Great power competition in the information space

In January 2017, the United States Intelligence Community released its declassified assessment concluding that Russia conducted a coordinated influence campaign targeting the 2016 presidential election — combining covert intelligence operations, social media manipulation, and state-controlled media amplification. Whatever one’s view of the downstream political consequences, the structural significance of that assessment was largely underappreciated at the time: it marked the moment great power competition was formally acknowledged, by a major Western government, to include the information environment as a primary strategic theater. Not a secondary effect. Not a propaganda sideshow. A primary theater. That framing has since reshaped defense doctrine, intelligence collection priorities, and multilateral governance debates from Brussels to Canberra. This article analyzes the structural logic driving information geopolitics — why states compete in the information space, what doctrines guide that competition, how infrastructure control functions as a geopolitical instrument, and where Western strategic responses are reaching their documented limits.

The structural conditions driving information geopolitics

Why the information environment became a strategic theater

The digitization of communication infrastructure did not simply accelerate information exchange. It created a new class of strategic asset — one that is simultaneously a medium of economic activity, a vector for influence, a target for disruption, and a site of norm contestation. From a structural-realist perspective, this created an obvious imperative: states that could shape information environments would gain leverage over adversary decision-making, domestic political stability, and international legitimacy. The information space became, in the language of Kenneth Waltz’s structural theory, another dimension of capability distribution — and therefore a domain of competition.

What complicates this picture is that information power does not distribute in the same way as military or economic power. The United States retains significant structural advantages — dominant social media platforms, undersea cable infrastructure, satellite communications architecture — but those advantages are simultaneously constrained by the First Amendment, by corporate independence from government direction, and by normative commitments to an open global internet that limit the tools available for state-directed information management.

The concept of sharp power and its structural implications

In 2017, the National Endowment for Democracy published a report by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig introducing the concept of sharp power — distinct from both hard power (coercive) and soft power (attractive). Sharp power describes the use of information manipulation, co-optation, and distraction to pierce the information environments of target societies, degrading their capacity for autonomous political judgment. The concept was developed specifically to describe Chinese and Russian information operations, but its analytical utility extends beyond those actors. Sharp power interventions exploit the openness of democratic information environments as a structural vulnerability — precisely the asymmetry that closed political systems can exploit while defending their own information space against equivalent penetration.

State doctrines in the information competition: Russia, China, and the United States

Russia’s reflexive control theory and its operational descendants

Russian strategic thinking on information operations has deep roots in Soviet-era aktivnyye meropriyatiya (active measures) — a doctrine of using disinformation, forgery, and agent-of-influence operations to shape adversary perceptions and decisions. The contemporary theoretical framework is reflexive control, developed by Soviet military theorist Vladimir Lefebvre and operationalized through the work of analysts like Sergei Rastorguev. Reflexive control aims not simply to deceive a target, but to cause the target to reach a decision — autonomously, seemingly of their own volition — that serves the originating actor’s interests. It is cognitive warfare in its most sophisticated structural form.

Russia’s 2013 Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov article — widely, and somewhat misleadingly, characterized in Western discourse as the “Gerasimov Doctrine” — articulated a vision of modern warfare in which non-military means, including information operations, play a primary rather than supporting role. The operational descendants of this thinking are visible in documented campaigns: the use of Internet Research Agency troll networks, the amplification of divisive content through state media outlets RT and Sputnik, and the exploitation of social platform algorithms to maximize organic reach of manufactured narratives.

China’s three warfares doctrine and the Belt and Road information dimension

China’s Three Warfares doctrine — formally incorporated into the People’s Liberation Army Political Work Regulations in 2003 — identifies public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare as coordinated instruments of strategic competition. Unlike Russian information operations, which tend toward disruption and destabilization, China’s information strategy is more explicitly constructive: building favorable perceptions of Chinese governance models, embedding Chinese telecommunications infrastructure through Belt and Road Initiative partnerships, and contesting Western normative dominance in multilateral institutions.

The infrastructure dimension here is critical and often underanalyzed. Huawei’s participation in 5G network construction in partner countries is not merely a commercial decision. It creates conditions for potential signals intelligence access, norm-setting on data governance, and long-term dependency relationships that constrain partner governments’ foreign policy autonomy. This is great power competition expressed through infrastructure deployment — and it operates on decadal timescales.

The United States: structural advantages and constitutional constraints

The United States retains the largest footprint in global information infrastructure. American platforms — Google, Meta, X (formerly Twitter), Amazon Web Services — intermediate a disproportionate share of the world’s digital communication. But this structural advantage creates a distinctive strategic tension. The U.S. government cannot direct those platforms to serve state information objectives without triggering First Amendment litigation and credibility costs that would undermine the normative case for open internet governance that Washington formally champions.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, established by executive order in 2016 and subsequently funded through the National Defense Authorization Act, represents the institutional response to this constraint — an attempt to counter foreign disinformation through exposure and counter-narrative rather than equivalent manipulation. Available evidence suggests this approach has achieved mixed results against adversaries operating without equivalent normative constraints.

Does infrastructure control determine information geopolitical outcomes?

Undersea cables and satellite communications as strategic assets

The physical layer of the information environment — undersea fiber-optic cables carrying approximately 95% of international internet traffic, according to estimates cited by the Council on Foreign Relations — is increasingly recognized as a strategic vulnerability. Cable landing stations, chokepoints, and the nationalities of cable-owning consortia have become subjects of active policy attention. The U.S. government has moved to block Chinese participation in trans-Pacific cable projects. Russia has invested in the capacity to surveil and potentially sever cable infrastructure, as documented by NATO assessments of increased submarine activity near cable routes.

