On 23 March 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on a social media platform, Truth Social, that Washington and Tehran were engaged in productive negotiations. Within an hour, oil prices fell by nearly 11 percent. Iran’s Foreign Ministry immediately denied the claim, but the denial proved ineffective as the prices did not recover at the same pace. This instance shows how disinformation has evolved from a tool of domestic political management into a fully operational instrument of international statecraft, actively functional in the policy loop.
Disinformation is not the same as propaganda, which is based on ideology or selective facts. In the words of Calir Wardle, disinformation is false information, knowingly created to cause harm or achieve a purpose. State-sponsored spread of false claims is not a new phenomenon, but it has been revived anew in interstate relations by populist leaders like President Trump. Earlier, the local population was the target audience for disinformation. For instance, Bismarck edited the Ems Dispatch in 1870, which enraged the French and Prussian public and triggered the Franco-Prussian War. In Northern Europe, the British fabricated the Zinoviev Letter in 1924 to destroy the Labour government’s electoral prospects.
President Trump has extrapolated this local strategy on a wider scale and has redefined this political tool by bringing it into the diplomatic arena. In 2025, during the US-China tariff war, President Trump used the same strategy...
On 23 March 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on a social media platform, Truth Social, that Washington and Tehran were engaged in productive negotiations. Within an hour, oil prices fell by n...