The Trump State Department is broadcasting hostile-state propaganda against a NATO ally.
Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, a desk created in 1999 to build institutional bridges, now used to burn them, stood in London at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The congregation drew delegates from Europe’s parliamentary far right, including Germany’s AfD, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Spain’s Vox, and the Dutch Party for Freedom. The conference’s head is the Conservative peer Philippa Stroud, one of the architects of universal credit. Its advisory board includes a Reform MP and a Cambridge theologian who is a senior adviser to Nigel Farage. The audience was given an official panel that included a British commentator, Carl Benjamin, who has publicly speculated about whether he would rape a Labour MP. Into this room, Rogers recited the meme-feed of a hostile intelligence service. She did not speak of policy. She told her audience that Britain is a country of “Da Yookay.” That is the phonetic mockery of British speech that has been circulating on the online far right for months. Then she fed them the conspiracy theory that British courts remand citizens for tweets while a psychopath who seized a three-year-old and threw him to crocodiles walks free.
This is the same State Department apparatus that recently seized on a British teenager’s killing to push an anti-immigration agenda, following hard on the vice president’s own statements about that murder, which the British Foreign Secretary rightly called wrong. The pattern is not diplomatic friction. The pattern is an information campaign.
In the doctrine of hybrid warfare, the kind we spent the last decade training special operators to counter in Eastern Europe against Russian active measures, the objective is not to conquer territory. The objective is to degrade the target population’s trust in its own institutions, its courts, and its police, until the society paralyzes itself. When a sitting official of the United States government travels to the capital of a treaty ally and explicitly endorses the propaganda line of that ally’s domestic extremists, she is executing a psychological operation on a receptive host audience. The fact that she did it under the banner of “free speech” while mocking the very concept of empirical reality is the final tell.
I am going to say this plainly. Rogers is smearing Britain with far-right conspiracies from a State Department podium. No. 10 issued a flat denial, with a government spokesperson insisting the justice system “operates without fear or favour” and Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson branding the rhetoric the work of a hostile state. The British press called it what it was. The fact that I have to specify any of this, and that a NATO ally’s foreign minister has to publicly correct a sitting American undersecretary, is part of the story.
The substantive thing here is not the speech. The substantive thing is the platform. The US State Department, on British soil, used a US government position to deliver a speech a hostile state might give. A North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally. The country whose soldiers served alongside us as our Abrams columns rolled through Iraq in 2003. The country whose forces have been at our side in every fight the United States has asked them into for a hundred years. Rogers’s office is the office Dwight Eisenhower would have recognized. It exists to tell foreign publics what America is for. She used it to tell a foreign public that one of our oldest allies is a police state run by crocodile-feeders.
The British Army fought alongside us in Iraq. British soldiers died in the same provinces where American armor operated in 2003. They were there before most of the coalition was there, and they stayed after we left. Whatever else one thinks of the war, the alliance cost them, and they paid it. The speech Rogers gave this week is the speech of a country that has forgotten what the alliance was for.
Andrew Bacevich, the soldier-scholar whose work has shaped how I read the country I served, has written for twenty years about the gap between what America says it is and what America does. In Washington Rules and across the body of work that followed, the argument has been that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment runs on a set of unstated rules, maintain global preeminence, lead, intervene, be present, that produce specific outcomes regardless of which party holds office. I do not think Bacevich would have predicted a sitting undersecretary of state standing in London using the word “Yookay,” and I am not making that up, to characterize the justice system of the country that has been our principal ally in every war the United States has fought in my lifetime. The bipartisan operating rules he described would have predicted it.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian-realist theologian whose The Irony of American History is the book I come back to most, named the structural feature of American foreign policy that this moment makes impossible to ignore. The irony, Niebuhr wrote, is the gap between the innocence of America’s self-understanding and the actual conduct of American power. America believes itself to be the indispensable nation, the city on a hill, the defender of liberal democracy. American power, in fact, is whatever the men who hold it at any given moment make of it. The gap is permanent. What Niebuhr asked of his readers, and what I am asking now, is the discipline of seeing the gap and not letting the rhetoric close it. Rogers’s speech is the gap in plain view. The State Department is the institution. Britain is the ally. The speech is the conduct. The rhetoric is that we are defending free speech. The conduct is that we are smearing a NATO ally with imported far-right memes.
The “Da Yookay” meme is a piece of frame-engineering, deliberate substitution of one vocabulary for another, designed to shift how the underlying reality is processed. The State Department is now its distribution arm in a friendly foreign capital. Rogers told her audience she was not there to repeat, “as your minders do, that it’s all misinformation.” That is a tell. The speaker who has to disclaim that what she is saying might be misinformation has already told you that what she is saying might be misinformation. The speech was a list of claims that are not in the public record, attributed to a country that is not a tyranny, delivered from a podium that is supposed to represent the United States of America.
The conference itself matters. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is not a debating society. It is a network, one that uses the respectability of figures like Stroud and the architecture of universal credit as cover to operationalize the very fringes represented by Carl Benjamin and the European delegate list. Its themes, demographic decline, civilizational inheritance, the “English settlement” rooted in scripture, are the same themes I heard in the pews of the church I used to attend, in the language of a movement I came out of. I know this language. It is the language of Christian Nationalism, and the Christian Nationalist project does not need a NATO ally’s cooperation to advance. It needs the ally’s destruction to vindicate its claims. The alliance is the obstacle. Rogers’s speech is not an accident. It is a phase.
Bacevich mapped the rules. Niebuhr named the irony. But it was Eisenhower who warned us about the machinery. The military-industrial complex he named in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, is a piece of the warning, but it is not the whole warning. The whole warning is that institutions captured by their own operating logic will produce outcomes their stated purposes do not authorize. The State Department is supposed to be the institution that maintains relationships with foreign publics. The State Department is now running operations that destroy relationships with foreign publics. The institution has been captured by an operating logic that produces the opposite of its stated purpose, and the machinery of American public diplomacy is now being run by a coalition dedicated to proving that American values are a fraud, using the exact psychological warfare techniques we once condemned in Soviet active measures.
Eisenhower warned us. We did not listen. The British press and the British government are listening. The question is whether the American people can be brought to hear it.