Laura Rosenberger

Laura Rosenberger: Open v Closed? Securing democracy from misinformation and foreign interference

Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF).

Laura is a global expert in foreign interference and misinformation campaigns.

Before she joined GMF, Luara was foreign policy advisor for Hillary for America where she coordinated national security and strategy for Secretary Clinton.

Misha Zelinsky caught up with Laura for a chinwag about the escalating threat of foreign interference, whether social media giants are doing enough to prevent misinformation, if Tiktok should be banned, what democracies must do to defend themselves and how they can turn the tables on autocracies, the crucial roles that alliances play in defending liberal society and why democracies must renew themselves internally if they want to project themselves to the world.

Misha and Laura get into some real mind bending conundrums and really dive into the practical as well as the philosophical challenges presented by autocratic misinformation and social media manipulation.

If you’re interested in the work of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and misinformation campaigns, please check ot the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard. It’s an incredible resource that details narratives being pushed by autocratic regimes such as the Russian Federation and the Chinese Communist Party.

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/

Please be sure to rate and review the episode! And thanks to the German Marshall Fund of the United States for supplying this image of Laura.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Misha Zelinsky:

Laura Rosenberger, welcome to Diplomates. Thanks for joining us.

Laura Rosenberger:

Thanks for having me.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, for the benefits of this recording, you’re of course in the East Coast of the United States, in the morning. I’m on the East Coast of Australia in the evening, but we’re brought together by the magic of the internet. So, first question, a good place to start, for those who in Australia may not know the Alliance for Securing Democracy. What’s the mission of the ASD?

Laura Rosenberger:

Well thanks, Misha, and thanks again for having me on for this conversation. The program I run, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, it’s about a three year old program housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The mission of the program is to better understand, analyze and develop the means to counter the tools and tactics that authoritarian regimes use to undermine and interfere in democracies. And I think this is a topic that becomes more salient by the day, and one where we find that the breadth of the issues we’re looking at, whether it’s from information operations, and cyber intrusions, to belying financial influence, corruption, economic coercion, subversion political groups. A wide range of tactics that are used here, and the number of threat actors that are using these kinds of tools to weaken democracies and democratic institutions just continue to grow as well. So a lot of ground that we cover on our team.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so, I’m curious here. And this is a bit of a personal issue for you. I mean, why did you decide to build program focused on these issues in particular?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah, thanks, Misha. So, maybe I’ll rewind the tape actually just a little bit to how I even got into National Security in the first place. I’ll sort of date myself here, people can do some math. I was a senior in college on 911. And I had been studying all kinds of issues of public policy, and knew I wanted to go into the public policy space. Had a lot of interest on both the domestic and foreign policy side. And felt really conflicted about needing to choose between domestic and foreign policy. And when you’re a senior in college, September of your senior year you’re thinking about what the next steps are. Started thinking about applications for various things. On September 12th, the morning after that horrible day, but I started to see my way clear of just the anguish. Realized that I felt the need to dedicate my career focus to doing my small part to see that that sort of attack never happened again.

Laura Rosenberger:

So I pursued a career in foreign policy and National Security, and went into this space. But it was really that attack on America that for me was an animating focus. A feeling that we had failed in a number of ways. And of course the 911 Commission really looked this, we had failed in so many ways to prevent and foresee that attack, and to halt the forces that were aligning against the US and our allies. And so, I spent quite a while in government and moved through a number of different issue areas. But towards the end of my time in government, one of the things I was working heavily on was Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and all that it was doing there. And getting to understand the tools and tactics that Russia was using there as well as elsewhere on it’s periphery.

