The State Department is launching a new initiative aimed at persuading impoverished countries to avoid going into debt to China by accepting infrastructure funds they can’t pay back.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is trying to carry out a “treasury-run empire build,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it recently. Pompeo, like his predecessor Rex Tillerson, has taken high-profile opportunities to warn that the Communist power’s many offers of loans for infrastructure projects, such as ports near valuable shipping lanes, can lead to neighbors losing control over those facilities when they struggle to repay the debt.
“We want to make sure these debates are informed by the actual facts,” Daniel Kimmage, acting director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, explained in a briefing.
One example is Sri Lanka, a small island nation of the southern coast of India that accepted more than $1 billion in loans from China in part for the construction of a strategically-significant but economically superfluous port. When Sri Lanka defaulted on the loan payments, China took control of the port as an alternative to a cash payment.
Kimmage’s team is warning other countries that a similar fate could await them.
“We are interested in not only identifying the next Sri Lanka, but in ensuring also that the information about how this unfolded there is [publicized],” Kimmage said.
The Global Engagement Center, first formed pursuant to a 2016 executive order from then-President Barack Obama, struggled in its early days due to a dearth of funding and a surplus of “bureaucratic politics,” as the entity’s former chief technology officer hinted in an email explaining his departure last year.
Kimmage turned the page from that era by touting a surge of funding — $40 million, drawn from diplomatic and Defense Department coffers — and a growing team of experts to combat misinformation around the world.
“We are going on offense and we’re going on offense against the major state adversaries of the propaganda and disinformation realm,” he said. “These are the adversaries we read about every day. This is Russia, Iran, and China.”
But he insisted that their efforts did not entail replacing anti-western propaganda with American propaganda. Rather than “provide the good message” to contradict the “bad message,” the Global Engagement Center seeks to outflank rival powers. The GEC now has 14 initiatives geared towards Chinese propaganda in East Asia and the Pacific.
They have another “25 initiatives in 21 countries to boost the technical skills of civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations, local influencers, and journalists to identify and expose the spread of disinformation” released by Russia, according to the State Department.
Two years before the 2016 presidential elections, Russia was already waging a disinformation campaign as part of a “hybrid war” against Ukraine that culminated in the annexation of Crimea and beginning of a low-grade war with Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin executed that campaign in part by deploying out-of-uniform Russian military forces, known colloquially as “little green men,” to carry out the attacks while allowing the Kremlin to deny involvement.
Kimmage hopes that, over time, the GEC’s efforts will hamper such anonymous invasions. “In and of itself, the Global Engagement Center is not a rapid response mechanism but our job is to support those and facilitate their creation so that when the little green men pop out again, someone is waiting for them,” he said.
