The President’s Asian trip sketched out a smart approach to containing North Korea, competing with China, and rebuilding trust with allies. Now comes the time to fill in the blanks. Excerpt:
Getting Back in the Information Game
[T[he most important tool will be the rebuilding of U.S. capacity for public diplomacy, political warfare, and information campaigns. We have for too long ignored how powerful China’s global propaganda operations have become. Beijing’s mouthpieces constantly repeat the themes that China’s rise is inevitable and the United States is in decline. Unfortunately, these concepts are often repeated unwittingly in top American media. But these themes are easy to rebut because they are so far from reality. Despite the machismo, Xi is on the cusp of several mini-crises, including a trend toward a stagnant economy, a population that will look as old as Europe by 2030 but without the wealth, and imperial overstretch. China’s good money is leaving—for the United States.
In contrast, Asia’s “quad” has the truth on its side. China not only offers no compelling vision for the region as it cracks down on human rights and cultural and intellectual freedom, it is facing what Xi has called a deteriorating security situation—especially as it counts the forces of globalization as a security threat.
But the “free world” is not even fighting back against Chinese political warfare.For President Trump’s Asia vision to work, he needs to rebuild the United States Information Agency and realize that any success in Asia will be undermined by Chinese attempts to propagate a message to Asians that the United States is in decline and retreat.
In sum, President Trump laid out an inspiring vision for the future of Korea and a comprehensive outline to compete with China. But there are many potential pitfalls and minefields along the way—and the hard work of translating visions and aspirations into to concrete plans and policies has just begun.
Published on: November 17, 2017
Daniel Blumenthal is the director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
A Princeton PhD, was a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Central/Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. After leaving the State Department in 2003 to express strong reservations about the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, he shared ideas with Georgetown University students on the tension between propaganda and public diplomacy. He has given talks on "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" to participants in the "Open World" program. Among Brown’s many articles is his latest piece, “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War,” now online. He is the compiler (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the USSR: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (also online). In the past century, he served as an editor/translator of a joint U.S.-Soviet publication of archival materials, The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations,1765-1815. His approach to "scholarly" aspirations is poetically summarized by Goethe: "Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life."
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