Laura Rosenberger:

And had a feeling that in government and in National Security we didn’t really have the tools we needed to be able to both understand and analyze, as well as respond to this asymmetric tool kit, if you want to think of it that way, right? These pieces that some people talk about is the gray zone, but they’re short of war, they’re non-conventional. They challenge our typical responses, and in many cases they put Democracies in quite a bind. Because they would push us to close off often as the easiest response, sort of respond tit for tat. But that I think is not the right course of action. So I had this feeling that we really didn’t have the toolkit that we needed. I left government, and I went to work for Hillary Clinton on her 2016 Presidential Campaign as her foreign-policy advisor. And of course from that vantage point got an even more personal and front row seat to the kinds of tactics that Russia was using to interfere in American Democracy.

Laura Rosenberger:

I think we had been a little it naïve perhaps that, a lot of assumptions were made who might be using these kind of tactics on his periphery. But you know, we have this vast big ocean here between us and Russia. And so somehow that makes us more protected. And in fact what we found in 2016 was that was not at all the case. And so once again, really felt that as a National Security community, we didn’t have the kind of tools and tactics that we needed to contend with these asymmetric tools that were being used to attack our democracy, and felt very much like I did actually… When it became clear, when it kind of came into focus in summer of 2016 probably just about four years ago the breadth of what was happening in Russia’s interference in the US.

Laura Rosenberger:

Really felt actually like I did after 911, that sense that America was under attack, that we had failed, and that I needed to do my small part to help prevent that kind of thing from happening in the future. So that’s basically the sort of personal version of the story of why I decided to build a program focused around these issues.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, well I mean, certainly an extraordinary set of events in 2016. We’ve talked about the election there. And in the washout I mean, it’s been relatively well-established now that there was a high degree of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election. How concerning in your mind is lack of bipartisanship in the United States, and sort of countering foreign interference? And what did you say more broadly about US Democracy and the state of democracy in the US?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah. One of the things I should have said about the program, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, is in fact that it is a bipartisan program. And I felt very strongly when we were launching this and building this program, that countering foreign interference could not be undertaken as a partisan mission. That our democracy and threats to it have be a unifying thing across the political spectrum. And in fact, that because so many of the foreign interference tactics that we see, seek to exploit partisan divides, or other sorts of divides in our society, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Rosenberger:

Many different fissures are used in these kinds of operations. One of the most important things that can be done to make ourselves more resilient to foreign interference tactics is in fact, to come together across these divides. And that politicizing or allowing these issues to become partisan ones, in fact plays directly into the hands of our adversaries. So for me, I think the degree to which I’d hoped for bipartisanship three years ago, and then comparing that to what we’ve seen materialize in terms of actual bipartisanship is pretty disappointing. I don’t want to sound completely pessimistic. There’s been a few bright spots. So, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has been leading bipartisan investigation for several years. It’s released four or five volumes of it’s report on that investigation. We’re expecting the fifth to come very soon. And there has been some small bits of hope out there on the bipartisanship piece.

Laura Rosenberger:

However, I think we have seen unfortunately, a situation in which not only has there been a failure to come together for instance in congress to pass many of the pieces of legislation that have been proposed actually, proposed on a bipartisan basis, but have not been passed. Many of which would just do basic things, a closing off and knowing vulnerabilities and our democratic institutions that have been exploited. And beyond that, one of the most concerning things to me is that we’ve actually seen the questions of foreign interference being weaponized for political purposes. And that to me is deeply concerning. Because it’s basically doing our adversary’s… It’s not just playing into our adversary’s hands, it’s doing our adversary’s work for them.

Laura Rosenberger:

So I truly believe that if we’re going to be able to counter these sorts of tools and tactics, we’ve got to be able to come together across the political spectrum. And you know, Australia is actually a great case study for this. I mean, not that they’re a sort of unified perspective across every individual within the Australian political system on these issues. But in Australia we really have seen a remarkable degree of cross partisan cooperation and unity on these issues. I think it’s one of the reasons that Australia has been successful in what it’s done far. Not that… There’s a lot more work to do to counter these issues from Australia. But I do think that some of the stuff that have been taken there, they are things I often point US policymakers to. Because it demonstrates that in fact you can come together across the political spectrum of these issues.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now it certainly is… Well, to take your point, it’s not complete anonymity, but it is relatively bipartisan, and certainly the responses thus far at the last sort of few years particularly. But we sort of talk a lot about interference and conceptualize it around elections. One thing I talk about a lot on the podcast, and certainly I know the ASD is looking at it, is the more the geopolitical contest behind authoritarian regimes and democracies. How does interference fit in within that broader context? And what are the other ones, all that kind of interference, and what’s it’s goal I suppose is the… What’s the assistance approach to this rather than just trying to make mischief?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah, absolutely. I have to laugh on the side for one second. It’s so funny. Whenever I have conversations with Australian colleagues and I hear ASD said in an Australian accent, I always feel the need to clarify, that your ASD it’s the different…

