Truth decay is existential---national safety controls the internal link to every impact scenario.

RECOGNIZING TRUTH, AGREEING upon truth, and proclaiming truth are relevant to American national security in a multitude of ways. Agreement about objective facts and confidence in the institutions that produce them allow politicians to rely on Intelligence Community reports, provide a foundation for trust among military units, allow policymakers to agree on foreign policy crises even across the aisle, and enable great powers to maintain credibility in both their overtures of friendship and their threats to use force. In these ways and others, the trends that the RAND Corporation has labeled Truth Decay have implications for national security. This Perspectiive serves as a preliminary examination of the many roles and the complex intersection of Truth Decay and national security; in it, we examine how eroding confidence in facts and fact-finding institutions can affect U.S. national security. In addition to framing these intersections, we examine whether Truth Decay’s role in national security has changed over time and the impact of the changing definition of national security.

Truth Decay affects the United States on individual, institutional, societal, and normative levels. On an individual level, citizens are an increasingly recognized force in driving foreign policy and often build foreign policy positions from partisan cues rather than objective facts. The current media environment further enables individuals to affirm preexisting opinions. Truth Decay can drive elites and policymakers to more extreme positions, and the biases and opinions of policymakers can have great impact on foreign policy. At an institutional level, Truth Decay can harm the recruitment, retention, and morale of U.S. national security institutions— including the U.S. military and the Intelligence Community. More polarized and less informed discourse in U.S. legislative and executive institutions can impair quick policy action, especially in crisis. At a societal level, Truth Decay can diminish the United States’ ability to use national power, the availability of resources to focus on national security, and the U.S. resilience to homeland security threats. The United States and its allies are also more vulnerable to these trends than many of the United States’ adversaries, where post-truth politics are common. But, ultimately, there is much about the interplay of Truth Decay’s trends that we still do not understand. R 2

This work is intended to serve multiple purposes. The first is understanding: to better explain the broad impacts of Truth Decay on American national security. The second is to frame future research: both to highlight areas where gaps exist and future research could be most fruitful and to provide a framework for how that work would connect to the overarching strategic question. The third is response: to suggest what actors are best positioned to address Truth Decay in national security and potential mitigating initiatives. It is our hope that this work will demonstrate the importance of improving our understanding of Truth Decay in national security and combating the national security vulnerabilities it creates.

Definitions

In this Perspective, we use the term Truth Decay as it is defined in RAND’s previous Truth Decay work. Truth Decay refers to a set of four related trends: (1) increasing disagreement about facts, (2) the blurring of the line between opinion and fact, (3) the increasing volume and influence of opinion over fact, and (4) declining trust in formerly respected sources of fact, such experts. For this project, we also looked for interactions between Truth Decay and other trends, such as polarized or partisan policymaking; the paralysis that partisanship can bring to the policymaking process; and the virulent spread of misinformation, pervasive conspiracy theories, and extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. As discussed in RAND’s previous Truth Decay work, polarization is one of the primary drivers of Truth Decay, and erosion of civil discourse and political paralysis are major consequences.

National security is a term not easily defined, especially with regard to what the term encompasses. A textbook definition is that national security “refers to the safeguarding of a people, territory, and way of life” (Meese, Nielsen, and Sondheimer, 2018). This would include the narrowest sense of national defense as the protection of the state from external attack or overthrow. However, the range of what are considered to be national security issues has expanded, as more and more concerns are recognized as potential threats to the nation and its people. The concept of national security is constantly evolving as social issues, such as environmental change, migration, and public health, become more securitized and framed as national security threats. While these concerns are outside the traditional bounds of national security, they are potentially more disruptive to the American economy and social dynamics than traditional state actors—as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. What is considered national security can also evolve over time. For example, in 1993, President Bill KEY PURPOSES › How does Truth Decay impact U.S. national security? › What future research needs to be done? › How can we address this problem? For a full discussion of the definition of Truth Decay and more information about each of these trends, please see Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich. 3 Clinton characterized environmental security as a national security problem, but the subsequent Bush administration removed it from the national security portfolio (Floyd, 2010), and while this has continued to oscillate with changes in administration, the impacts of climate change on Americans’ way of life are increasingly evident.

