Speaking at Iran International's Washington studio, Durns argued that influence operations and unconventional warfare are deeply embedded in the strategies of America's adversaries but remain poorly understood by much of the US public and political establishment.
"The American people are great people. They can be a bit naive," he said. Influence operations and hybrid warfare, he added, "have been ingrained into the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party since its founding, but they're very foreign to Americans."
Durns, a former deputy commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, leads a program launched last month by the conservative Capital Research Center to investigate extremist movements and foreign influence in the United States.
"These countries have a common enemy, and that is us," he said. "They do cooperate. They do collaborate, and we've seen that with the recent war, in fact, against Iran, where both China and Russia have given aid to Iran in its war against America."
A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Reuters in April found that Russian satellites had carried out dozens of imagery surveys of military and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran strike US forces and other targets.
In May, the Trump administration sanctioned several China-based firms it said had supplied satellite imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on US forces.
"The Chinese Communist Party views Iran as a foil, a way to tie down the United States,” Durns said, “so that it can continue to amass its power and challenge America for hegemony," he said.
Money and influence
Durns pointed to the network of Neville Roy Singham, an American-born former technology executive living in Shanghai, as an example of what he described as foreign influence reaching Western political movements.
Singham, who is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink, has funded organisations that have attracted scrutiny over their promotion of Chinese government narratives.
In July, the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three Singham-funded nonprofits—BreakThrough News, The People's Forum and Tricontinental—over approximately $40 million in funding linked to him.
Two of the organisations said the subpoenas violated the First Amendment. No charges have been filed.
Durns suggested that some demonstrations in Europe reflected organised influence campaigns rather than entirely spontaneous public mobilisation.
"It's important to understand, when the American public looks across the Atlantic and sees streets burning in Milan, Italy, or in Paris, France, or elsewhere, in Albania, in Spain, that these are not necessarily organic protests," he said.
Durns also accused such groups of exploiting the Gaza conflict to mobilise public anger.
"Gaza has been a very effective one for them, in which, of course, they use lies," he said. "They count on the public not being aware, not being educated."
He argued that social media platforms have made it easier for foreign influence campaigns to reach American audiences.
"There's no fact-checking on TikTok, and the algorithms are distorted to work on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," he said.
Lessons from the Cold War
Durns said American complacency about foreign influence was not new, pointing to revelations about Soviet intelligence operations that emerged after the Cold War.
Among the examples he cited was the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes compiled by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and smuggled to Britain in 1992, which exposed Soviet intelligence operations across the West.
"I have met a number of individuals in the press, or who are policymakers themselves, who have never heard of things like the Mitrokhin Archive," Durns said.
He suggested that a similar failure to understand the motivations of adversaries had shaped Washington's approach to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.
Successive American administrations, he argued, had repeatedly searched for moderate figures within Iran's leadership, misreading the nature of its political system.
"There are no moderates in the Iranian regime. The moderates have been expelled," he said. "They're in Evin prison, or they're elsewhere."
An enduring challenge
Durns rejected comparisons between the recent US war with Iran and the American experience in Vietnam, arguing that claims of an American defeat were misleading.
"There's been a very popular narrative, which is that America lost the current war against Iran, or that this war against Iran was like Vietnam," he said. "That is profoundly, profoundly false."
He also argued that Iran's economic weakness left Washington with substantial leverage despite Tehran's efforts to prolong the confrontation.
Durns compared the current mood in the United States to the 1970s, when America emerged from Vietnam amid widespread predictions of decline, only to prevail in the Cold War less than two decades later.
"So never count America out," he said. "But at the same time, the hour is getting late, and there are growing threats that have been massing over the course of many years that we need to confront and combat."
