For the last few years, we have witnessed Russia using nonmilitary tools of power to achieve strategic goals, which include undermining NATO, the EU, and the U.S.-led international order. In January 2017, the U.S. Intelligence Community released a report detailing Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at supporting Donald Trump’s election against his opponent. His reasons for doing so are not hard to surmise: Hillary Clinton promised that she would “deter” Russian aggression in Europe if elected, whereas Donald Trump supported the UK in leaving the EU, spoke ambivalently about NATO, and said he would consider lifting sanctions against Russia. Accordingly, a strategy to shape the preferences and opinions of U.S. voters in support of Donald Trump was the logical coercive action to take in support of Russian strategic goals.

Regardless of how these new incentive structures play out, one thing is clear: the success of Russia’s influence operations illustrates the new normal.

Evidence of Russian operators engaging in similar influence campaigns—shaping public opinion in support of candidates and parties based on Russia’s national interests—is prevalent across Europe. These influence operations are not just limited to shaping preferences during electoral campaigns. In 2016, Russia mobilized its public opinion shaping tools in an attempt to undermine public support for a military partnership between Sweden and NATO. Russia also used similar tools to support the “leave” campaign in the UK. On both occasions, Russia prioritized public opinion shaping tools above traditional hard power tools as a means to achieve two of its highest priority objectives: undermining both NATO and the EU.

Experts may argue that these actions do not represent a new international dynamic. In fact, some may even propose that Russia’s strategic doctrine represents a return to Soviet era active measures. While this may be true, what is different about these strategies is their rising efficacy because there are more democracies in the post-Cold War era, and with the rapid expansion of information technology, even more ways to directly influence their voters.

According to a 2016 Pew Poll, 62% of American adults now get their news from social media sites. Meanwhile, in another 2016 study, Stanford researchers found that even young, savvy social media users were easily duped by fake information sources online, concluding “we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.”