Of course, many Truth Decay trends are not unique to the national security realm. In addition to the definitional issues discussed above, this makes it challenging to define the scope of our inquiry. For most of this Perspective, we focus on the traditional, narrow conception of national security as national defense, and principally against the threats posed from other states. However, we have also included a section extending this discussion to less traditional areas that could be associated with national security, such as natural disaster response, public health concerns, and refugee migration. Internal security threats, particularly those posed by domestic extremist movements, are particularly thorny. We have made a special effort to include experts in disinformation and extremism in our focus groups, but we leave the questions as to how these trends may be undermining the American way of life or the societal fabric to other work.

Framing the Problem

What are perceived as threats to national security and what national security strategy should be are not based entirely in fact: National security strategy blends facts, expert opinion, and perspectives and beliefs. Although all Americans may agree on desired outcomes—a safe, prosperous, democratic, and free United States—Americans are not in agreement on how to best achieve these goals. Similarly, Americans may generally align on what the threats to national security are but disagree on how to prioritize them—and opinions are nearly guaranteed to diverge on how to address them.

The complexity of national security problems and the national security environment—and limited knowledge about the intentions and resolve of other players—can play into cognitive biases, a driver of Truth Decay. Policymakers may present some facts about national security issues, but they will often present, with similar confidence, their opinions about what the facts mean and what must be done about the threats.

We live in a period when even America’s role in the world is subject to debate (a debate that RAND has dedicated a space for with its Center for Grand Strategy). Varied opinions about how the United States should approach and shape the world are held both between the major political parties and within the political parties. Even expert judgment can vary dramatically. For example, Foreign Affairs features an “Ask the Experts” column in which it polls leading scholars on questions about the future (i.e., Will more states acquire nuclear weapons?) and the past (i.e., Should NATO have been enlarged?), and the important consistency is that the experts rarely agree. It is against this backdrop that Truth Decay is playing out.

Methods and Information Sources

In producing this Perspective, we drew on existing literature and the wide breadth of expertise available within RAND. We conducted six focus groups and spoke to 33 RAND experts on the overlap between Truth Decay and national security, both broadly and in their areas of focus. We additionally conducted nine follow-up interviews.1 We drew from a broad range of experts at RAND, including historians, political scientists, Grand Strategy specialists, regional specialists, military experts, terrorism and extremism scholars, and nontradi4 tional security experts, organizing the focus groups around similar areas of expertise. We identified researchers with expertise in these areas, with one focus group allowing researchers to nominate themselves to participate. Although focus groups were semistructured, with flexibility to allow conversations to expand naturally, sessions were organized around structured questions related to which actors (civilians, leaders, countries as a whole) used or experienced Truth Decay, broad impacts the experts observed in national security, and possibilities for mitigation of Truth Decay in national security.

In our review of existing literature, we uncovered existing work that speaks to the intersection of Truth Decay and national security. Truth Decay itself is a burgeoning area of research. Building on Kavanagh and Rich’s seminal 2018 work on Truth Decay, RAND researchers have subsequently considered Truth Decay and its relationship to COVID-19 misinformation by Russian and Chinese actors, Truth Decay in Europe, racial inequalities, disinformation online, and other topics with direct relevance to national security. Other academic work has explored how rumors, conspiracy theories, and false information on political issues, including national security topics, are prevalent in American society, even if these phenomena are not always labeled as Truth Decay (Parent and Uscinski, 2014). Existing scholarly literature touches on the impact of Truth Decay on individuals, including policymakers, members of the executive branch, and members of the public, but usually require melding the work of multiple scholars to reach relevant conclusions specific to our research question. For example, there is ample existing work on the psychology and delusions of leaders, and ample work on the impacts of misinformation on the public, but little work examining the impact of misinformation or Truth Decay specifically on the psychology of leaders, or on elites more broadly. Existing work relevant to this topic is often siloed in different areas of academia, the policy realm, and think tanks. There is an additional lack of research on the impact of Truth Decay on the U.S. military, civil-military relations, the Intelligence Community, or functional military specialties, such as information warfare. RAND researchers have begun to conduct work on the impact of bias and perceived bias in the Intelligence Community on its products (Dictus et al., forthcoming), but broadly there is little work on the impacts of Truth Decay on U.S. national security institutions. In this Perspective, we draw on these various research threads and our conversations with our colleagues to suggest how Truth Decay affects the national security domain.

