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The job of US under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, created in 1999, was intended to shape foreign publics’ understanding of America and what it stood for. For much of the past quarter-century, that meant democratic values. Today the same post, and US funding, are being used to promote the Maga worldview, support rightwing populist groups and oppose EU tech regulation.
As the FT has reported, the latest under-secretary, Sarah Rogers, met influential rightwing think-tanks during a December trip to Europe. Social media posts revealed that the former New York lawyer also met a lawmaker from Germany’s far-right AfD. Rogers has spoken to senior figures in Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK about using a State Department fund to spread the Trump administration’s concept of US values. While older US democracy-promotion efforts in Europe mostly targeted the former communist bloc, an official said the new programme was likely to focus on London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels.
When JD Vance accused European leaders at the Munich Security Conference a year ago of running in fear from voters’ real beliefs, suppressing speech and failing to curb immigration, it was unclear if the US vice-president intended just to provoke. But a new US national security strategy codified Vance’s views, calling for “cultivating resistance” to a European path to potential “civilisational erasure”. Funding populist rightwing groups and Rogers’ activities seem part of that strategy.
Other parts of the Washington machine are pursuing a similar agenda. An interim report from the House Judiciary Committee last week alleged that the European Commission had conducted a “decade-long campaign” to censor free speech — including within the US itself. Brussels had used regulation such as the EU Digital Services Act to press US social media platforms to change their global content moderation, the report claimed. Its findings are intended to help shape legislative solutions to counter this “existential risk”. In December, secretary of state Marco Rubio announced US visa bans on five high-profile Europeans that he called “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex”, including former EU tech commissioner Thierry Breton.
Such steps dovetail, too, with the priorities of US tech billionaires close to the administration. Elon Musk has used his X platform to support far-right parties such as the AfD, and addressed a far-right rally in London. The Trump administration and Big Tech have moved beyond claiming that European regulation aims to throttle US companies to allege that the laws interfere in America’s democratic affairs.
While rules are occasionally overzealously framed or enforced, EU and UK regulation rightly aims to provide protection against hate speech, misinformation and exploitation. Using technology to digitally undress women or children, for example, has nothing to do with free speech.
The worries the US proclaims about Europe form a distorted mirror image of exactly the concerns — over the undermining of the rule of law, free expression and democratic safeguards — that Europeans express, with far greater justification, about Trump’s America.
European countries need to overcome fears of riling the White House and strengthen their defences. That means, for example, deploying against misinformation from US sources, initiatives first set up to counter “fake news” from Russia. They should boost their own tools for the promotion of democracy, and reverse funding cuts for outlets such as the BBC World Service. Above all, as Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has argued, they need to club together with like-minded democracies. America is embracing an Orwellian definition of freedom. The rest of the west will survive only if it can muster the courage to defend freedom’s true form.
