The Paradox of Liberty: Narrative Warfare and America’s Identity Crisis

The Problem

America was once a nation of stories. Freedom. Justice. The lone cowboy carving his own fate. The immigrant who builds something from nothing. The dream that anyone—anyone—could make it.

Now? We’ve lost the plot.

For all our talk of rugged individualism and self-determination, we Americans no longer know who we are. The melody of our story was lost in the cacophony of narrative warfare.

The American story is no longer told.

And when a nation stops telling its own story, someone else will do it for them.

The U.S. national security apparatus has failed to grasp what our adversaries already know: narrative is not just a tool. It is the mechanism by which humans define identity, differentiate the self from others, and make sense of the world.

America’s failure in this space is more than just an intellectual weakness—it’s a forfeiture of power, influence, and legitimacy. While we bicker over politics and seek comfort over moral courage, Russia, China, and other asymmetric adversaries are filling in the blanks.

The Information Age and Personal Agency

For most of human history, meaning making and information control have been geographically bounded. Now, the internet, agentic AI, and emergent deep research capabilities ensure that information dissemination is exponentially faster. Humans now consume 90 times more information than in 1940.

The democratization of technology is maximizing human agency. In a democratic society, that means that even as wealth disparities increase, access to information and technological capability is more accessible than ever in human history. America has historically upheld, though imperfectly, free speech, individual liberty, and the common good.

But there’s a paradox.

An open society thrives on the free exchange of ideas. But that same openness creates a series of cognitive vulnerabilities. Ideas can be weaponized. Narratives can be hijacked. Influence can be exerted without a single shot fired.

Which is why, in our desperate attempt to counteract this, we keep making the same mistake – that is, defaulting to centralized, top-down control, the very thing the U.S. system was designed to reject. Yet American society is not built for that, and it jolts violently against attempts at top-down control.

Doctrine: Too Little, Too Late

It’s not as if the Department of Defense has not acknowledged the problem. There are now hundreds of terms in joint doctrine describing how people engage with information, identity, and meaning, at the individual, collective, and national levels. Narrative warfare. Cognitive warfare. Psychological Operations. Information Operations. Influence. Operations in the Information Environment. Yet, despite this growing lexicon and awareness of the problem, the U.S. Government (USG), the Department of Defense, and adjacent industries have failed to establish a coherent strategy for engaging in the information space.

The newest swathe of joint doctrine references narrative over 100 times. Yet across these texts, it is formally defined only three times, each definition conflicting, incomplete, and/or vague. Consider the Public Affairs Manual, JP 3-61: it defines narrative as a meme, specifically a tool for defeating or coexisting with adversarial narratives. It describes narrative as a “short story” designed to contextualize operations. It assumes a hierarchical, top-down structure, where strategic messaging flows from the White House down to the lowest tactical level.

This approach is a broken relic, a Vietnam-era public affairs model applied to an environment where information moves globally, instantly, and iteratively. Even in the 1960s, this model was a failure. Thus, the current USG approach lacks the analytical constructs necessary to break narratives down across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

Identities, relationships, and issues intersect in meaningful ways where collective agency creates networks and systems greater than their sum. The individual may be seen an anchor point while the broader United States can be seen as a distinct entity utilizing its own agency, like in recent addresses by Minister Trudeau discussing the impact of US tariffs.

How can we acknowledge the intersection of these different spheres of agency while also not treating them as independent systems, but as deeply interconnected spheres of influence?

The United States has fallen into the trap of its own societal paradox. The United States is trying to emulate authoritarian structures with a universally top-down approach. American society isn’t built for that.

And our adversaries know precisely how to exploit this contradiction.

The Threats

Russia and China—two of the most sophisticated actors in the global information environment—have leveraged radical connectivity to shape, distort, and dominate narrative landscapes. Their approaches differ radically, but their objectives are aligned: to control perception, influence behavior, and assert strategic advantage without conventional military engagement.

Russia: Chaos as a Weapon

Russia operates through disruption, deception, and data saturation. Its content farms flood the information space with false, misleading, or contradictory narratives, eroding trust in institutions and fragmenting public consensus. Russia’s focus is not merely promoting pro-Russian messaging—it is about destabilizing certainty in the foundations of our identity, making it impossible to discern truth from fabrication.

Russia employs a sophisticated––and unsophisticated––array of tactics. Troll farms and bot networks manufacture discourse, manipulating social media algorithms to seed division and amplify existing fractures. Data poisoning corrupts the training sets of public-facing large language models, ensuring that AI-generated discourse is subtly or overtly skewed.

Russia’s disinformation ecosystem is decentralized and entrepreneurial. For example, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now-deceased leader of the Wagner Group, also founded the Russian propaganda apparatus responsible for reaching over 126 million Americans during the 2016 elections. This intersection of military and information warfare collapses the boundary between kinetic and cognitive operations.

China: Controlled Perception, Global Influence

Where Russia’s approach is fracturing, China’s is constructive, a controlled, monolithic narrative production. China’s information strategy focuses on uncontested narrative supremacy instead of chaos.

China does not simply broadcast its message: it weaves it into the fabric of global discourse. Unlike Russia, which thrives on noise, China seeks to eliminate competing narratives before they can take root by infiltrating student organizations and promoting revisionism through cultural exchange and economic power.

China’s Confucius Institutes operate in universities worldwide—serving as cultural and linguistic Trojan horses, embedding CCP-sanctioned narratives into academic and intellectual spaces. While the Strategic Support Apparatus broadcasts information; and cognitively overwhelms adversaries, particularly Taiwan, through relentless psychological pressure and narrative control.

