To understand US national security, it’s necessary to know its enemies.

Threats to America are always bubbling just below the surface. When the media tries to describe national security threats, it tends to talk about isolated events – dangerous events, to be sure, but points in time that are perilous. And yet, US adversaries have a purpose and an attending crusade designed to eliminate forever what good Americans sacrificed and died for throughout the nation’s history. If the focus of the Fourth Estate and even US National Security is solely on moments and events in time, they will continue to fail to understand the most significant lesson.

The Threats Must Be Recognized

To be prepared for threats to our country’s well-being, US leadership and citizenry must understand those threats. Our current national security apparatus identifies China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as the most well-defined menaces. Unfortunately, the problem is that Americans and government leaders generally behave as if they are clueless about what the US faces. In simplest terms, America faces two existential threats, as defense insiders like to call them, to our country’s existence. One is from the outside, and one is from the inside. Both are produced to one extent or another by these four adversaries.

“The American homeland has been under attack for the past two decades, with little in the way of meaningful response,” RAND researcher Stephen Webber explained to The Hill. “In 2013, disaster was narrowly averted after Iranian hackers infiltrated the control systems of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York and nearly flooded a small town. A 2017 hack of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas was later revealed to be the work of Russian hackers, as was a 2022 attack on an international food company, which temporarily closed all of its meatpacking plants in the United States.”

North Korea has been equally busy in its cyberattacks against the US. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has consistently published warnings regarding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) assaults on America’s domestic infrastructure. Recently, the DPRK has targeted institutions using ransomware, demanding payment in cryptocurrency. These attacks have been against health care and public health sector organizations. According to CISA, the revenue from the ransoms “supports DPRK national-level priorities and objectives, including cyber operations targeting the United States and South Korea governments—specific targets include Department of Defense Information Networks and Defense Industrial Base member networks.”

Destroying Confidence in America’s Institutions

The purpose of cyberattacks is to destroy average Americans’ confidence in the US institutions on which they depend. When citizens no longer have confidence in government or essential services, decision-making on the national and local levels is suspect. No institution is dearer to maintaining Americans’ values and ways of life than our electoral process. Confidence in the fair and accessible means of choosing our elected leaders is critical to the foundations of America’s national values. So, the electoral process is a logical and, unfortunately, easy target for freedom’s enemies.

“On Friday [Sep. 6, 2024], a hawkish think tank [Foundation for Defense of Democracies] revealed that a network of pro-Iranian sites have [sic] been circulating disinformation around the election,”  Politico reported. “That comes on the heels of the intelligence community linking Iran to a hacking of the Trump campaign. US officials said in a briefing with reporters on Friday that Russia, Iran, and China were all trying to influence the upcoming elections.”

This Russian and Chinese military aggression constitutes tangible threats to US interests globally. Beijing’s bellicose activities in the South China Sea and Russia’s and China’s intrusion into Africa are direct challenges to US influence in those regions. However, more subtle attacks domestically stress Americans’ confidence in the US capability to keep them safe – like at American colleges and universities where parents thought their children would be safe but soon found out otherwise. “Agents of the Iranian government have worked to influence American protests against the war in Gaza, a top US intelligence official said Tuesday [Sep. 9], in one of the most stark warnings yet about foreign meddling amid demonstrations that rocked the nation this spring,” USA Today reported.

As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conveyed to Congress recently, “When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting, and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.” When institutions of higher learning on which Americans rely cannot be trusted to prepare young people for positions of responsibility in governing, serving their fellow citizens, or engaging in any number of endeavors that make America work, it is one indication that the US will begin to collapse from its foundations.

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.