Iran Has Been Waging an “Informational Battle” Against the U.S. for Decades

JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Misztal joined the Navigating Noise podcast for an extended conversation on the structural challenges democracies face in developing long-term strategy against adversaries like Iran, the informational asymmetries that have allowed Tehran to punch above its weight, and what regime collapse in Iran would actually look like.

Misztal argued that America’s difficulty sustaining long-term strategy against Iran is partly structural, noting that the Cold War’s 40-year policy coherence may have been “the exception, not the rule,” forged by the singular threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and enabled by rare bipartisan consensus. That consensus is gone, and with it the continuity of personnel, congressional engagement, and institutional memory that made containment work. He pointed to Congress’s abdication on the 2013 Syria red line as a turning point that set an “unfortunate precedent” of letting the executive act on war without legislative engagement or authorization.

On the question of whether Iran was winning, Misztal offered a nuanced answer: the regime has survived, but its “imperial project” — the axes of resistance spanning Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis — “has collapsed.” None of those groups are what they were, and Iran’s reason for existence was to fight American power and push Israel into the sea, objectives that have clearly failed. On regime fragility, he described Iran as a “brittle totalitarian structure” rather than a failing state in the African mold, one that “holds together until it doesn’t and then it all falls apart,” with the key variable being when enough members of the security apparatus stop being willing to shoot their own people.

On the informational battle, Misztal argued Iran “has known for much longer than we have” that the real fight is in the information space, honing that approach through Hamas’s wars of delegitimization against Israel. He warned that American culture and media are currently amplifying doubt rather than projecting confidence, making the informational battlespace “much easier for adversaries like Iran to exploit.” His closing message was personal and direct: “When other countries export terror and bombs and weapons and bloodshed, America has exported freedom and hope. Let’s get back to that, starting with Iran.”