Information Wars. Richard Stengel
of what’s fact and what’s not. Under the law, these companies are not considered publishers, so they are not responsible for the truth or falsity of the content they are delivering to you. That is a mistake. They are the biggest publishers in history.
Not that long ago, the internet and social media were seen as democratizing and emancipating. The idea was that universal access to information would undermine authoritarian leaders and states. In many cases, it does. But autocrats and authoritarian governments have adapted. They have gone from fearing the flow of information to exploiting it. They understand that the same tools that spread democracy can engineer its undoing. Autocrats can spread disinformation and curtail the flow of accurate information at the same time. That’s a dangerous combination for the future of democracy.
This challenge is different from those we’ve faced before. It is not a conventional military threat to our survival as a nation, but it is an unconventional threat to our system of beliefs and how we define ourselves. How do we fight back without changing who we are?
As you will see, I don’t believe government is the answer. In a democracy, government is singularly bad at combating disinformation. That’s in part because most of those we are trying to persuade already distrust it.6 But it’s also not good at creating content that people care about. That’s not really government’s job. Early on at the State Department, I said to an old media friend, “People just don’t like government content.” He laughed and said, “No, people just don’t like bad content.”
This is not a policy book, though there is policy in it. It’s not a traditional memoir, though the book is in the first person. It’s not journalism, though I’ve tried to use all the skills I learned over a career as a journalist. Is it history? Well, it’s somewhere between the whirlwind of current reporting and what we once called history. But with today’s accelerated news cycle, where memoirs come out a few months after the actions they describe, it’s more like history as the Greeks saw it, a narrative about the recent past that provides perspective on the present. It’s the story of the rise of a global information war that is a threat to democracy and to America—a story that I tell through my own eyes and experiences at the State Department.
I spent a little under three years at State during President Obama’s second term, from early 2014 to the end of 2016. I came to it after seven years as the editor of Time and a lifetime as a journalist. As head of Time, I used to say my job was to explain America to the world, and the world to America. That’s not a bad definition of my job at State. I brought other experience with me as well. I spent three years working with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography. I was the head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The official description of my job at the State Department was to support U.S. foreign policy goals by informing and influencing international audiences.7 Some people called it being “propagandist in chief,” but I liked to say that I was the chief marketing officer of brand America.
The story is not a view from the top. Despite that opening anecdote, I was not in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama on key decisions. But it’s not a view from the bottom either; I was the number-five-ranked person at the State Department. In the grand scheme of things, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy isn’t a big deal, but the job is not a bad vantage point from which to tell this particular story. No, I couldn’t see everything that the President or the Secretary of State saw. But in government, it’s harder to see below you than above you. While I missed a lot of what those below me saw, I saw a lot of what those above me missed.
There’s a lot in the book about how government and the State Department work. I found government too big, too slow, too bureaucratic. It constantly gets in its own way. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Like, now. I used to joke with my conservative friends that they should be in favor of big government because big government gets nothing done. But at the same time, I came to realize that the only people who could really fix government are those who understand it best. The dream of an outsider coming in to reform government is just that—a dream. This also bears repeating: I found that the overwhelming number of people in government are there for the right reasons—to try to make things better. To work for the American people. To protect and defend the Constitution. They are true public servants. Even when I grew frustrated, I never doubted that.
The rap on me in government was that I saw every problem as a communications problem. I wouldn’t say this was quite true, but I saw that communication was a critical part of every problem. And that not thinking about and planning for how to communicate something generally made the problem worse. And you know who else saw it that way? ISIS and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. For all three of them, communications—what we in government called messaging—was not a tactic but a core strategy. They all understood that the media cycle moves a lot faster than the policy cycle, and policy would forever play catch-up. They knew that it was almost always better to be first and false than second and true. One problem with the U.S. government is that we didn’t really get that; we saw messaging as an afterthought.
Even though my position had enormous range—covering educational and cultural exchanges as well as public affairs—I ended up focusing on two things: countering ISIS’s messaging and countering Russian disinformation. Before I went into government, smart people told me to find a few things to concentrate on and not to worry about the rest. As it turned out, I felt like these two issues found me. History happened, I jumped in, and I worked on them to the exclusion of almost everything else. Both involved a global trend: the weaponization of information and grievance. ISIS perfected a form of information warfare that weaponized the grievances of millions of Sunni Muslims who felt spurned by the West and by their own leaders. Russia spent decades developing its own system of information warfare, which helped Putin weaponize the grievances of Russians who felt a sense of loss at the fall of the Soviet Union.8 In fact, our word “disinformation” is taken from the Russian dezinformatsiya, which was reportedly coined by Stalin.9 Both ISIS and Russia saw and depicted America as a place riven by hypocrisy, racism, and prejudice, and the primary source of global injustice. This book’s narrative is chronological, and the story rotates back and forth between Russia and ISIS, a structure that reflects the reality of my job. I tell the story in real time with the knowledge I had at the time.
And then, two-thirds of the way through my time fighting these battles, Donald Trump entered the American presidential race, and it felt like everything suddenly connected. The information battles we were fighting far away had come home. Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS. Russian propagandists had been calling Western media “fake news” long before Donald Trump. The Russian disinformation techniques we saw around the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine were transposed to the American election space. Only this time, they were done in English—pretty poor English mostly—not Russian. For ISIS, Trump’s candidacy confirmed all that they had been saying about the Islamophobia of the United States and the West. Trump’s “Muslim ban” was propaganda gold for ISIS. All three of them—ISIS, Putin, and Trump—weaponized the grievances of people who felt left out by modernity and globalization. In fact, they used the same playbook: ISIS sought to Make Islam Great Again; Putin yearned to Make Russia Great Again; and we know about Mr. Trump. The weaponization of grievance is the unified field theory behind the rise of nationalism and right-wing strongmen.
I found that there was a malign chain of cause and effect among the three. In fighting Assad and seizing territory in Syria, ISIS helped create an exodus of Syrian refugees, millions of whom made their way to Europe. Putin’s indiscriminate bombing in Syria accelerated that mass relocation. Then Russia, through disinformation, helped weaponize the idea of immigration by stoking fears of refugees and terrorism. And along came Donald Trump, who made the fear of immigration a central part of his campaign.
I see that very clearly now, but did I see it then? Not really. Did anyone in the U.S. government see it? I’m not sure. If people did see it, they didn’t talk about it, and not much was done about it. I’m not sure how much we could have done anyway.
Every scene in the book is designed to show how both Russia and ISIS weaponized information and grievance; how Russian disinformation entered the American election; how Donald