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s true.

Laura Rosenberger:

Our acronym similarity there. But anyway-

Misha Zelinsky:

And there’s so many acronyms to go around. And Australians are acronym obsessed in fairness as well. We’ve never met an acronym that we don’t like.

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah, yeah. But back to your question. I mean, I think it’s a really important one. So I think there’s like a couple different layers there maybe for me to unpack. So the first is, your point that a lot of the conversation I think particularly in the US about foreign interference is framed around elections. And I think that that’s frankly unhelpful for a couple of reasons. I mean, I think it’s both unhelpful and inaccurate I guess I should say. I think number one, it’s unhelpful because really and to our last discussion there, I think that seeing it primarily through election focus actually reinforces or plays into the politicization of the issues, right? Elections are naturally where everybody gets into their most partisan corners.

Laura Rosenberger:

And the more that we frame this issue around election outcomes in particular, I think it just drives people more naturally to partisan positions. It’s not an excuse for that, I think it’s just a dynamic occurs. But I think, as I said as well from a sort of analytic perspective, I also think it’s inaccurate. And one of my colleagues had the phrase that I have abused religiously, which is that, elections are not a starting point or an end point for these operations, they are flashpoints. And I think that that’s a really, really good way of thinking about it. In the sense that, if we just take the US 2016, the Russian campaign aimed at the 2016 election, there’s a few things that we know about that. One, it started at least as early as 2014, 2013, there’s even some social media data that indicates it could have been as early as 2012. So a lot of work that was done several years in advance to lay the groundwork for the operation, again, in particular on social media.

Laura Rosenberger:

Number two, that in fact, not only did these operations start well before, but the operations actually continued and increased. Again, if we want to talk specifically about the social media operations which was just one piece of it, but they actually increased after the 2016 election. So, the amount of activity we saw from this sort of internet, Russian internet research agency, fake accounts, fake pages, all that, they really ramped up after the election. Really seeking to exploit the anger of many Americans on the left, to gin up emotion, to sow dissension, to create chaos. And that was actually even more obvious in the year and a half after the election before a lot of this contact was finally taken down by the social media platforms.

Laura Rosenberger:

So, you have it starting well before an election, continuing well after an election. And then I think the third piece is to understand what the goals of these operations are, right? So while I do think that in some instances, and certainly the US Intelligence community has concluded that one of Russia’s goals in 2016 was to help Donald Trump, to help his election chances. The Russians had two other goals. One was to discredit American Democracy, and the other was to hurt Hillary Clinton in the thinking of, not just as a candidate, but assuming if she won that she would be a weakened president. But to me that first piece, the discrediting of American Democracy is really the overarching piece of what… at least in our analysis, we see from Russia’s operations.

Laura Rosenberger:

But also I think it’s an area where we see some overlap with the Chinese Party-State’s intentions, which we can talk about a little bit. But, I think China’s… The goals of the CCP are different than Russia’s in terms of long-term goals. But there is some intersection. And in particular this discrediting and weakening of democracy is an area where there’s some intersection. And I think that relates then to your larger question, which is interference as one piece of this broader competition between authoritarian and democratic systems. And in that sense, I think interference is one line of effort that we see from regimes like Russia an China. I think that again, they probably take a even bigger share of what we seen from a country like Russia that’s a declining state, right? You know, Russia’s objectively declining economically, geopolitically, other ways, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Demographically, yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah, exactly. So the sort of range of options that Putin has in front of him to actually gain power or leverage are more limited. And the interference piece is a big one. I think from the CCP perspective there’s a broader range of tools. And it has I think a bigger interest in shaping rules and norms, and things like future information architecture, aero technology, and other pieces of that. And I think that the interference piece for both of them, is one piece that’s brought our effort to make the world more favorable to autocrats. And weakening democracies had the big piece of that. So interfering in democracies and undermining them is one set of tools that are used there.

