Opinion | Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey: How to counter Putin’s lies – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

Joseph I. Lieberman was a U.S. senator from Connecticut from 1989 to 2013 and the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000. Gordon J. Humphrey is a former U.S. senator from New Hampshire. Lieberman drafted this piece with Humphrey in the months before Lieberman died on March 27.

Democracies are taking a battering, the editorial board of The Post wrote in December. Russia and China are running rings around us, asserts former CIA director and defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

The Post and Gates have underscored our failure to go on the offensive in the information war by using counternarrative that asserts our values and ideals and explains the priceless advantages of freedom, the rule of law, a free press and freedom to assemble and express opinion. This failure has weakened national security and emboldened adversaries.

The regime of Vladimir Putin, for example, brazenly floods computers around the world daily with malicious falsehoods. Americans are particular targets of false narratives designed to sow confusion about our institutions including our elections and to undermine American confidence.

Formerly, we thought about national security in terms of battles on land, at sea and in the air. The newest battlefield is the human mind. Our adversaries are fully deployed on that field of battle. We are all but absent. Thus, we are losing the information war by default to malefactor regimes in Russia, China and Iran.

What explains this alarming state of affairs? Lack of leadership and lack of means. No one is in charge of telling Americas still-inspiring story to the world. For three years, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, part of the State Department, has urged the White House and Congress to designate a lead official in the information war. The recommendations appear to have been ignored. This reflects inattention at the very top.

As for lack of means, since 1999, when Congress unwisely abolished the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the United States has lacked the capability to fight back using counternarrative. We have the invaluable Voice of America, of course, but VOAs product is news. News is not counternarrative. It is not the marshaling of truth and fact to tell our story. Putins high standing in domestic polls and in some nonaligned countries is proof we need more than news to achieve victory on the battlefield of the human mind. We need counternarrative as well.

Joe Biden was one of 49 senators who voted against abolishing the USIA. It should be an easy walk for the president to take the steps necessary to get us on the offensive.

The president should immediately require the National Security Council to produce a strategic plan that puts us on the offensive, a plan that includes the use of counternarrative. He should designate the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs with responsibility for executing the plan and ask Congress to fund it robustly. And he should take a personal interest and stay involved.

The personal involvement of President Ronald Reagan in using counternarrative to help win the Cold War is instructive. Reagan appointed a longtime California friend, Charles Z. Wick, who had experience in the motion picture industry, as USIA director. His access was such that Reagan afterward called him my principal adviser on international information.

When Congress abolished the USIA, it simultaneously created the office of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. The intent was for that office to continue all of the USIAs activities except for news broadcasting. Unfortunately, the State Department has treated that office as an unwanted child for the past 24 years, underfunding it and leaving it vacant 40 percent of the time, rendering it virtually mute.

As a measure of the counternarrative lost when the USIA disappeared, its archives contain 20,000 films it produced. One even won an Oscar. The films were not newsreels; they were documentaries meant to persuade. They served as counternarrative to Soviet lies and distortion. Very little counternarrative in modern form videos that could be disseminated on social media has been produced since.

As an example of what could be, consider the excellent video To the People of Russia, produced by the office of Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Elizabeth M. Allen. It undermines Putins casting of the United States as an enemy by recalling with vivid news clips dramatic examples of Russian and American cooperation, from World War II to the exploration of space. And it supports Russian antiwar protesters. When the U.S. Embassy in Moscow tweeted the video early last year, it provoked a harsh and threatening response from the Kremlin.

The video was produced more than a year ago, and nothing like it has appeared since. That halting effort in counternarrative stands as a metaphor for the larger U.S. failure to engage seriously in the battle for human minds. The president and Congress should take note and act.

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Opinion | Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey: How to counter Putin's lies - The Washington Post - The Washington Post