Platforms in Budapest, Bombs in Tehran: The New Interventionism- and what it means for Jordan
On the evening of April 7, 2026, the United States Vice President stood on a stage in a Budapest football stadium and told Hungarians how to vote. JD Vance — who had arrived in the Hungarian capital declaring he was there to “help as much as I possibly can” — worked through an Orbán campaign rally, called Trump live on his mobile phone and held the speaker to the microphone, and accused the European Union of “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” he had ever seen. He did all of this in the same breath. The irony appeared not to register.
Central to Vance’s indictment of Brussels was a charge that will be familiar to readers of the previous piece. The EU, he argued, was forcing social media companies to control what information Hungarian voters could access — treating sovereign citizens, in his words, “like children.” This framing was not new. It was the third act of a sequence that began at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, where Vance declared that Europe’s greatest threat was not Russian aggression but internal liberal decay. It was then encoded into official US doctrine in December 2025, when the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy committed Washington to “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” — a formulation that the Brookings Institute described, with admirable precision, as a policy of constitutional regime change.
“Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This is not an alliance. It is an interference doctrine — written down, published, and then performed live on a stage in Budapest.
Days later Orbán lost. Peter Magyar’s Tisza party secured 138 seats on 53.6% of the vote — a supermajority. Fidesz, the model illiberal state that the American right had spent years venerating as a blueprint, collapsed to 37.8%. Political scientists at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel concluded that Vance’s visit was “likely counterproductive” — that the scene of a foreign power campaigning openly on Hungarian soil had reinforced the opposition’s central argument about sovereignty. The profound irony that we are seeing almost everywhere: parties that place national sovereignty at the ideological core of their identity had yet again accepted, and been damaged by, precisely the foreign interference they claim to oppose.
What Vance did in Budapest is not unusual — it is systematic. The same administration that stood on a stadium stage accusing Brussels of election interference was simultaneously threatening Iran with the destruction of its “whole civilisation,” and debating military action in the western hemisphere (Think Greenland) under a revived Monroe Doctrine. American interventionism has always operated in two “ways”: the hard mode of force, sanctions, and covert regime change — deployed against adversaries in the Global South — and the soft mode of civil society funding, media support, and democratic institution-building. What is historically novel and “disorienting” about this moment is that the soft mode has been inverted. The United States under the current administration is no longer using its soft power infrastructure to export liberal democracy into authoritarian states. It is using it to install and sustain illiberal governments inside the West itself. The target has changed. The toolkit is the same.
This is the architecture that the first piece in this series described as digitized capitalism’s political project — what innovation economist Francesca Bria calls the Authoritarian Stack: a vertically integrated system of privatized control built by technology billionaires, venture capitalists, and political ideologues, embedding itself directly into the core sovereign functions of democratic states. The Vance-Orbán rally was not a diplomatic “event”. It was the Authoritarian Stack made visible — the same ideological network that owns the platforms, funds the candidates, and occupies government now performing its project in public, without embarrassment, in a stadium, in a European capital, just days before an election.
“The soft mode of American power has been inverted. It is no longer used to export democracy outward. It is being used to dismantle it from within.”
Vance’s social media framing in Budapest deserves scrutiny, because it completes a “Loop”. The EU’s Digital Services Act — which he characterised as censorship imposed on Hungarian voters — mandates algorithmic transparency, prohibits targeted advertising to minors, and requires platforms to assess their own systemic risks to civic discourse. It does not tell platforms which political views to promote. What it does is create accountability for the very algorithmic architecture: the engagement-maximising machinery that systematically “serves” largely right-wing political content to young users regardless of their preferences, that recommends AI-generated deepfakes and misogynistic memes to adolescent boys, that accelerates audiences from localised grievance to institutional delegitimization in real time. When Vance defends that architecture against European regulation, he is not defending free speech. He is defending the “pipeline.”
Which brings us to Jordan. Jordan is a 92.5% internet-connected society with 45% youth unemployment, a large refugee population, and a digital environment that has been a primary theatre of regional information warfare. The 2026 Iran war demonstrated what that means in practice: coordinated disinformation campaigns, AI-generated deepfakes indistinguishable from real footage, and emotionally engineered content designed to frame the Jordanian state as a traitor to the cause of resistance — moving the narrative from real grievances to delegitimization in a highly connected population operating under acute psychological stress. The same escalation pathway. The same algorithmic infrastructure. Different actors, different narratives, identical mechanics.
Jordan’s response to date has leaned toward the control model — managing the information environment through legal instruments. The Cybercrime Law has produced the one outcome that information warfare operators depend upon: a vacuum. When journalists self-censor and citizens “withdraw” from the digital public square, the space is not left empty. It is filled instantly by coordinated disinformation, uncontested. The control model, whatever its short-term security logic, hands adversaries precisely the conditions they need to operate.
The deeper question this moment poses for Jordan — and for every state navigating this landscape — is not technical. It is doctrinal. Which modus operandi underlies our approach to the digital space?
A control doctrine treats the digital environment as a space to be managed — its voices “scripted”, its threats suppressed, its harms contained by restriction. It is clear, governable, and institutionally familiar. But It is also structurally losing: it creates the conditions disinformation exploits, and it frames the state as the threat to its own citizens’ access to information.
A human security doctrine treats the digital environment as what it is — a conflict arena in which citizens are simultaneously the target, the terrain, and the first line of defence. It asks not how to silence harmful content but how to build population-level cognitive resilience against the manipulation techniques that produce it. It addresses the full spectrum of security: the mental health of a 16-year-old in Amman radicalized through a gaming platform; the institutional legitimacy of the state when treason narratives circulate at wartime speed; the long-term social cohesion of a society whose young people’s political formation has been largely “outsourced” to foreign-owned media and engagement-maximising algorithms. These are not separate concerns — they are the same concern, viewed from different distances.
Human security is indivisible. What is done to the psychological development of a generation is done to the security of the state that generation will one day govern. The question is not whether Jordan can afford to take the digital space seriously as a human security domain. The question is whether it can afford not to — and how much longer the answer can be deferred.