Laura Rosenberger:

But there is also a broader competition and effort to try to shape the rules based order in a way that is less favorable to democracies and more favorable to autocrats. And I think for me, we could talk about this in particular dimensions, but I think this is particularly important to bear in mind when we talk about things like information manipulation. And I think we have a tendency to think about that issue in very tactical terms. People are very focused on specific disinformation campaigns, or even down to the bots and trolls and all that, which really is just a small part of what we see in these operations. But in thinking about the responses to information operations, I think it’s really important to pull back the lens a little bit and understand that, that’s a tactic that autocrats use to actually enable a more authoritarian friendly information environment that is defined by control and manipulation.

Laura Rosenberger:

Autocracies and democracies see it for rich and very, very differently. And that bigger picture frame of what autocrats are trying to achieve in the information space is really important to understand, and fundamentally at odds with the democratic information system.

Misha Zelinsky:

I think that’s right. One of the things that I think is difficult to grapple with if you’re a person who lives in a democracy and used to being in a democracy, authoritarian regimes pose some kind of threat to democracies. But democracies through their very existence are enormous threats to authoritarian regimes. So, just by exiting and not touching an authoritarian regime, the very existence proves that there’s another way of doing. Which you can understand why if you’re an authoritarian regime, you may want to discredit it. Now just want to dive in a little more into misinformation campaigns. Thinking about your 911 example and why that shocking set of events occurred. No one really conceived that planes could be used in the way that they were in weaponization.

Misha Zelinsky:

Social medial in many ways was relatively, and still is relatively new. But it was a fun thing, right? The 2016 election was… People started to see problems with social media, for the first time seeing perhaps the weaponization of social media, and this sort of open access to Western society’s provided by these platforms. I mean, since the election, do you think social media companies are doing enough to stop misinformation of this kind?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah, you know, I think the analogy is right. That just as we didn’t anticipate airplanes could become weapons, we didn’t see social media becoming weaponized in the way it has been. Obviously there was some sense of that around the way that ISIS for instance was using-

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that’s true.

Laura Rosenberger:

… social media for radicalization and recruitment purposes, right? And so there was a sense that indeed there was a downside risk to some of these platforms. But I think it was seen in pretty narrow terms. So, I think that you’re absolutely right that this is something that we didn’t really anticipate in the more sort of geopolitical competition space that we should have. On the question of what the companies are doing, I think there’s a couple of ways of thinking about this. And of course, we just here in the US, we’re speaking on July 30th. Just yesterday we had these big tech hearings in Congress-

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s right.

Laura Rosenberger:

… with several of the large social media and Allied Information Platform heads testifying. And it wasn’t really focused on disinformation issues per se. But of course it came up. And you know, it’s very interesting to me to look at how these leaders are framing themselves in the roles of their platforms. I thin that, look, the platforms in general… And I should say that while I’m talking sort of generically about the platforms, it’s important to acknowledge that they are not all created equal either in their role in this ecosystem, nor are they equally taking steps to address it. So, I wanted to just like be very clear on that point upfront. I do think that we’ve seen progress by most of the platforms. So there’s no question that… In late 2016 Mark Zuckerberg thought it was ludicrous the idea that somehow Facebook could have been used to influence the election.