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation introduces a new variable into this calculus. Its demonstrated utility in the Ukraine conflict — providing connectivity when terrestrial infrastructure was targeted — illustrates how commercial satellite communications can function as military-relevant information infrastructure, raising governance questions that existing multilateral frameworks are not equipped to resolve.

The splinternet and digital sovereignty as geopolitical architecture

The concept of a unified global internet is increasingly a fiction. China’s Great Firewall, Russia’s Sovereign Internet law (adopted 2019), and Iran’s national intranet architecture represent three distinct models of state-controlled information environments — each reflecting different political economies of information control, but converging on the shared objective of limiting external information penetration while preserving capacity for outward-facing information operations. This structural asymmetry — the splinternet as a geopolitical condition rather than a technical failure — is what makes great power competition in the information space so difficult to address through reciprocal constraint.

A framework for mapping great power competition in the information environment

Analysts assessing information geopolitical competition require a structured methodology that disaggregates the domain into analyzable components. The following framework, drawing on NATO’s cognitive warfare concepts and OSINT analytical practice, identifies key indicators across four dimensions:

A practical OSINT assessment of a specific information operation or infrastructure deployment should evaluate the following indicators:

1. Attribution confidence: Is the actor’s identity established through technical indicators, behavioral pattern matching, or solely through government attribution claims? Each carries different evidentiary weight.
2. Doctrinal consistency: Does the observed operation conform to the attributed actor’s documented doctrine? Deviation from established patterns warrants analytical caution.
3. Infrastructure dependency: Does the target state or organization have structural dependencies on the attributed actor’s information infrastructure — telecommunications, platforms, or data systems?
4. Narrative objective: Is the operation aimed at disruption (degrading trust in institutions), construction (building favorable perceptions), or coercion (changing specific decisions)?
5. Temporal dimension: Is this a short-cycle tactical operation or part of a long-cycle strategic campaign? The distinction has significant implications for response design.
6. Multilateral governance implications: Does the operation exploit gaps in existing international agreements — Budapest Convention, ITU frameworks, or bilateral information-sharing agreements?

In my assessment, the most analytically underweighted dimension in current Western frameworks is the temporal one. Most counter-disinformation responses are calibrated to the news cycle. Chinese information infrastructure embedding operates on 10–20 year strategic timescales. That mismatch in temporal logic is itself a structural vulnerability.

Multilateral governance failures and the limits of Western strategic response

The ITU as a contested governance arena

The International Telecommunication Union has become a primary site of information geopolitical contestation, largely below the threshold of mainstream analytical attention. Russia and China have actively advanced proposals at the ITU that would shift internet governance from the current multi-stakeholder model — in which civil society, technical bodies, and governments share authority — toward an intergovernmental model that would formalize state control over national information environments and potentially over cross-border data flows. The election of Russia’s candidate to lead the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau in 2022 was a concrete indicator of this strategic contest, even if the margin of defeat on the broader Secretariat election suggested the strategy has limits.

NATO’s cognitive warfare framework and its implementation gaps

NATO’s 2021 recognition of cognitive warfare as a domain of concern — articulated through the Innovation Hub’s research program and referenced in subsequent strategic communications — represents an important doctrinal acknowledgment. But acknowledgment and capability are different things. The Alliance’s information operations capacity remains fragmented across national authorities, constrained by member-state legal frameworks, and structurally dependent on the United States for signals intelligence that informs attribution. The Five Eyes architecture provides a partial corrective — enabling information sharing that supports faster attribution — but it excludes key European NATO allies and creates its own governance tensions around intelligence-derived evidence that cannot be disclosed publicly without compromising sources.

Forward assessment

Great power competition in the information space will intensify as AI-enabled content generation reduces the cost of narrative production, as undersea cable infrastructure becomes an active military planning consideration, and as ITU governance battles accelerate the structural fragmentation of the global internet. What concerns me here is not the familiar alarmism about information war — it is the institutional mismatch between the long-cycle strategic logic of Chinese information infrastructure embedding and the short-cycle political logic governing Western democratic responses. The most durable strategic advantage in this competition will not come from superior narrative production. It will come from institutional resilience — the capacity of open societies to maintain epistemic coherence under sustained informational pressure while preserving the normative commitments that differentiate their model from the alternatives.

For further analytical depth on the themes covered here, readers may want to explore the adjacent questions of cognitive warfare and democratic resilience, the operational mechanics of reflexive control in documented case studies, and the emerging governance architecture for AI-generated influence operations — all of which are developing rapidly enough that the analytical landscape is materially different than it was two years ago.

Sources

• Walker, C. & Ludwig, J. (2017). Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence. National Endowment for Democracy.
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (2017). Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. ODNI.
• Giles, K. (2016). Russia’s ‘New’ Tools for Confronting the West: Continuity and Innovation in Moscow’s Exercise of Power. Chatham House.
• Thomas, T. (2004). Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military. Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 17(2), 237–256.
• NATO Innovation Hub. (2021). Cognitive Warfare: The Battleground of the 21st Century. NATO ACT.
• Lindsay, J. & Kello, L. (2014). Correspondence: A Cyber Disagreement. International Security, 39(2), 181–192. MIT Press.