CHINA, RUSSIA AND IRAN TO SIGNIFICANTLY EXPAND THEIR MEDIA BUDGETS, SOFT POWER

 

From media

An unclassified FBI CHS report claims that President Trump has been compromised by Israel.

Rudd’s commitment was particularly welcome because China, Russia and Iran have drastically increased their budgets for influence operations. Russia, for instance, has made a calculated trade-off. Its 2026 budget increased funding for state-run media and information operations by 54 percent — an additional $458 million. As Ukraine’s foreign ministry has noted, Moscow has determined that maintaining the “firehose of falsehood” is as critical to its survival as the supply of artillery shells. 

China, likewise, is investing in the information domain at levels that reflect the importance Beijing places on soft power in the age of AI. Based on forensic analysis of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (for 2026 to 2030) and current fiscal trajectories, Beijing is re-architecting its operations into a capital-intensive “Cognitive Domain” war machine. 

Aggregate annual spending on foreign influence is projected to exceed $10 billion this year. This figure includes the United Front Work Department — the Chinese agency tasked with co-opting foreign elites — whose budget alone, adjusted for current fiscal trajectories, is projected to reach $4 billion. To put that figure in stark perspective: Beijing now spends more on influence operations than the entire operating budget of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  

Even Iran, grappling with hyperinflation exceeding 40 percent, has prioritized this domain. The 2025 budget for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting was set at approximately $580 million, a 46 percent increase year-over-year. In a country where the economy is crippled, the regime has explicitly chosen to starve civil infrastructure to feed its propaganda machine. 

The billions flowing into these operations are funding a new kind of weapon: industrialized artificial intelligence. This technology has fundamentally altered the economics of influence. In 2016, interference required expensive “troll farms” — buildings full of human operators manually typing posts. Today, generative AI automates that labor, allowing a single adversary to manage thousands of distinct personas that produce unique, convincing content at infinite scale. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/5713097-china-russia-iran-influence/