Laura Rosenberger:

Which is ridiculous that he would have ever thought that, given how much they had built infrastructure to support political campaigns using the platform. Clearly this is something that they knew. But, putting that to the side. We’ve gone from a basic rejection to the premise that this even happened, to an acknowledgement, to investigations, to marginal steps being taken to address some of the abuse of the platforms. Twitter similarly has taken action, and I’ve actually suggested, especially over the past six months, Twitter has become far more aggressive and assertive in going after a wider range of different kinds of activity that we see. I think one of the challenges… well, several challenges here, a few. Well, I think in so many ways the platforms have not gone far enough. I’d also do acknowledge that they face some difficult challenges here.

Laura Rosenberger:

I mean, my own view is, as I mentioned earlier, that needing to understand the sort of information environment that authoritarians want to create, one that’s controlled and manipulated… I do think it’s really important that in responding to these kinds of information operations, governments and platforms ensure that they’re not taking steps that actually help create that sort of controlled information environment, right? I think the tendency here is to want to just remove all content that we don’t like and really lockdown the systems. And I think that that’s the wrong instinct. Because I think it’s fundamentally undemocratic, and it will actually… I think a lot of that is what autocrats would like to see.

Laura Rosenberger:

They’d like us to become less democratic. And so, I don’t think in every instance there are easy answers for some of these platforms. A lot of us in this community that work on these issues have really come to the view that behavioral and actor-based interventions are the most appropriate and effective ones, versus content-based interventions, right? That it’s not so much that [crosstalk 00:25:13].

Misha Zelinsky:

And what do they want that, sorry?

Laura Rosenberger:

Sure. So, I think in some places there’s still a sense that a lot of what we’ve seen happening in the online information space is about purely false information. And that somehow if you get rid of the false information, then you’ve taken care of the problem. And of course, one of the things we knew about what the Russians did in 2016, as we see China getting much more into the online information manipulation game on Western platforms, we see similarly that the vast majority of this is not about content that is demonstrably false. Now, there are other aspects of the mis and disinformation problem where we do see that. So, antivax kind of content, and all the stuff about different cures, supposed cures for COVID. There are in certain spaces more of a problem that does have to do with the false information. But in a lot of cases, this is not either demonstrably false information. Sometimes it’s more opinion-based-

Misha Zelinsky:

Opinion, yes.

Laura Rosenberger:

… for a lot of times. A lot of what we saw from the Russians in 2016 and afterwards was memetic work there. The use of memes and other kinds of more pictorial kind of things that actually have much more emotional resonance, to kind of gin people up. But you can’t say like this is false. And there’s a whole different… We could go through different categories of content. But I think for me, the harm is not necessarily the content in most cases. Again, there are some exceptions to that. But in a lot of cases it’s the behavioral manipulation of the platforms, right? It’s the use of computational strategies. It’s the use of swarming. It’s the use of Astroturfing. It’s the use of all these different kinds of tactics that are used in order to manipulate algorithms, manipulate individuals, manipulate groups.

Laura Rosenberger:

The use of false personas, all that kind of stuff, we see all that as well. But to me then, when we want to talk about how the platform’s done enough, part of the problem with that is that, if you’re thinking about behavioral interventions, and you’re thinking about the approaches that actually get at the systemic aspects of a problem. And a lot of those actually begin to bleed into solutions that would really challenge the business model of some of these companies. Where you had algorithms that have been trained to promote virality, to promote content that makes people angry. To promote-

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, outright [crosstalk 00:28:15].

Laura Rosenberger:

