War of the Words: Can New Zealand Save the West (and Itself)?
The most effective sabotage is the kind we cheer for.
No one would have believed, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that Western affairs were being manipulated by hostile states abroad. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinised, as a virologist studies a disease that swarms and multiplies in a receptive population.
Few even considered the possibility that our divisions were being shaped and cultivated. And yet, across the gulf of ideology and ambition, regimes immeasurably more patient and strategic than our own regarded our freedoms as weaknesses, and our openness as opportunities - and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.1
The West can’t inoculate itself against a pathogen it refuses to acknowledge
There was a time when political life in the West was shaped by shared assumptions: that truth was knowable, that disagreement was healthy, and that citizenship meant something beyond competing identities. We argued, often passionately, about taxes, education, housing, healthcare, and a fairer system. But in recent years, those familiar civic arguments have been displaced - not by better ones, but by a kind of cultural fever.
The symptoms spread quickly: increased tribalism, language policed, history rewritten, institutions distrusted, reality itself rendered negotiable. What began as ideological drift has become something closer to infection - an opportunistic pathogen that enters through division, multiplies through outrage, and is weakening the West from within. It would be comforting to think this was simply cultural evolution, or an imported strain of American madness. But that underestimates what we’re dealing with. This social pathogen was not just imported, but also implanted.
New Zealand has proven itself to be far from immune. Small, open, and wired into almost every global current, without a capable immune system to ward off these imported ideologies, identity obsessions, and digital manipulation. What appears here as homegrown dissent - left, right and everything in between, often carries the fingerprints of this foreign influence. Narratives laundered through social media, movements shaped offshore, outrage optimised by algorithm. The culture war, once a sideshow, is now the stage. And the lines we shout at each other are all too often scripted outside our shores.
The idea that we in New Zealand are merely passive recipients of American cultural fads is oddly reassuring. It suggests the fever will pass, the infection self-limiting - something we can outlast or outscroll. It also flatters our moral superiority: we blame each other, assuming the virus is always carried by the other side. But the evidence tells a more unsettling story. Around the world, authoritarian regimes have learned they don’t need to conquer the West - they only need to confuse it. To fracture it from within. By seeding division, amplifying grievance, and eroding shared truth, they achieve with memes and narratives what tanks and missiles never could. And they are doing it with chilling precision, and almost no resistance.
We can’t inoculate ourselves against a pathogen we refuse to acknowledge - and the West seems remarkably resistant, despite the evidence, to accept that we are under sustained cognitive viral attack. For all our talk of resilience, liberal democracies remain dangerously naive to the strategic use of disinformation, digital manipulation, and ideological subversion by hostile states. We still frame these tactics as fringe phenomena - esoteric troll farms, random conspiracy theories, or culture war excesses, rather than coordinated campaigns designed to destabilise societies from within. But the fingerprints are everywhere.
So who are some of the key players?
Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA), now well known within Western intelligence, pioneered the weaponisation of digital discourse. According to a 2020 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, the IRA wasn’t merely pushing disinformation; it was orchestrating division. It ran both pro- and anti–Black Lives Matter Facebook pages. It built audiences, fostered outrage, and then directed them at each other. One account calls for justice. Another calls it terrorism. Neither is real. Their aim was never persuasion, it was provocation and polarisation. Not debate, but detonation. The result: entropy disguised as engagement, and civil trust bleeding out into the algorithm.
China’s methods are slower, smoother, and in many ways more insidious. Its operations don’t crash through the front door; they rewire the house. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and cyber-intelligence firm Recorded Future have documented how Beijing curates a parallel news ecosystem through platforms like TikTok and WeChat. These aren’t just apps. They are ecosystems of influence, particularly among diaspora communities, where narratives are shaped to subtly denigrate liberal democracy while elevating authoritarianism as rational, stable, and morally justified. ASPI’s findings have been questioned by some for their closeness to Western defence interests, but the evidence they present is both detailed and corroborated. A soft power offensive, delivered through hard code.
Even Iran, with its more limited reach, has joined the fray. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Iranian nationals for running sophisticated networks of fake social media accounts impersonating Americans on both sides of the aisle. These weren’t bots posting spam. They were sockpuppets posing as citizens - activists, veterans, teachers - sowing discord across sensitive social fault lines. They didn’t argue for a cause. They picked at wounds. A meme here. A hashtag there. The goal wasn’t to advocate, but to aggravate. Not win an argument, but to make reason impossible.
But the threat doesn’t stop at state borders. While Russia, China, and Iran may be key players in the contagion, they are not the only forces driving it. A complex web of actors - some strategic, others opportunistic, many completely unwitting - continue to accelerate the spread. Ideologues chasing influence, media outlets chasing clicks, political movements chasing power: all become vectors. Even well-meaning citizens, convinced they are fighting for justice or truth, can end up amplifying messages designed to divide. The infection spreads not because it is powerful, but because we are vulnerable, fragmented, distracted, and addicted to outrage. And the longer we misdiagnose the cause, the lower our chances of survival.
The prognosis for New Zealand is not good, but it doesn’t have to be terminal.
Some in New Zealand still believe we’re immune. We’re small. We’re tucked away. We’re practical. “She’ll be right, mate”. Blissful ignorance, alas, is not a vaccine. In 2023, our own Security Intelligence Service issued an explicit warning that New Zealand is now the target of coordinated foreign interference efforts - particularly from China, Russia, and Iran. These players objectives are clear: to erode trust in our institutions, to exploit social fault lines, and to manipulate communities vulnerable to identity-based appeals.
Insidiously, these efforts don’t wear the badge of a state. They arrive through a torrent of Facebook and X posts, viral TikToks, influencer collaborations, and weaponised YouTube rants. They colonise the mind through repetition and familiarity, not force. Our universities see rising waves of ideological conformity. Our media increasingly confuse activism for reporting. And our public discourse, once boring but relatively stable, is now a theatre of moral outrage.
