Meddling in U.S. Elections, Florida Reels from Twin Storms, Nobel Peace Laureate to Be Named, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, U.S. intelligence officials warn of foreign meddling in the U.S. elections. Florida seeks to recover from back-to-back historic storms. And this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner is announced in Norway. It's October 10th, 2024 and time for The World Next Week.
I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's kick off with that meddling mentioned. On Monday, U.S. intelligence officials reported that Russia and China are targeting congressional races using a combination of fake websites, social media accounts, and so forth to spread misinformation about the campaigns.
What should we know about these threats and their scale and how serious?

ROBBINS:
Let's be clear, especially in these very nervous and fraught times, that U.S. officials—from federal government to local election officials, your neighbors— say there has been no evidence in previous elections, and they see no evidence of tampering right now in the integrity of U.S. voting systems. If you're going to hear disinformation about that, they are not raising that alarm.

We have the benefit, of course, that there is no central election system here. There's nothing central to hack. We are protected from that. Venezuelan dictators, Smartmatic, all of that other stuff that we heard before. That's not what they're talking about here. And that stuff was, as they delicately say, I'm not going to delicately say what it was, but it was.

What is being tampered with is the public psyche, and U.S. officials are worrying. There's domestic disinformation, there's foreign disinformation, and worrying because this is breaking down trust in the system and trust in each of us, and they're worrying that that could manifest itself in a very physical way in the real world. They're warning that, in the days and weeks after the election, that dis- and misinformation both foreign and, once again, domestically generated—and a lot of this is homegrown—could feed extremist sentiments. Election workers are already getting all sorts of threats. And I don't want to predict violence, but we certainly need to ensure the safety of election officials and the safety of voters. This stuff is real, but it's not the tampering with the election machines which is going to be part of the focus of the misinformation campaigns.

After the shock of 2016 and the Russians messing around in social media, I think we've really become inured to foreign disinformation. It's as if it's just one more cost of doing business in a social media world, but U.S. officials say it's actually getting worse by the year. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco warned in early September that this year's campaigns will be more diverse and aggressive, with more actors from more countries operating in a more polarized world and fueled by more technology and accelerated by AI. If you were feeling happy, don't be happy.
U.S. Intelligence has said that Russia is the primary foreign threat once again with efforts to bolster, once again, former President Trump and weaken support for Ukraine on social media with fake websites, but they're certainly not the only actor in the space.

Iran is believed to oppose President Trump's reelection, and they're accused of hacking and spear-phishing attempts mainly against the Trump campaign but against all the campaigns, Biden and Harris as well, including trying to leak stolen material from the Trump campaign, which the Biden campaign pushed back.

State does not believe China is meddling at the presidential level, but this week, as you said, U.S. intelligence reported that congressional races are now a focus of foreign misinformation campaigns with China and Russia the main actors but also, interestingly, Cuba moving to bolster candidates they believe could advance their interests.

Opposing support for Taiwan, tariffs, aid to Ukraine, the embargo, and the sort of general focus undermining confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and domestic social cohesion. And that sort of more general campaign focuses on the sort of things we also hear from politicians here—immigration, the economy, Gaza—and they're also warning this disinformation could be very tactical in the sense of telling people, "No, actually, you're voting place is not on First Street. It's actually on Broad Street." That's what we used to refer to as dirty tricks in elections. There's a lot here to worry about.

MCMAHON:
Carla, I agree with you. I think the biggest impact in the landscape we are currently in is a sociological one, perhaps, and I should note a recent joint briefing by CFR and Brookings and our colleague, Kat Duffy, and Elaine Kamarck at Brookings seized on that as a central area and just both the media environment, the vacuum of traditional reliable media, and the public distrust is all adding to a real witch's brew.