… content that pulls people to extremes, right? And so to me, honestly, that’s where we need to be getting at in a more systematic way to address this problem. It feels at the moment like a lot of what we do is play Whac-A-Mole, and that does not seem to me to be sustainable.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s an incredibly challenging kind of philosophical and technological problem as you start to unpack a bit. We sort of focus a lot on the role of I suppose US tech platforms in the global democratic discourse. What about, the big discussion point at the moment is around Chinese platforms, specifically TikTok. Personally, I mean, do you think there’s a case to ban TikTok? And then secondly, shouldn’t we be taking a closer look at things that are state-owned Chinese Communist Party tech, like Kwai, like other platforms such as that. I mean, is there a case for looking more deep with them, given their links to the party-state?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah. I think it’s one of the most important and challenging questions that we’re going to be seeing right now. And you know, look, I’ll be candid. I don’t think I totally feel like I know what the answer is to TikTok and to similar platforms. I will say that I have a lot of trepidation about the idea of banning TikTok. And the reason that I say that is that, again, if we look at what the Chinese Party-State has done with it’s own information environment, and the way that it bans or blocks platforms. The way that it tries to close off it’s information environment to one that it can control, I think that when we start talking about systematically banning platforms from other countries, I have a little bit of a concern that we are starting to head down a path that looks very similar to the sort of cyber sovereignty, information sovereignty doctrine that the CCP has advanced.

Laura Rosenberger:

Now, I completely take the point that the reasons that the CCP does that are fundamentally different than the reasons for which democracies are talking about banning TikTok. But that’s the reason that it gives me some significant pause. I have similar concerns for instance about talk of banning for instance Chinese Government officials and party officials from platforms like Twitter. Twitter is the platform that’s banned in China, or blocked in China. And there’s been some discussion about, now that these officials have become much more aggressive in using that platform as a way of weaponizing information against democratic audiences, given the asymmetry there, should we ban them? And again, I just worry that at the end of the day that ends up leading us down a path for creating an information space that looks a lot less democratic and a lot more authoritarian. That-

Misha Zelinsky:

Is the… yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

Go ahead.

Misha Zelinsky:

No, no. Because these are… I mean, one of the biggest challenges here, you’ve sort of zeroed right in on it. It’s these challenges within authoritarian democracy, but open closed systems. And so, at the moment you’ve got this lack of reciprocity where essentially you’ve got the great firewall of China, you’ve got the Russians essentially disconnecting their incident in part. And then the openness and permissiveness of Western society, the Western information systems, it feels almost like closed systems are winning. And you just wonder, how ca open systems prevail without losing it’s sense of self.

Misha Zelinsky:

But you’ve identified all the right areas. You know, we want things to be open, we want discourse to be free, we want things to be contestable. And yet, the closed system doesn’t permit that. And so, we’re allowing, on one rating of it, you’re allowing this sort of gaming of your system without a reciprocal relationship on the other side. It’s very difficult. How can we win that battle as Western open societies?

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly right. The asymmetries here are profound, and they are significant challenges. I think there’s a couple of things that we need to do, right? One of the things that goes alongside with openness in democratic systems needs to be transparency. And I think a lot of times we have moved away, in a lot of different areas, we’ve moved away from transparency as a guiding principle in our systems. And so, whether that’s around financial flows coming into politics, or into lobbying spaces, or political campaigns, or business deals or whatever. I think there’s challenges there. I think in the information space, there’s lack of transparency about how algorithms work, why do we see information, where information is coming from originally?

Laura Rosenberger:

I mean, and I should stipulate on that, that I think the ability to be anonymous online is really important, especially in closed spaces. So I think again, there’s transparency in figuring out where information comes from while preserving some ability to be genuinely anonymous. But that’s sort of a small but important point in my mind. But I think the transparency piece here is huge for me. Now, there’s limits to it, I grant that and acknowledge that, and there’s a lot of literature around that. But I think that the problem with seeing this just in terms of reciprocity… I mean, you’re right in terms of analyzing the problem in terms of the lack of reciprocity.

Laura Rosenberger:

My problem with seeing reciprocity necessarily at the answer, is that if we’re playing on reciprocal terms to autocrats, definitionally we are going to end up being more closed off. Because we’re letting them pace set, right? We’re letting them set the terms that the status quo is a closed system. And we’re reciprocating in a way that will close us off more. And I think that that fundamentally weakens us. It’s great this is just like a values question of, we need to be principled on these things. It’s actually that I think it fundamentally weakens us, and that we… The source of our strength really is our democratic values and principles with openness and transparency, and civil liberties, and all these different pieces.

