity to produce and distribute counter-narrative content at scale. We had that. We threw it away.
“This is how we lose big wars,” one former counter-disinformation researcher said after the GEC’s closure. That quote wasn’t hyperbole. In the DIME framework, information is not a supplementary element. It is a co-equal instrument of national power. You cannot substitute military and economic pressure for informational presence — especially when the adversary has studied your culture for decades and knows exactly how to reach your own population. Iran’s propaganda operation is the fruit of a decades-long government program to learn American politics and pop culture — the meme war didn’t emerge overnight. It was prepared. We were not.
There is a tendency in American political life to dismiss information operations as somehow soft, as less serious than real tools of statecraft. The same impulse that sees diplomacy as weakness and foreign assistance as waste. These are the instincts of people who have never had to fight for narrative control in a conflict, who have never watched a carefully crafted lie spread faster than the truth in a language we didn’t think to monitor. The DIME model exists because generations of national security professionals learned, often through painful experience, that you need all four instruments working together. Pull one out and the others become less effective, not equally effective.
We dismantled our informational infrastructure not because it was failing — VOA alone reached hundreds of millions of people in closed societies who had no other access to independent news — but because some people convinced themselves and others that it was a domestic censorship threat. The result is that the US has been all but crippled in its ability to compete in the global information arena, while Russia and China have moved to fill every gap.
The Lego videos are funny. The situation is not. A theocracy that blocks its own people’s access to the internet is currently running circles around the United States in the information space of an active conflict. That does not happen by accident. It happens because one side prepared and the other side burned down its own capacity and called it a victory for free speech.
We will be paying the cost of that decision for a very long time.
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