But I'm wondering, as you were describing the different approaches from foreign actors or malign actors, it seems to be that Russia is willing to sort of be disruptive, however it works, just for the sake of being disruptive as well as having a favored candidate. China, though, is sort of going a little bit more tactical and looking out for—maybe even the long game—but looking out for people who could be rising in the ranks who might have it in for China.
Is that correct?

ROBBINS:
That's their read of it. I always take intelligence a little bit with a grain of salt about that, but I was intrigued by the distinction. The Iranians seem to be picking candidates on the federal level, but the Chinese and Russians and Cubans are playing as well on the local level. I find obviously they're picking up on things. They see websites. They see disinformation being pushed out on all of these things. How much more transcendent it is in the cacophony of misinformation that's also being pushed out by domestic actors? I don't think there's any way to measure that, how much is foreign impact versus domestic.

I think the more general feeding of mistrust in the system—that's really scary.

MCMAHON:
Is there a truth squad cavalry on the horizon or some sort of approach that U.S. officials or laypeople can do to try to counter this?

ROBBINS:
Well, we've all been having this conversation since 2016, and certainly fiercely within our business within journalism, about how do you deal with this? Do you amplify it by pointing it out? There's all sorts of debates that have gone on here.

What U.S. officials are doing is that, unlike in 2016 where the Obama administration made a very conscious effort not to make a big deal about it before the election, in part because they were utterly persuaded that Hillary Clinton was going to win and Donald Trump was going around before the election saying that it was going to be stolen—we hadn't heard that before, certainly in modern times, from a candidate—they thought it was easier just not to make a big deal about it in public.

They're making a big deal about it. They have regular briefings about it. They're raising public awareness. I think they're basically trying to say to people, "Be conscious of what you're hearing." People don't like to be manipulated, and if they're warned, "Someone's trying to manipulate you, and these are the topics you're going to be manipulated on," the hope is—whether you hear it from the federal government or you hear it from your pastor or you hear it from your local newspaper or you hear it from a celebrity—that has the potential, no matter where you come on the political spectrum. Nobody likes to be yanked around. They're trying to do that by raising awareness.

They're also training local and state officials as well as campaign teams, if the campaign teams will accept the help on cybersecurity—that's probably the biggest effort so their information sites are not hijacked—and also on the local level so that election infrastructure is safe.
What can we do? Really, the biggest thing this requires—civic education—that's got to start with kids. That's not something you can effectively vaccinate an entire society against four weeks before an election.

But the social media platforms certainly need to do their part to correct and give context to this information, and instead of that getting better, it's getting worse and worse. Admittedly, that's Whac-A-Mole. But unfortunately, X, which under Elon Musk has cut fact-checking staff, reinstated banned accounts. And Musk himself, with a couple of hundred million followers, regularly uses his own account to boost these voter fraud conspiracies and other disinformation. That's a really grim development. Social media is not helping with it.

But all is not necessarily lost on this notion of people not getting manipulated. I think we can all do our part here and raise the warning of, if something starts stinking, you say, "They're yanking you around here." And if you hear a false story—I don't usually sound, so here's a public service announcement from The World Next Week—but if you hear a false story, check the impulse to share it. Even if you think you're sharing it to point out its absurdity, don't push that button.

MCMAHON:
And I would note we, at CFR.org, are assiduously tracking the positions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and linking to primary sources to their own words wherever possible—certainly not sharing any sort of secondhand or iffy information, but with a focus on a foreign policy prism—but I do think, as you say, everybody's got to do their part and stop spreading rumors so promiscuously.

ROBBINS:
Is that the first time we've had the word promiscuous on The World Next Week?

MCMAHON:
It is. Sorry. I was waiting for the right moment.

ROBBINS:
It's a good time. Bob, let's shift to the series of storms that are battering the south. As we're recording Thursday morning, the sun has come up over Florida, and we're getting a fuller sense of the destruction wrought by Milton. And this is the second massive hurricane to hit the Southeastern U.S. in two weeks. I used to live in Miami, which has twice now been spared. I don't want to jinx it, but we know hurricanes in Miami and Milton was unusual in two ways.
It started in the Gulf, not the Atlantic, and it spawned a lot of tornadoes. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that at least 116 tornado warnings were issued. A lot of people need help here—they need help from Helene, they need help from Milton.
Are FEMA and other agencies up to the task ahead?

