ISD-US and ASD Announce Merger

With great pleasure, ASD and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue-US (ISD-US) are announcing their merger effective January 1, 2026. You can read more about the merger here and below. 

To all of ASD’s champions over the last eight years, thank you for your support. We are proud of our achievements in pursuit of our mission to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on foreign interference and information manipulation in democracies. We’ve built innovative open-source research tools that have been widely used across sectors of society. We’ve developed numerous policy ideas that have ultimately been implemented on both sides of the Atlantic. And we’ve forged countless partnerships with likeminded actors in civil society around the world who have tirelessly and fearlessly worked to safeguard democracy from ever-evolving threats during increasingly difficult times.

Though this marks ASD’s end as a formal initiative, we are thrilled to continue our mission and the legacy of ASD as part of the incredible team at ISD-US. Please stay in touch with us there.

With deep gratitude,

David Salvo, Managing Director, Alliance for Securing Democracy

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue-US (ISD) and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), currently housed at the German Marshall Fund, are merging under the ISD-US banner, effective January 1, 2026. The consolidation brings together two leading organizations with long-standing commitments to countering digital authoritarianism, foreign interference, and hybrid threats to national security and democracy.  

“Consolidating the immense expertise, skills, and technological capabilities of ASD and ISD’s information operations team, represents a unique opportunity to strengthen our defenses against foreign interference and authoritarianism—at a time when it has never been more urgent and the sector has been significantly weakened” said Sasha Havlicek, President and CEO of ISD.

On joining ISD-US, outgoing ASD Managing Director David Salvo added, “ASD’s merger with ISD-US is a force multiplier for our research and analysis, policy development, and engagement with civil society partners. Together, we will be able to address existing and emerging threats with even greater impact.”  

The two organizations already share a strong legacy of partnership, having co-developed an innovative tool mapping Russian state propaganda networks, published joint analyses of coordinated pro-Chinese Communist Party disinformation campaigns, and tracked how Russian state media outlet RT continues to evade media restrictions in Europe. Together they combine an extensive track record in countering Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-sponsored information and cyber operations, as well as in tracking the intersection of state and non-state actor hybrid threats. 

ISD and ASD’s latest research on digital authoritarian threats has informed recent reporting by the New York Times on the laundering of Russian state propaganda through Spanish-language media outlets in Latin America; by the Guardian on the massive penetration of Russia’s Pravda network into English-language sites; and by WIRED on chatbots’ amplification of Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities.   

For 20 years, ISD has been at the forefront of detecting, exposing, and combating not just state-sponsored information manipulation and interference threats, but all forms of online harms that affect national security, public safety, democratic processes, and individual rights around the world, such as terrorism, violent extremism, radicalization, and weaponized hate. With the merger, ISD and ASD will combine their extensive technical and policy capabilities to generate field-leading threat detection and monitoring as well as in-depth research and analysis of this multidimensional threat ecosystem. The aim is to build a significant infrastructure combining intelligence and analysis with policy support, training and capacity building for stakeholders at the state and local levels, safeguarding national security, public safety, and democratic processes across the United States, including at the state and local level, and in democracies globally.    

As ASD transitions from the German Marshall Fund to its new home at ISD-US, its team expressed deep gratitude to GMF for providing the platform from which ASD launched and thrived over the past eight years. “We will continue to honor the spirit of transatlantic cooperation that GMF embodies,” Salvo said, “as we begin this next chapter with ISD-US.” Since 2006, ISD’s independent teams in the UK, Germany and Jordan working alongside ISD-US and the worldwide Strong Cities Network, have similarly collaborated across the transatlantic arena to address transnational threats to democratic institutions and processes.  

“Together,” adds Havlicek, “we are in a position to significantly scale up efforts to safeguard democracy, defend national security, and build resilience against rising authoritarianism in 2026 and beyond.”  

As part of an investigation led by Factchequeado, ASD finds that a Mexican journalism club’s online magazine sourced “two-thirds of its content since April 2025 from” Russian and Cuban state media. ASD researchers Peter Benzoni, Krystyna Sikora, and Bret Schafer explain how this raises further questions about the club’s role in advancing Russia’s information campaigns in Latin America.

“There remains a bit of a Cold War mentality about Russia taking it to the United States in their own backyard”, Schafer tells the New York Times about the report. “To gain influence, Latin America has long been seen as a priority for the Russians.”

Are tech companies using your private data to train AI models? Here’s what we know. Research Analyst Krystyna Sikora quoted in PolitiFact

The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.