And now, these tactics are being supercharged. The advent of generative AI and synthetic media means hostile actors no longer need armies of trolls, they can deploy armies of machines. AI-generated personas, deepfake videos, and algorithmically tailored disinformation are not just possible - they are already in play. What once required time, money, and manpower can now be scaled at the speed of computation. In this new environment, even reality becomes negotiable, and trust, already fragile, becomes almost impossible to restore once lost.
Left or right, the ideological contagion respects no political boundary. On the right, it exploits paranoia, conspiracy theory, and anti-establishment sentiment, from QAnon to sovereign citizen rhetoric, often imported from fringe corners of American discourse and rapidly localised. On the left, it finds willing hosts in decolonisation dogma, intersectional Marxism, and critical theory, which can erode shared truth and national unity under the guise of justice. Both sides, though convinced of their moral clarity, risk becoming agents of this imported discord. As Canadian intelligence analyst Scott McGregor notes, adversarial regimes don’t care which ideology prevails - only that trust dissolves and institutions fracture. When a nation sees its own foundations as illegitimate, it no longer needs to be conquered. It collapses from within.
This isn’t cultural evolution. It’s an ideological virus - mutated, weaponised, and deliberately released into a population with no immunity.
The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported in 2022 that Russia had used state-controlled media, bot networks, and covert funding to interfere in British democratic processes. Similar tactics have been identified in Germany, Canada, Australia - and now, here. The NZSIS has confirmed this in open reports. Still, too many New Zealanders meet this information with a shrug.
Doubt is natural. But it’s no longer credible to dismiss this threat as online noise or conspiracy. The G7 (an informal grouping of seven of the world's most advanced economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) has formed a Rapid Response Mechanism to track and counter disinformation. NATO has established a StratCom Centre of Excellence for the same purpose. If this were just fringe paranoia, why would every democratic alliance treat it as a Tier One threat?
And why, when our own intelligence services sound the alarm, do so few seem to hear it?
Perhaps because it’s easier to believe our neighbour is the problem. That the real threat is the protestor, the activist, the partisan fool on X, the broadcaster with the wrong views, or the academic who dares question the prevailing narrative. But this is precisely the point of cognitive warfare. It doesn’t demand you believe the lie - only that you distrust everything else.
Russia doesn’t care if you support vaccines or oppose them. It wants both narratives to metastasise. China doesn’t care whether you love democracy or loathe it, only that you lose faith in it. Iran doesn’t need you to endorse its ideology, only to turn your back on your fellow citizen.
Because what our adversaries truly seek is not to win an argument, but to dissolve the conditions in which arguments can even take place. Trust. Legitimacy. Consensus. The assumption of good faith. These are not abstractions - they are the lifeblood of democracy. And it is that which they are trying to kill.
And here lies the greater tragedy: the West is losing a war it doesn’t even seem to realise it’s in. While our adversaries operate with strategic clarity and ideological ruthlessness, we get sucked into identity politics, bicker over definitions, cancel our own thinkers, and declare truth subordinate to feelings. A society unsure of what it is, or even if it deserves to exist, cannot defend itself. Not physically, not morally, not intellectually.
Can New Zealand lead the fightback and set an example for the West to follow?
New Zealand, paradoxically, may be uniquely placed to lead the fightback. We may seem too small, too quiet, and too far away to matter - yet those qualities may make us the ideal testbed and beacon for democratic defence in the digital age. We are small enough to turn the ship around, yet stable enough to set a global example. We still possess a salvageable level of institutional trust, social cohesion, and democratic spirit that has been further eroded elsewhere. If we choose to confront this threat - by investing in education that values critical thinking, media literacy, civic humility, unity and pluralism - we may yet inoculate ourselves from the mind viruses tearing Western nations apart.
We cannot censor our way out of this. Nor can we retreat into tribalism. Our only defence is cognitive resilience. It means teaching students critical thinking. It means improving our media literacy as a civic skill. It means creating institutions that can recognise information warfare when it appears in the feed. It means holding our media to a higher standard. It means starving the trolls instead of feeding them. It means asking: Whose narrative is this? Who benefits from my anger?
New Zealand must build an immunity to these ideological contagions, both imported and implanted. Not by closing our eyes, but by opening them wider: seeing not just the slogans or hashtags, but who benefits from them and how. And more importantly, by seeing our fellow citizens not as ideological enemies, but as teammates in a shared project to save freedom and democracy - people we need beside us, not against us, to face the real threat in front of us. In an age of weaponised narratives, your true adversary is rarely the one shouting at you online. It’s the silent actor who profits from your outrage, and weakens your country while you fight their war for them.
Because if we don’t, and we keep tearing ourselves apart, the only ones left standing will be those who never wanted us united in the first place.
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An homage to the great H.G. Wells, Jeff Wayne, and Richard Burton, and the wonder and imagination they inspired.
Bibliography
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Available here.
FBI. (2024). Wanted Poster: Three Iranian Cyber Actors.
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Graphika & Stanford Internet Observatory. (2020). More-Troll Kombat: Russia’s Strategy for Africa.
Available here.
New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS). (2023). Annual Report 2023.
Available here.
NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. (n.d.). Official Website.
Available here.
Recorded Future. (2023). Beyond Hybrid War: How China Exploits Social Media to Sway the West.
Available here.
UK Parliament Intelligence and Security Committee. (2020). Russia Report.
Available here.
U.S. Department of Justice. (2024). Three IRGC Cyber Actors Indicted for Hack-and-Leak Operation Designed to Influence the 2024 U.S. Election.
Available here.
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Available here.