MCMAHON:
Well, they are hard-pressed at the moment. As you say, back-to-back storms like this of this size and magnitude—and we're still getting a grip on what Milton wrought—but these are not usual and the second one in particular was hitting a very populated area. There were more than seven million people put on warning notice to hunker down, to leave, to go to safe terrain, and so forth. Last I saw, close to three million people were without power in Florida. And this storm was hitting as there were active efforts to try to still clean up and help out from what Helene wrought.

By the way, they are still looking for missing people and survivors. There are at least 230 people killed by that storm, and that's the most since Katrina—so almost twenty years since a storm of that lethality. And Milton, we're still getting a grip on how much rain it dumped. Helene was notable for, especially as it got inland, just the torrents of water that were dumped. Unbelievable amounts. And so, you have places like Asheville, North Carolina—seemingly safely inland with a pleasant river running through it and a historic district and a real hub for people to come and spend time in—underwater. We have good friends who live there who were worried that they might not get their own water restored by the end of the year.

These are the types of things that FEMA was already in the grips of dealing with, and then you have Milton coming. One of the metrics that caught my eye was, in St. Petersburg, Florida, it registered more than eighteen inches of rain, which represented a one in one thousand-year rainfall event for that area. Tampa, which was an area of real concern given the potential for surges that could affect a really populated area, actually was able to avoid the worst of it by most accounts. It still, though, registered wind gusts of more than one hundred miles per hour. The roof of Tropicana Field was ripped off. It was supposed to be a makeshift shelter for first responders. This was wind. This was surge. This was rainfall. A big storm that blew across the midsection of Florida and then took off, as you say, and is now out to sea.

But its providence in the Gulf, as you say, a very rare thing this west-to-east movement across the Gulf. By the accounts of meteorologists, it was able to gain strength from the really high temperatures, unusually high temperatures, in the Gulf. Somewhere off of Cancun, it spun up, it built strength, and then it surged in strength in a way that has only been seen a few times in recorded recent history, so much so that there were meteorologists recorded being overwhelmed with emotion as they saw what was happening with the power of the storm.

Again, it downgraded to category three by the time it hit landfall, which was, by the way, what Katrina was when it hit. But still, it's able to produce a lot of devastation and destruction. And back to your original question, FEMA is already sort of low in staffing. There was a report by the government accountability office last year that about thirty-five percent of its positions were unfilled partly because of this surge in disaster activity as well as things like burnout and attrition, again, amplified by disaster activity.

What's been a little bit weird so far in this whole thing—and again, it's the immediacy of the moment is what commands attention for understandable reasons—but you're hearing very little about this human-caused climate change, human-caused factors contributing to climate change, as being something that maybe people should take more seriously, including from the campaign trail. There's more other kinds of disinformation, especially coming from—you have Republican lawmakers, like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying these are storms that are cooked up by Democrats created, which caused President Biden to single that out for criticism.

He also singled out President Trump for spreading disinformation about money going to migrants rather than to emergency needs, which is not true. FEMA has pushed back on that. Republicans, we should note, especially on the local level, have pushed back on a lot of this.

There's a lot of concern. You have an agency that's trying to do everything it can to just help people out, and it's got to also field rumors and falsehoods because we're in a political season. It's just a really difficult time. My heart goes out to the people who are affected by this but also for the relief workers who are just trying to bring help in a difficult time.
And we still have some time left in the hurricane season. Let's hope there's nothing else of this size brewing, but, as some pointed out, this was a big storm. It wasn't the big storm of the century. That should make people worried as well.

ROBBINS:
Yes. We still have a place in Miami, so I worry about it. We shut ours closed, but I worry about it every single time it happens. And I think to myself, yes.

I thought it's intriguing that this hasn't fed the climate change debate, you would think, or certainly fed the argument for why we should be worrying about climate change. It seems to be the way it's been playing in the election is that it has fed more disinformation.
But there's also one other topic, the one that we talk about frequently, which is the funding debate, and there's been a lot of concern that there isn't enough money there. We're under a continuing resolution. Small business administration saying it doesn't have enough money. Obviously, small businesses are—a lot of them are going to be wiped out by this—they need help from the federal government. A lot of people are hurting out there.

I saw this morning that Speaker Johnson says he's not going to bring any money back before the election, and he'll just have to wait until afterwards. And there's this debate. "Yes, there's enough money." "There's not enough money." Money is an important thing to help people get back their lives together. Why is there even a question about coming back and doing what people need to have done? This is a moment in—there's a lot of things people can do for themselves, but when something is this big, they really do need—they need help from Washington.

MCMAHON:
And Speaker Johnson pointed to his own experience as a Louisiana lawmaker dealing with these issues and saying it's a matter of timing, and it takes time to find out what the true needs are, but it would be helpful to know that the government stands ready to jump in and provide even some confidence-building stopgap money. There seems to be some sort of maneuver that could be enacted that would not require them to come back, by the way, and there is some sort of procedure that would allow them to provide some sort of tranche of money. I'm not sure whether that's being entertained seriously at this point, Carla, but there seem to be other paths for this. Again, it's really unfortunate that this has become this political point-scoring exercise at a time when the country really needs the politicians to be grownups and to just deal with the problem at hand because it's going to continue to be a problem.

Let's also note that this storm caused President Biden to postpone a really important trip to work with allies and to meet up with allies to shore up support for Ukraine. The Ramstein meeting in Germany. That's not happening and possibly gets rescheduled, not sure, but he basically had to scuttle that as well as his first trip—the first trip by any American president almost ten years to Africa—to Angola.

These have consequences, these storms. They are funding challenges, but these should be things that the government can take on and take on in a straightforward way.

ROBBINS:
The idea that they're not coming back because they want to be out on the campaign trail. Do your job.

MCMAHON:
Well, let's talk about the lofty chambers of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Carla, in that, shortly after this podcast drops, there should be an announcement. Sometimes there's not, but there should be an announcement—there usually is—of a new Nobel Peace Laureate.

The Laureate receives a prize of more than a million dollars, obviously global recognition of platform, should they decide to use it. There have been some really outstanding recent candidates you can point to, such as Malala Yousafzai for her ongoing work to advocate for girls' access to education and opportunity.

There have also been really questionable ones; another recent one being the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who, in the short span afterwards, drove a conflict that really laid waste to the country's Northern Tigray region.

What can you say about how the Nobel Foundation arrives at these decisions, Carla? And do they even matter?

ROBBINS:
They don't always get it right and, at times, they have gotten notoriously wrong. Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ in 1973 is certainly high on my list of getting it wrong. But for all that, I pay a lot of attention because they do get it right. And one—

MCMAHON:
Even the '73 one, they were seemingly trying to drive a process that was going to end a nasty war.

ROBBINS:
And driving a process is a big part of what they do and what the committee decides. Winning a Nobel can draw global attention and support to incredibly courageous people and support and attention to important causes, like the 1997 prize to the international campaign to ban landmines, which I think really sort of fixed the campaign in many countries and many people's minds and hearts.

I really love it, Bob, when we get to do these sort of questions, because I learned some of the background of things that I should know, and I sort of do know, but I really don't know until we start to do the research on this.

The first question we asked was, why did Alfred Nobel—who was the Swedish-born but mainly raised out of, I think, in Russia, a lot of it, Swedish-born chemist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the prizes—why did he decide that this one prize, the Peace Prize, would be awarded by a Norwegian committee when all the other prizes were awarded in Sweden?

