Non-State Actress: The National Security Establishment’s Never-Ending Sin

How America's Communication Failures Handed Democracy's Enemies the Keys

BLUF

The U.S. national security establishment equates sounding like a human graham cracker with being serious, intelligent, and important. And now? Democracy isn't just under attack - it's hemorrhaging from crusty self-inflicted wounds.

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The U.S. national security establishment equates sounding like a human graham cracker with being serious, intelligent, and important. And now? Democracy isn't just under attack - it's hemorrhaging from crusty self-inflicted wounds.

Authoritarian ideas, regimes, and their expanding networks of proxies operate with impunity while the United States retreats into dangerous isolationism. Elaborate (and not so elaborate) foreign interference bears some responsibility, but not all.

A great deal is traced back to the never-ending sin of how America's national security establishment continues to systematically alienated the very people it exists to protect.

For decades, the U.S. foreign policy and national security community has operated under a catastrophic near-criminal assumption: expertise is cloistered among elites and communicated through briefings, insider channels, newsletters, and the nightly news rendering critical issues boring and incomprehensible to ordinary Americans. It holds a death grip on what constitutes as "serious". A terrifyingly narrow, stiff, and stale information ecosystem reigns and any deviation from approved channels or approaches is treated as a silly gimmick or sideshow at best but more frequently as frivolous and stupid.

This isn’t "poor messaging" - it's a fundamental abdication of democratic responsibility, creating a progressing storm of public disengagement, institutional distrust, and political chaos.

Worse still, the refusal to acknowledge this never-ending sin, let alone understand and address it, hands our adversaries a strategic advantage they exploit mercilessly.

The stakes couldn't be higher. While Putin wages war in Ukraine and bolsters global dictatorships, Xi threatens Taiwan and the South China Sea, Kim Jong Un accelerates missile development, and Tehran fights a war with Israel with a weakened but still present proxy network in tow. Together these four nations and their non-governmental friends are collaborating in an increasingly complex group project to eradicate democracy and freedom around the world fueled by the tinder America made.

And the United States is merely watching the fire spread because that is the reply the American people and our elected leaders say is right.

But, why?

America's response is hampered by a populace that views foreign policy as irrelevant and suspicious because the system made it so. It did not just open the door to constant disinformation and malinformation campaigns from adversaries—it built the house, paid the mortgage and property taxes, and furnished every room with the accessories stolen from those who pointed out the cracks in the foundation. Worse, it handed our adversaries the keys and the ability to sound more credible to Americans on foreign policy than their own government. Now Members of Congress treat foreign policy as a domestic political weapon and get away with it because of this never-ending sin.

Meanwhile China leverages every tool of statecraft, Russia perfects hybrid warfare through surrogates, North Korea builds asymmetric capabilities and gets really good at Zoom interviews, and Iran orchestrates regional destabilization through militias and terrorist groups, and America struggles with basic policy coherence because too many decision-makers lack basic knowledge to do their jobs. The US is left with aid packages ICMB-ed by conspiracy theories and military strategies determined by people who think NATO is a trade deal and Signal is a classified space.

Who is to blame?

When national security experts speak only to each other and in language 99% of Americans find as interesting as iPhone Terms and Conditions, they create a void that state and non-state actors eagerly fill with conspiracy theories and anti-establishment narratives big and small. The progression is well-documented: disengagement breeds distrust and distrust metastasizes into resentful chaos, thus producing leaders who fundamentally misunderstand and undermine America's role in the world.

Yet for those of us who see what could be and not merely what is, the path is clear. No more "targeted outreach" or condescending efforts to educate "low-information voters.". No more national security as a political exercise. Rather, a breed of fact-focused foreign policy, national security, and defense communicators with deep expertise and unique voices. The obliteration of "one message, one way" and rise of "the Panama Canal is the Geopolitical Equivalent of Netflix."

The world demands we abandon the comfort of the informational equivalent of corn flakes for the harder work of real, deep, and yes – sometimes funny, explanation. National security must and can become a public conversation, not a private consultation among insiders.

The window for this transformation is closing fast. Authoritarian regimes are expanding their proxy networks, spreaders of adversarial world views are embedding further into the cultural zeitgeist, and democratic institutions are crumbling. America cannot afford a national security establishment operating in splendid isolation from the people it claims to defend. We must use the water our politics are supposed to stop at to subdue this wild fire.

The choice is stark: revolutionize how we communicate what matters and why or watch the world burn.