Fifth and Final in a Series on U.S. Global Leadership: There is a global information war and the United States is losing it ... along with so much else.
In her latest piece in The Atlantic, the extraordinary journalist Anne Applebaum illustrates how the U.S. has surrendered in the global information war by disinvesting in public diplomacy resources such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia and generally disengaging from multilateralism. It is a hideous miscalculation. That is, of course, if any form of "calculation" could be applied to such egregious, knee-jerk decisions.
Applebaum writes that, "The U.S. is reorienting its foreign policy to protect governments that manipulate and suppress information." This should terrify us. It does not seem to disturb us much, however, because we are drowning in the sheer mass of excrement and vomit splattered on the American people daily by the U.S. Administration.
Predictably, Applebaum reports that Chinese state media is happily replacing VOA and the other U.S. broadcast services as the latter exit the world stage. No doubt that the Russians are following suit. Nations and regions that we hope will embrace, support, and spread democratic values will now, instead, bask in the glories of dictator-led, state-run politics and economics.
It doesn't stop there. The U.S. also chose to shutter the State Department's Global Engagement Center, responsible for identifying and countering foreign disinformation, as well as its Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, which performed comparable tasks. We have disrobed, dropped our fists, and stand flabby and naked before the world. Our adversaries and enemies could not be more pleased.
Image courtesy of Davidson Capital.