According to the Nobel organization, he never explained it, but the best guess is that, while Nobel was Swedish, for his whole life, Sweden and Norway were in a union that only ended after he died in 1905. And Nobel may have been impressed by the Norwegian Parliament's strong interest in the late 19th century in finding peaceful solutions to international disputes, which I think is really interesting because I tend to think of the Swedes as the peace-minded ones, but there you have it for that time period.

How does anyone get chosen? This is really an opaque process. According to the Nobel organization, nominations can come from government officials, from members of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, International Board of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, University professors. I wonder if I can do that. I teach now.

MCMAHON:
Go for it.

ROBBINS:
Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and others.

This year, the Norwegian Nobel Institute has registered 286 candidates, 197 individuals, and eighty-nine organizations, but we won't find out who they are for at least fifty years, if they decide to release it. It's going to be a long time.

As for who is on the committee, that isn't a secret. It's chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, which explains why this can, as you notice, be fundamentally a very political message-sending prize. And I looked up the current committee members. The chair is also the General Secretary of PEN Norway. The vice chair is a foreign policy scholar and newspaper columnist. We like that.

MCMAHON:
There you go.

ROBBINS:
For political diversity, there are politicians from the labor, conservative, and center parties, including a woman who opposed the EU. It's a sort of diverse and interesting group here.
I also spent a bit of time—I actually got totally into this, as you know I do—looking at acceptance speeches, which I highly recommend. There's so much grim out there, but if you really want to feel good about the human spirit, it's really worth looking at some of these acceptance speeches.

You mentioned Malala. She won a decade ago for championing girls' education and almost dying for the cause. She's the youngest person to win—she was seventeen then—and in this really charming speech, she jokes that, while she wants world peace, she was still fighting with her younger brothers who were sitting in the audience watching and laughing. It's really charming.
The 2021 winners, Maria Ressa, the founder of the Rappler news site in the Philippines at a period of time when journalists were getting killed right and left.

MCMAHON:
Hugely courageous. Incredibly courageous—

ROBBINS:
Incredibly courageous and a wonderful speech. But she also shared it with Dmitry Muratov, who is the co-founder and editor of Novaya Gazeta in Russia, which suspended publication after the invasion of Ukraine and—just last year—was declared by the Russian authorities to be a foreign agent. I mean, these are really courageous people.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to Al Gore for raising global awareness of manmade climate change. It's so extraordinary now—although not so extraordinary given the politics here—that there was even a question about the manmade causes of climate change, and they raised incredible awareness. I always sort of thought that Al Gore, in part, got it also for peacefully stepping aside after the 2000 elections.
And Martin Luther King I watched—there's so many more, obviously, Nelson Mandela and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and all that—but Martin Luther King in 1964 for civil rights and social justice, just four years before his assassination. Lots to watch there, and I really recommend watching some of these speeches.

Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week.
This is a figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. And this week, our audience selected Slovakia Prime Minister vows to block Ukraine's NATO bid. Why is he so adamantly against Ukraine's admission? And is this even on the table right now?

MCMAHON:
It's sort of on a side table with some of the other main dinner offerings that are not going to be dealt with anytime soon. I feel he felt compelled to mention it in the course of some other discussions that are going on, including the fact that Slovakia—it was confirmed that Ukraine will not renew an agreement that allows Slovakia to receive Russian gas that transits Ukraine, which was a really important source of energy. Although, Slovakia has known this for a while this was going to happen.

