Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.

• Author: Duffield, Will

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

Richard Stengel

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019, 368 pp.

In Information Wars, Richard Stengel offers a compelling first-person account of his tenure as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy during President Obama's second term. The book recounts his attempts to turn the State Department's sprawling public diplomacy apparatus toward countering Russian and ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) messaging. His experience illustrates that American government institutions cannot move rapidly enough to effectively respond to the digital messaging of more nimble adversaries. This lesson largely fails to influence his proposed policy solutions, however, which embrace media regulation rather than civil-service reform and the elimination of bureaucratic veto points.

From the start, Stengel takes a clear-eyed view of disinformation's effects. He highlights its ability to muddy the epistemic waters, rendering truths unbelievable, while rejecting the popular shibboleths of malleable minds and a disinformation-borne 2016 Tramp victory. He writes:

I absolutely hate the phrase, so often used to describe PD [public diplomacy], "winning hearts and minds." Everything we've learned in the last 50 years from social science and psychology suggests that changing someone's mind is a nearly impossible task. Russian messaging had a lot of reach but hardly any depth ... the ads themselves were not very' successful ... what had a more significant effect was the false and deceptive content ... but in the end, disinformation tends to confirm already held beliefs; it's not really meant to change people's minds. Disinformation doesn't create divisions, it amplifies them. After a year-long confirmation process, Stengel was dropped into the State Department, where he found himself almost totally at the mercy of foreign-service officers in scenes that feel drawn from the British political satire Yes Minister: "Nobody would openly oppose something, but then people would work behind the scenes to undermine it. Sometimes you discovered that actions you had signed off on were still not done months or years later."

He describes the "infantilization of Principals," a process by which political appointees are kept overscheduled and dependent on staff for information such that they lose any real agency, never making "any decision or choices other than the ones baked in for them by staff." Time and time again, Stengel recounts how bureaucratic red tape, office politics, and a careerist mentality delayed or outright prevented the presentation of an official countervailing narrative to disinformation. Early in his tenure, the State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism...