Larry Diamond
24 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬
allocated resources; the initiative is only
now gaining momentum under a new
secretary o state, Mike Pompeo, who
understands its importance.
What the United States needs now is
not just a single program but an infor-
mation agency staed by a permanent,
nimble, technologically innovative corps
o information professionals—or, in the
words o James Clapper, the former
director o national intelligence, “a ¬
on steroids.” The purpose o a revived
¬ would not be to one-up China and
Russia in the game o disinformation.
Rather, it—along with the U.S. Agency
for Global Media, which oversees such
independent U.S. foreign broadcasting
as the Voice o America and Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty—would observe
the dictum o the famed journalist
Edward R. Murrow, who was director
o the ¬ under President John F.
Kennedy: “Truth is the best propaganda
and lies are the worst.” And the truth
is that people would prefer to live in
freedom. The most eective way to
counter Chinese and Russian propaganda
is to report the truth about how the
two gigantic countries are really governed.
These facts and analyses must then be
broadly and innovatively conveyed,
within China, Russia, and other closed
societies, and also within more open
societies that, as targets o Chinese and
Russian propaganda eorts, are no
longer receiving a full and true picture
o the nature o those regimes.
Transparency can also play a role in
the Ãght for democracy. The soft under-
belly o all malign autocracies, including
China and Russia, is their deep and
incurable corruption. No state can truly
control corruption without instituting
the rule oÊ law. But that would bemoting Russia and Putin as the defenders
o traditional Christian values in an era
o gay rights, feminism, and cultural
pluralism—along with general contempt
for democracy and blatant lies about the
United States. Washington must push
back with information campaigns that
reÁect its values but are tailored to local
contexts and can reach people quickly.
At the same time, it must wage a longer
struggle to spread the values, ideas,
knowledge, and experiences o people
living in free societies. It will need to use
innovative methods to bypass Internet
Ãrewalls and inÃltrate authoritarian
settings—for example, distributing texts
and videos that promote democracy in
local languages on thumb drives. It must
also create new tools to help people in
autocracies safely and discreetly circum-
vent Internet censorship and control.
The United States once had a good
instrument to wage such a battle o
information and ideas: the U.S. Informa-
tion Agency. In 1999, however, it was
shut down in a deal between the Clinton
administration and Senator Jesse Helms
o North Carolina, a conservative
Republican who sought to cut back on
American engagement abroad. To spare
cuts to other budgets for U.S. global
engagement, the Clinton administration
reluctantly agreed to shut down the
¬. Its budget and operations were
moved—never very eectively—into the
State Department, and a critical tool
for promoting democracy was severely
damaged. In 2016, the Obama adminis-
tration created the Global Engagement
Center, a group within the State
Department charged with countering
foreign propaganda and disinformation.
But Rex Tillerson, Trump’s hapless Ãrst
secretary o state, failed to spend the