It also, I should note, it's a little known aspect that, despite Russia's invasion, Ukraine was allowing Russia to get revenues from the transit of gas on its territory to countries like Slovakia and Hungary. That's not going to happen anymore after the end of this year. It wasn't necessarily a spiteful comment, though. Fico was quick to point out that they still would strongly support Ukraine's EU membership. Fico has been in his party, known as Smer, has been a strongly—

ROBBINS:
He really sounds like a James Bond supervillain—

MCMAHON:
It's just a few letters short of SMERSH, yes. It actually campaigned on and won on a vow to sort of make amends with Russia to be more of a pacifying role to echo what some of the Hungarian leader, Orbán, has been saying about Russia. And so, he's basically came out and said, "As long as I am head of the Slovak government, I'll direct MPs under my control never to agree to Ukraine's joining NATO," and that could be up to 2027, although he previously had to cut short a term because of all sorts of scandals brewing. Let's not rule that out necessarily, but, again, he was in support of EU membership for Ukraine, and maybe it's just a statement he can make at this moment because it was not on the table. It's sort of a—it gains him a little bit of ground for anything else he wants to do, potentially bargaining with Russia on energy. Who knows?
It should also be noted he met with the Ukrainian officials this week and had said they should work together on common cause on an energy hub for the region. I think they were trying to say things and trying to be a bit more collegial and neighborly. They share a hundred-kilometer-long border, but it certainly wasn't great for Ukraine to hear that at a time when, as I said, Zelenskyy—even though he didn't go to the Ramstein group meeting—he's going all over Europe in the next couple of days. He just met with Keir Starmer. He's going down to Italy. He's going to meet the Pope. He's met—

ROBBINS:
He's going to meet with Macron.

MCMAHON:
He's going to meet with Macron. He met with Balkan leaders at one of their summits just the other day. A huge amount of diplomacy going on, as we've discussed many, many times. And the new incoming NATO leader, Mark Rutte, has been strongly in support of their membership. He's trying to consolidate that as much as possible and get this desperately needed aid at a time when Russia is pushing its advantages on the Eastern front and what looks like it's going to be a very cold winter on top of everything else.

ROBBINS:
It is interesting that he's supporting EU memberships, and he's doing all these other things, which does raise this very interesting question that maybe he is not as fiercely opposed. And when you think about it, Joe Biden's opposed to it, too. Hungary came around. Turkey came around. There's always a lot of bargaining in these things, and we'll see. We certainly know that Zelenskyy wants this because he wants a clear path, and he wants a clear commitment. We believe it's part of his victory plan, which is yet to be unveiled.

I think his next step is going to be to unveil the victory plan because he's not on the front pages with everything else that's going on, and time is running out for him. It really is, it's really a scary thing.

Thank you for explaining that because I took this to be a very obstructionist comment and we don't know yet. This may be less of an obstructionist comment than it sounded, which I'm surprised because I expect Fico to be very obstructionist.

MCMAHON:
There's more nuance than we realize in that part of the world. At the same time, Fico also, by the way, is a leftist populist, not a rightist populist, which we're seeing a surge of in other countries, including Austria most recently in their elections.

ROBBINS:
Can you really tell the difference?

MCMAHON:
There are differences by degrees. There are some things that are pretty common, though, and one of them seems to be a dovish inclination toward Russia. And again, it may be just a bit of concern about that war spilling across the borders a bit more has gotten them very concerned, whereas they see the EU as more of a stabilizing factor. Although, Russia is no fan of EU membership either.

ROBBINS:
Well, I want the last word on this. I don't want the word dove and Putin's Russia in the same sentence.

MCMAHON:
You're really parsing the vocabulary today, Carla.

ROBBINS:
I am.

MCMAHON:
Duly noted. And that's our look at the troublesome World Next Week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on: Mozambique holds its presidential election; the Dominican Republic is due to announce plans to deport ten thousand Haitian migrants per week; and Tunisia's president faces backlash after a landslide, reportedly, re-election.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback.
If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected] publications mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org.Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Molly McAnany and Markus Zakaria, Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra, and special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson for her fabulous research assistance. Our theme music is provided by—he's everywhere—Markus Zakaria. And this is Carla Robbins saying, so long, and get ready to vote.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye, and be careful out there.