With the midterm elections less than 4 weeks away and control of Congress hanging in the balance, the stakes for the United States are immense, argues expert @JamesMLindsay. "The second Trump administration has canceled or rolled back many of the initiatives that its predecessors launched to discourage influence campaigns and secure U.S. election infrastructure," he writes. Russia, China, and Iran "are still pursuing influence operations and could be aided this time by the development of artificial intelligence, which could make such operations more effective and easier to conduct. In the nightmare scenario, these efforts could go beyond poisoning the information environment to disrupting an election or changing vote counts." Read his analysis: cfr.org/articles/are-the-u-s…

Tomorrow marks one month until Election Day. And in recent weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court has made several decisions with the potential to reshape the midterms, argues @JamesMLindsay. The Court ruled a week ago that states can search the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for ineligible voters. That national database was created in 1986 to enable states to verify the citizenship and immigration status of applicants for public benefits. The Trump administration has expanded SAVE to make it easier, and in theory more accurate, for states looking to find ineligible voters. States are not required to use the database. “Complicating matters is the accuracy of the SAVE database itself,” argues Lindsay. A year ago, Texas reported that its pilot use of the SAVE database had “identified 2,724 potential noncitizens who are registered to vote in Texas.” In a process that took nearly a year, Texas found that 578 of those individuals were eligible voters. That is an error rate of 21%, Lindsay notes. “Much like the talk about the Trump administration invoking the Insurrection Act to intimidate voters or duly elected Democratic lawmakers being barred from being sworn in next January 3, concerns that the SAVE database will enable widespread voter suppression seem farfetched," Lindsay writes. "But in a deeply polarized society, where control of political power is up for grabs and some people continue to believe, against all available evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the voter rolls are stuffed with noncitizens, it is not so far-fetched as to be impossible.”

Read the full analysis: cfr.org/articles/the-u-s-sup…

Eight months after the launch of Operation Epic Fury, "the United States now finds itself in a quagmire that has demonstrated the limits of U.S. power, exposed the Achilles' heel of a U.S. defense strategy built on small numbers of hard-to-replace weapons, and potentially emboldened U.S. adversaries," writes expert @JamesMLindsay. "But Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to launch a war confident of quick success," he argues. "That track record had me thinking about the questions Americans should ask themselves before using military force," he writes. Read his analysis: cfr.org/articles/what-questi…

For more on this week's summit and the status of U.S.-China relations, @JamesMLindsay spoke with experts @JulianGewirtz and Bonny Lin on the latest episode of The President’s Inbox. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…