Existing work relevant to this topic is often siloed in different areas of academia, the policy realm, and think tanks. “ 5

6 We propose an organizational framework for the multiple impacts of Truth Decay on the national security within the United States, on U.S. allies, and on U.S. adversaries. FRAMEWORK “

7 FRAMEWORK Organizational Framework

We propose an organizational framework for the multiple impacts of Truth Decay on the national security within the United States, on U.S. allies, and on U.S. adversaries. Our research exposed a wide variety of impacts on these three areas that are also spread over a spectrum of different actors. We have chosen to break these impacts down by the actor involved and the level at which they acted: individual, institutional, or societal. We also consider Truth Decay impacts at a fourth level: those that affect norms and concepts, as opposed to having a more direct, pragmatic policy effect on a particular individual or institution.

This framework offers a number of benefits. First and foremost, it provides a platform for similar and overlapping research to speak to each other and encourages coordination across different areas of research on this topic. Second, it provides researchers with a shared language for communicating about future efforts on Truth Decay and national security. Third, it allows categorizing and organization of these disparate research efforts, so that existing work can be linked into the Truth Decay framework, and it opens brainstorming for further issues that may fall in these different areas of the framework. Finally, it encourages researchers not to overlook Truth Decay as they conduct research on such issues as polarization or extremist groups, where Truth Decay may be contributing factor. The individual level focuses on human actors, including leaders, policy decisionmakers, and members of the public. The institutional level focuses on institutions or structures of governance, such as Congress, the military services, and the Intelligence Community. The societal level focuses on impacts on society— whether U.S. society or the societies of U.S. allies or adversaries—and usually indicates broader trends, such as domestic stability or economic stability. The normative level focuses on impacts at the conceptual or norm-based level, such as belief in the traditions, customs, or best practices of the country, including democracy and civic pride. 8

LEVELS OF IMPACT

Individual-Level Impacts of Truth Decay in America

CITIZENS

Foreign policy has often been considered elite-driven—an area where leaders drive public opinion and where public opinion has little influence on policy decisions. However, a growing body of literature challenges this belief, highlighting the importance of the domestic public in shaping or constraining foreign policy.2 Recent academic work has stressed the importance of public opinion in informing policymakers’ decisions regarding military force (Tomz, Weeks, and Yarhi-Milo, 2019) and broader foreign policy decisionmaking (Kertzer and Zeitzoff, 2017). But to what extent does the public conform to “rational” interest? Scholars argue that foreign policy opinions are often built from foreign policy cues, such as the statement of a trusted leader, rather than objective facts, with more partisan cues leading to the public holding more strongly held foreign policy opinions (Cavari and Freeman, 2017). In other words, polarization in politics “intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information, and perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions” (Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus, 2013, p. 57). In the other direction, academic researchers have found that increased exposure to misinformation on social media platforms leads to polarization, most pointedly in the case of Russian misinformation around the 2016 election stoking partisan divides. (Grinberg et al. [2019] explore this misinformation and what it was directed at.) In this way, polarization and Truth Decay can have a compounding impact on one another in shaping public opinion. In addition to the impact of partisan leaders on public opinion, the recent work of scholars Kertzer and Zeitzoff (2017) shows that one’s peers may also influence one’s perceptions of public opinion, which could further intensify partisan cues and the acceptance of misinformation. Connecting the dots, this literature indicates that public opinion is increasingly relevant in shaping national security, that this influence is connected to increasingly partisan politics, and that polarization can contribute to Truth Decay. A public opinion subject to the negative cycle of (1) disinformation feeding polarization and (2) polarization feeding disinformation will lead to public opinion on foreign policy that is broadly less grounded in fact and objective analysis.

The current media environment further creates an environment where Americans can “pick the authorities they want” and reaffirm preexisting beliefs by seeking media sources that confirm their opinions rather than seeking facts in a nonpartisan manner. There are increasingly partisan clusters of media providing new tailored to polarized positions, with many Americans preferring news platforms outside the mainstream that more closely align with their chosen identities, such as their ethnicity, religious group, or political party. This encourages more insular community interaction and the sharing of more biased news, and it makes it easier for citizens to seek information that better aligns with their views but may be less factual. A 2021 set of Pew polls revealed that Republicans who consumed right-leaning news, and Democrats who consumed left-leaning news, held deeply varying views of China, even when compared with members of their own party. Seventynine percent of Republicans with right-leaning news sources, compared with 55 percent of Republicans more broadly, said that limiting the influence of China should be a foreign policy priority (Silver and Shearer, 2021). This suggests that polarized positions, not based in shared fact, are already influencing public foreign policy opinions. Individuals are additionally vulnerable to false narratives, including those related to foreign policy: Research shows that around 50 percent of Americans ascribe to at least one conspiracy theory, although this proportion does not appear to have changed over time (Uscinski et al., 2022). One poll, as an example, suggests that one in six Americans believe in the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration allowed the attacks of 9/11 to justify an invasion of Iraq (Cox, 2020). Beyond the impact that such a belief may have on a citizen’s trust in national institutions, it could affect opinion on the Iraq War or U.S. policies in the Middle East (Vedantam, 2014; Byler and Woodsome, 2021). Academic research also shows that misinformation or rumors are more prevalent on controversial topics, which in foreign policy are often those that touch such domestic topics as immigration (Kertzer, Brooks, and Brooks, 2021). Popular political figures are typically themselves perceived as partisan, which can limit the resonance of corrective, fact-based information they provide in dispelling public misperceptions when they are seen as part of an out group (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler, 2017).

