What would Iran stand to gain from hacking the US election?

Microsoft alleges Iran is attempting to interfere in the 2024 US presidential election. AFP

Eight years ago, then US presidential candidate Donald Trump argued in his first major foreign policy speech that America “must as a nation be more unpredictable”. It was an echo of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory”: the idea that the best way to deter your adversaries from provocation is to convince them you are sufficiently emboldened to do just about anything, however destructive and irrational.

After Mr Trump entered the White House, some scholars began calling his use of strategic unpredictability the “Trump Doctrine”. The best example, notes US Naval War College professor Andrew Stigler, was his seemingly out-of-the-blue decision in 2020 to assassinate Iranian general Qassem Suleimani.

As Mr Nixon learnt in Vietnam, however, "madman theory" often fails to produce the desired results. As far as Iran is concerned, US officials say that, far from having been deterred, Tehran continues to this day to plot its revenge.

The US alleges the targeting of Mr Trump involves not just bullets, but ballots, too

The US intelligence community contends that Iran is actively attempting to kill Mr Trump, who is running for the presidency again. Plans were allegedly set in motion even before a 20-year-old American gunman shot Mr Trump in the ear on July 13. In fact, the day before that shooting, US federal agents arrested a Pakistani man who allegedly acted on behalf of Iran to hire hitmen to kill prominent Americans – one of them reportedly Mr Trump. US Attorney General Merrick Garland tied the plot to “Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate” for the killing of Gen Suleimani.

The US alleges the targeting of Mr Trump involves not just bullets, but ballots, too. A report published on August 8 by the threat analysis team at Microsoft claims Tehran seeks to influence the 2024 US election by launching fake news sites. One of these, which bills itself as “believing in the power of diverse perspectives and informed discourse”, features articles rife with insults towards Mr Trump sandwiched between seemingly AI-generated content.

The Microsoft report also describes successful efforts in June by a group “run by [Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence unit” to hack into the email account of “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign”. The tech company did not name the campaign involved, but Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Mr Trump’s campaign, heavily implied it was the target.

“The Iranians know that President Trump will stop their reign of terror just like he did in his first four years in the White House,” Mr Cheung said.

The Iranian government has firmly denied the allegations of election interference and hacking. Amir Saeid Iravani, Tehran’s ambassador to the UN, said his country has “no motive to interfere in the US presidential race”.

The question of motive is certainly intriguing, because for all the allegations that it desires to see Mr Trump humiliated or even killed, Iran is also being accused of the kind of interference that might help him get elected. Microsoft suspects one Iran-backed group of creating right-wing websites focused on culture-war issues like transgender activism – a crowd-pleaser at Mr Trump’s rallies.

Another Iran-backed group, the report notes, “may be setting itself up for activities that are even more extreme”, with the goal of “undermining authorities and sowing doubt about election integrity”. Mr Trump himself has accused authorities of incorrigible corruption and denied the integrity of any election he doesn’t win. In a political climate where he appears to have monopolised anti-establishment extremism, pouring fuel on that fire is likely only to help him.

If extremist elements in Iran were indeed behind all of this, their approach suggests the aim is neither narrow vengeance nor a particular political result, but rather simply chaos. And that state of affairs would be just as likely to work to the Iranian elite’s detriment as it might in its favour, to say nothing of its destabilising effect on the lives of millions of others. The world does not need any more destabilising developments.