What is the biggest threat to democracy today?
It is not tanks rolling across borders or generals seizing parliament at dawn. The gravest danger is slower, quieter, more corrosive: hybrid warfare. In this new battlefield, adversaries dismantle democracy by silencing voices, destabilizing venues, undermining votes, and eroding vetoes.
The strategy is elegant in its patience—freedom is hollowed out layer by layer until only the shell of democracy remains.
In Shadows of Tehran, Nick Berg shows how regimes like Iran master this art. Their power does not rest solely on brute force but on the ability to fracture communities, pollute information streams, and bend institutions to their will.
The story is not just about Tehran; it is about every democracy confronted with adversaries who know that you need not storm the fortress if you can rot its foundations from within.
Voices – Why is free speech the first battleground?
The first target in any hybrid campaign is the voice of the citizen. Speech is dangerous to authoritarians precisely because it cannot be fully controlled once it circulates.
That is why adversaries turn freedom of expression against itself: they flood the public sphere with propaganda, disinformation, and online mobs that punish dissent.
Silence then becomes self-imposed.
Analysts note that Iran maintains a network of state-aligned and proxy media outlets abroad, including satellite channels and diaspora platforms, designed to amplify regime narratives while mixing them with community content. Research from the Washington Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies shows how Tehran blends cultural or local reporting with political messaging to sustain influence among expatriates and sympathetic audiences.
Hamas, meanwhile, has developed a sophisticated digital media strategy. Studies by CSIS and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab show how the group uses Telegram channels, viral videos, and coordinated social media campaigns to recast violence as “resistance” and flood the information space with competing narratives. The aim is not always persuasion but saturation—drowning out clarity until citizens distrust all voices, including their own.
Venues – How do adversaries destabilize civic spaces?
Once the voices weaken, attention shifts to the venues—those spaces where citizens gather, deliberate, and organize. These can be physical spaces like universities and NGOs, or digital arenas like social media platforms.
Hybrid warfare excels at poisoning them. Universities face infiltration through regime-linked student groups. NGOs are discredited as foreign agents. Online communities are hijacked by trolls and botnets. The purpose is not simply control but corrosion: to make civic spaces so toxic or unsafe that citizens retreat into private silence.
Votes – Are elections the biggest threat to democracy today?
Votes embody the visible heart of democracy, which makes them prime targets. Adversaries know they need not always steal ballots; it is enough to sow doubt. Cyber operations probe election infrastructure. Disinformation spreads across platforms, warning citizens that their vote “does not matter” or will not be counted.
In Iran, elections are a theatre—the Guardian Council pre-screens candidates to guarantee loyalty to the regime. In Gaza, Hamas rules by the gun while invoking past elections as a fig leaf of legitimacy. Both examples are instructive: when voting becomes ritual rather than choice, democracy has already been hollowed out.
Western democracies face the same danger in subtler form. When adversaries undermine confidence in the fairness of elections, the legitimacy of the system itself begins to unravel.
Vetoes – Why are checks and balances eroded last?
The final target is veto power—the ability of courts, constitutions, and parliaments to restrain authority. Adversaries wait until voices, venues, and votes have been weakened before striking here.
In Iran, the Guardian Council embodies this capture: what remains of the system’s checks exists only to ratify the regime’s will. Hamas eliminated its rivals and now rules without meaningful institutional challenge. And in the West, pressures mount against judicial independence and parliamentary oversight—subtler, yes, but following the same logic.
The reason vetoes fall last is strategic: once they collapse, resistance has nowhere left to anchor. The machinery of democracy is still standing, but it no longer works.
Conclusion – What do we defend last, and why does it matter?
The biggest threat to democracy today is not a single enemy state or ideology. It is hybrid warfare—the patient dismantling of freedom through psychological, informational, and institutional sabotage. Adversaries understand that the easiest democracy to defeat is the one that no longer believes in itself.
In Shadows of Tehran, Nick Berg warns that freedom rarely vanishes overnight. It disappears through resignation, through the long pause before citizens raise their voices. Democracies die not in dramatic battles but in the slow erosion of trust, the corrosion of institutions, the silence of the majority.
Which do we defend last? Too often, it is the very foundations—our vetoes, our courts, our constitutions. By the time we notice, it may be too late.
If freedom means voices, venues, votes, and vetoes, then defending them cannot be sequential.
It must be simultaneous.
Otherwise, the biggest threat to democracy today will not come from Tehran, Gaza, or Moscow—it will come from our own delay.