There is a counterweight to this trend. Although more-partisan attitudes may lead to sharper, more extreme positions, disinformation can also encourage disengagement—both from reality and from interest in policy (Wenzel, 2019). Truth Decay can therefore also encourage the public to disengage from influencing foreign policy.

9 LEVELS OF IMPACT

10 THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and its impact on the Iranian nuclear threat is a complicated topic, and there are justified alternative points of view about the merits of the United States entering into the deal initially in 2015, withdrawing from it in 2017, and potentially reentering it in the future. But the facts are that, since the 2017 U.S. decision to withdraw unilaterally from the deal, Iran has advanced its nuclear capabilities, expanded its missile arsenal, directly attacked Saudi Arabia, and expanded hardliner control of the government, trends that are all detrimental to U.S. national security (Nadimi, 2021; Smith, 2019; Fitzpatrick, 2020; Hickey, 2020; Mortlock, 2020; Haaretz, 2021). Despite generally shared American views about the fact that Iran represents a threat and that diplomatic tools should be the primary approach to dealing with threat, the United States unilaterally abandoned a diplomatic agreement that put constraints on Iran’s nuclear development.

As a baseline, American views of Iran are generally and consistently unfavorable: Between 80 and 90 percent of Americans have viewed Iran unfavorably since 1989 (Gallup, 2022). Although a majority of Americans have historically supported the use force if necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons (Pew Research Center, 2019b), and Republicans on average have been less concerned about the consequences of using military force, as 2019 Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans wanted to deal with Iran diplomatically rather than militarily, with 78 percent wanting America to rely on economic and diplomatic efforts (Younis, 2019).

The Iranian deal was a politically charged issue in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and misinformation about the Iranian deal was perpetuated by politicians and by social media. For example, Donald Trump, while a candidate and as President, claimed 136 times that the United States had given Iran $150 million as part of the Iranian nuclear deal, a false claim that also became a meme (Spencer, 2019; Kessler and Fox, 2021). This issue also shows the disconnect between expert opinion and popular opinion: Although 94 percent of U.S. international relations scholars disapproved of a unilateral withdrawal from JCPOA, the public was divided fairly evenly in opinion (Peterson, Powers, and Tierney, 2018). The dearth of facts and abundance of inaccurate facts likely affected public support for JCPOA. In 2015, a Pew poll asked about the deal without any specifics about its content and found the deal to be generally unpopular, with 48 percent of the 79 percent of Americans aware of the deal disapproving of it, and only 38 percent approving (Pew Research Center, 2015). However, the Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll during the same period that asked Americans about the deal while also describing its general contours—lifting economic sanctions in exchange for Iran agreeing not to

ISSUE EXAMPLE The Iranian Nuclear Deal

LEVELS OF IMPACT 11 LEVELS OF IMPACT

When we tie together these disparate literatures in the context of national security, they point to two takeaways. First, some Americans’ attitudes toward national security situations or allies and adversaries are built on misinformation, such as the 9/11 belief discussed above or unsupported theories about the origin of COVID-19. Second, even correct information often will not move Americans from entrenched partisan or other positions, and this partisan gap can lead to pushes for more extreme national security actions. Given the research indicating that the gap between policymaker decisionmaking and public decisionmaking may not be as large as previously suggested, elite policymakers may operate under these same misperceptions (Kertzer, 2022).