Information is not the only soft power China exerts in the narrative space. China uses the Belt and Road Initiative to buys, shapes, and infiltrates foreign media ecosystems, ensuring that global discourse aligns with Chinese strategic interests. The application of economic power provides China with tangible embodiment of their national narrative.

The Strategic Conundrum

Our National Narrative Security Paradox

If the United States tries to match Russia’s chaos with more centralized control, it plays into China’s hands, because China thrives on control. The more we degrade the principles of our republic, the more we play into China’s strengths.

Yet, if the United States defaults to decentralization without strategic coherence, it plays into Russia’s hands—because Russia thrives on narrative fragmentation.

A top-down, centrally controlled approach goes against the very fabric of our republic. We need something different. A modular, self-organizing model—one that preserves our open society while resisting hostile narrative control.

The Way Forward: Practical Recommendations

To counter these cognitive threats, Western strategies must move beyond top-down, isolated interventions and bottom-up grassroots movements that exclude the context of the whole, and toward an approach to influence that operates at multiple levels simultaneously. The Western response to these threats has relied heavily on fact-checking and debunking—but these methods are largely ineffective in the face of sophisticated narrative warfare.

Debunking is reactive—it responds after the damage has been done, addressing individual falsehoods rather than the overarching narrative structures that sustain them. Fact-checking assumes rationality—it presumes that people are swayed by objectivity when narratives operate at the level of emotion, identity, and collective memory.

Pre-bunking (proactive inoculation) has marginal effectiveness, but only when deployed within a comprehensive, sustained narrative strategy. One-off interventions fail. Meaning is not built through single statements—it is reinforced through repetition, cultural integration, and lived experience.

All these interventions have one thing in common. They are top down.

This is why hierarchical models of narrative control fail. Meaning cannot be imposed in a high-agency world; it must be co-created. A nation’s story is not a single, top-down directive, it is the emergent property of countless interwoven experiences, histories, and identities.

The American defense community must acknowledge that it is merely a participant in the exchange and discussion of the American story, rather than the arbiter of it.

The call to action is directed to three levels: the individual, community, and the government.

Government

The American government and our security apparatus are not separate from the individuals, families, and communities that comprise it. To build an approach that maximizes human agency in the information age, the USG should:

1) Adopt a simplified narrative taxonomy that may be applied at multiple levels of scale. For this, narratives can be grouped into three primary taxonomies:

           1.1 Identity Narratives: How an actor conceptualizes itself.

           1.2. Relational Narratives: How an actor tells the story of its interactions with other actors.

           1.3. Topical Narratives: How an actor engages with events, ideas, goals, and interactions.

Narratives do not follow linear, top-down progression—they emerge recursively, layering meaning at individual, communal, and national levels. This taxonomy can be applied flexibly.

2) Incorporate Unified Narrative Principles.

           2.1. Time: Does the narrative target’s immediate perception shift (short-term), influence policy and institutional change (mid-term), or shape deep-seated cultural identity (long-term)? Recognizing the temporal scale ensures strategic coherence and sustainability.

           2.2. Embodiment: How is the narrative expressed in tangible, physical reality? Identity is reinforced through symbols, spaces, rituals, and physical manifestations—whether through national monuments, local traditions, or the spatial organization of communities. Narratives that lack embodiment risk abstraction and detachment.

           2.3. Self-Reference: (How) does the narrative mirror or reinforce meaning across different levels of scale? A successful narrative will resonate across multiple scales, connecting personal stories to collective ideals (e.g., an individual’s resilience reflecting a national ethos) and ensuring that identity finds expression in individual and community experiences.

3) Apply interventions that maximize human agency within micro-meso-macro levels of identities. Identity narratives gain strength through organic, localized storytelling that reinforces belonging while inviting participation. Democratic nations must take a co-creation approach to identity formation.

4) Integrate Top-Down Clarity with Bottom-Up Nuance. A comprehensive narrative strategy must balance strategic unity with local adaptability. At its core, a unifying narrative, rooted in national or organizational ethos, provides cohesion, preventing fragmentation across leadership and institutions. But rigidity is a weakness. The most effective narratives are not imposed; they evolve. Top-down clarity sets the foundation, but bottom-up dynamism ensures relevance.

Organizations

Organizations must never forget that they exist at the intersection of individual lives and national narratives. They are not abstract entities; they are built by people, for people. That responsibility demands more than profit-seeking or political convenience, it demands principled action that strengthens, rather than erodes, the society they operate within.

People over profit. Mission over destruction.

Institutions must resist the gravitational pull of short-term gains at the cost of long-term integrity. Engage with the world as it is, not as it is convenient to portray. This means acknowledging complexity, resisting ideological rigidity, and actively working to build trust rather than exploit division.

The mission of an organization should transcend administrations, political shifts, and market fads. Move according to virtues and values that reflect the people who comprise your institution, not the fleeting priorities of those in power.

Individuals

Individuals in our society must not look in despair, but neither should they wait for change to come from above. Narrative warfare thrives on passivity—on people believing they are powerless in shaping their own story. But this is false.

You, the individual, have agency.

The individual must recognize their role not just as a consumer of narratives, but as a participant in them. To counter polarization, and manipulation, you must embody the identity you want for America—not through slogans, but through action.

Seek conversations across ideological lines. Narrative control is most effective when people retreat into isolated, self-reinforcing tribes. Challenge this by building bridges, even in disagreement. Express compassion, give back to those in need, support one another, develop your own strength, and operate in humility. Narrative resilience begins with personal resilience.

America’s future is not written in Washington alone.

It is written in our classrooms, on our job sites, in our neighborhoods, and in the small, daily acts of meaning-making and kindness that shape collective memory.

Because in the war of meaning, it is not just information that matters.

It is the story that endures.

Note: An expanded narrative taxonomy and theory is currently under review and will be available soon.