“The information domain has become an area of conflict with the Russians and the Chinese”, James P. Rubin, special envoy and coordinator of the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, warned a handful of journalists on Wednesday 1 March in Brussels.
Charged with countering foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts in the United States, Mr Rubin met for the first time with the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell. This first visit to the European capital aims to alert the public to the extent of Russian, and especially Chinese, disinformation strategies. “Society at large doesn’t know the extent to which Russia and China are trying to manipulate and poison the information well and the extent they have”, he summarised.
“Tens of billions of dollars” invested by Russia and China
While he welcomed the level of cooperation between the EU and the US on this issue and said the Russian invasion of Ukraine had acted as a “wake-up call”, he called on the West to “step up [its] game” after a delayed response. In particular, he noted that the EU and the US are only gradually realising “how high a level the information war they’re conducting is treated in their system [and foreign policy]. A much higher level than in our system”.
Thus, for him, and despite different strategies, “Russia and China are aligned” on the war in Ukraine and have spent “tens of billions of dollars together” to invest in the information field.
Switch to an “active” strategy
Asked about possible responses, Mr Rubin conceded that, for the time being, the West remains on a “passive defence” footing by “identifying disinformation, exposing it, building resilience to it ”.
He therefore called for a shift to an “active defence”, including “trying to deter the primal disseminators of disinformation”. Taking the example of the Russian news agency Prigozhin, whose founder admitted to interfering in the 2016 US election, he suggested tackling the “information warriors” directly by exposing not only their practices, but their identities.
For him, considering “disinformation that harms our countries” as something that can be prevented in advance would open the way for more concrete response actions. Beyond sanctions, he called for discussions with the governments of “allied” countries where large-scale disinformation activities are based to “try to more actively defend against this and not wait till they tell the lies”. (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)