ELITES, POLICYMAKERS, AND EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP

Although, as discussed previously, public opinion plays an important role in shaping foreign policy, research does confirm that elites are more influential than the general public in direct foreign policy decisionmaking (Saunders, 2022). The most impactful are individuals in positions of executive leadership or highly influential policymakers. When these produce nuclear weapons and to allow monitoring of its facilities. This poll found that 56 percent of Americans supported the deal and 37 percent opposed it (Washington Post and ABC News, 2015). This example illustrates how polls can drive public opinion on a foreign policy issue by providing factual information, rather just than capturing gut reactions, which is particularly important on an issue like the JCPOA, where there was frequent misrepresentation of the facts.

12 individuals fail to respect facts and the institutions that are sources of facts, they can be even more destructive to productive or optimal national security decisionmaking than a misled general public.

The combination of partisanship and Truth Decay can lead policymakers to take more extreme bargaining positions (Wenzel, 2019), ultimately leading to political paralysis on partisan issues. However, the interplay of these drivers is not well understood. Academic work shows that bipartisan actions in America have declined (Harbridge, 2015), while negative partisanship has increased (Abramowitz and Webster, 2018). This body of research on the effects of polarization on policymaking bodies does not focus heavily on the role that Truth Decay plays in interacting with polarization. There is limited literature examining partisanship impacts on security issues. For example, Brian Rathbun (2004) shows that right- and left-wing governments in Europe conduct humanitarian interventions very differently because they understand the world in very different ways, and this research has been updated and built upon in the work explored in Tapio Raunio and Wolfgang Wagner (2020). They show that there are genuine ideological differences between political parties on security policy and security policy decisionmaking but do not directly explore polarization or misinformation.

We know that individual policymakers’ private opinions or partisan-leaning can have great impact on foreign policy. Such scholars as Michael Horowitz, Alan Stam, and Cali Ellis have dedicated an entire book to the importance of the impact of military service history on leaders’ decisions to go to war (Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis, 2015), and Elizabeth Saunders (2011) found that major U.S. foreign policy decisions can be explained by the personal beliefs of Presidents about dangers posed by other governments. However, there is a notable gap in work focused specifically on how Truth Decay affects these personal views. The most relevant academic literature speaks to the effects of leaders’ delusions or psychological biases on their decisionmaking about foreign policy and conflict, and this has been the subject of study for decades (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin, 1962; Hall and Yarhi-Milo, 2012; Kertzer and Tingley, 2018). Leaders’ delusions and decisionmaking biases have been explored as key contributors to war (Lake, 2010/2011), with Jerrold Post (1993) finding that the decisionmaking capabilities of a narcissistic leader are “often impaired.” If these findings apply to executives influenced by Truth Decay, then partisan and nonfactual attitudes in individual policymakers can affect decisions about conflict, how the United States is treated abroad, whether the United States is targeted in disputes, and U.S. credibility in threats and reassurances (Prins, 2001; Foster, 2008; Clark, Fordham, and Nordstrom, 2011; Clare, 2014).

Institutional-Level Impacts

Although there is little literature on Truth Decay in national security at the institutional level, we suggest that Truth Decay could have broad institutional impacts on U.S. national security institutions. Those could include diminishing the morale of those within the federal workforce, because they feel less relevant—given the declining trust put in their institution by policymakers compromised by Truth Decay—or because of a tarnished reputation with the public. This could make it more difficult to retain personnel and recruit future personnel. Officials within U.S. government institutions who circulate misinformation or opinion as fact on social media could erode national security professionals’ trust in their colleagues, weakening the bonds of trust that are built in the workforce and in the field. Truth Decay can diminish the potential for respectful, civil discourse between subordinates and superiors and blur the lines about what topics are appropriate to discuss, either face-to-face or indirectly via social media posts, as misinformation leads to obvious political fault lines and reinforces polarization.

LEVELS OF IMPACT 13

IN AUGUST 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) mandated vaccination against COVID-19 for active-duty and Ready Reserve service members. Mandatory military vaccination is not new or unusual: Vaccination for military service members has been mandated since vaccines first became available (and inoculation against smallpox was mandated even before that [College of Physicians of Philadelphia, undated]). When DoD announced the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, nine vaccinations were already required before initial entry or basic training, with more required depending on circumstance. Despite this, as of July 12, 2022, 6,748 service members had been separated for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine (Mongilio, 2022). And although 97 percent of the active-duty force was vaccinated by December 2021, misinformation was seen as the primary driver of the reluctance and refusal of some service members to vaccinate (Jackson, 2021). Although this is a small percentage of the overall force, given the costs of recruiting and training service members, this loss is not insignificant. Further, it points to general vulnerabilities of military personnel to misinformation.