Laura Rosenberger:

And so, I think one of the pieces that we need to do is actually look inside our own depth democracies. The US for sure faces a lot of challenges at the moment with living up to our democratic principles. And that’s not just a recent thing. We’ve had challenges for quite some time in our democratic institutions that we’ve left unaddressed. And that makes us more weak an vulnerable, and open to exploitation. I think again, we can look at a lot of what Australia’s done in some of the steps it’s taken to respond to CCP interference tactics.

Laura Rosenberger:

And a lot of those have focused on a variety of transparency regimes, other kinds of disclosures, et cetera. So I think that’s a big piece of it. But think the there piece of it for me is that, as I look at this competition right now, this broader competition we talked about earlier between autocratic and democratic systems, is democracies right now are very focused on responding to autocratic advances, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

We are looking at this primarily through a framework of countering what autocracies are doing. And of course that’s got to be part of it. But, that framing is fundamentally defensive and reactive. And it’s not actually enabling democracies to articulate an affirmative vision of what they are trying to achieve. And I’ve done some writing for instance, around again the information space. And in that area, democracies need to acknowledge some of the ways in which the free and open internet that we envisioned 20 years ago is falling short. The rise of surveillance capitalism and all these ways that we just talked about, that the online information platforms we’ve designed are falling short of democratic principles. We’ve got to acknowledge that. But we can’t just focus on countering what autocrats are doing in this space. We’ve got to figure out our affirmative plan of what we’re trying to achieve. I think that’s how open systems prevail.

Misha Zelinsky:

So how do we do that? I mean, yeah, if you think about the last time they had genuine systems competition was the cold war, and the West was pretty bolshie so to speak, in how it projected it’s values. I mean, how could, in this contest, how can we turn the tables? You’re right, because it does feel like one-way traffic, that’s how I describe it. It’s all one-way traffic at the moment with the West trying to play catch-up. I mean, how can we turn the tables in a way that… What are the tools we can use the same or different tactics against autocrats to make their lives a little more difficult so to speak?

Laura Rosenberger:

You know, I wish I could give you a concise and easy answer on that.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s a podcast, so you can take as long as you want, but you know…

Laura Rosenberger:

You know, this is a… I think that’s a huge question. I think it’s the right question. It’s a question that I’ve been doing a good bit of work around. And I don’t think I fully have all the answers yet. I think, I guess I would sort of bucket it into a few categories. The first is that it starts I think where I was noting before, that we can’t just… The tendency in these kinds of competitions is to look outward, and to focus the competition in that outward space. And that’s certainly a part of it. But, I think that democracies first of all just really need to get their own houses in order. I mentioned in my sort of personal story at the beginning that when I was back in college, before 911 feeling really conflicted choosing between domestic policy and foreign policy.

Laura Rosenberger:

And at the time it felt like this artificial thing to me. But career track wise you have to choose, right? And 20 years later I feel like I’ve come full circle on that. And in the sense that, I still think that the distinction between domestic and foreign policy is pretty artificial. And I fact, it’s partly what is hindering our ability to compete in this contest effectively is that we don’t necessarily see the way that these spaces are integrated, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Rosenberger:

So that’s one piece of it, but that’s, I mean [crosstalk 00:40:12].

Misha Zelinsky:

And this is kind of like… It’s a JFK thing, right? Like we don’t need to build a wall to keep our people in.

Laura Rosenberger:

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. But I think beyond that, there’s a couple of things. Two is like, we need to focus on where our advantages are, and do a much better job at harnessing that. So obviously in the US despite advances by the PRC, we still have the strongest economy in the world. We have a lot of challenges to our economy, and COVID is certainly exacerbating those. But we need to be better about figuring out how do we harness our economic strength in a strategic way? And I think a lot of that relates to technology. Where again, I think we still have a huge technological edge in a lot of areas. I think we are at risk of losing it or falling behind.

Laura Rosenberger:

But I think if we actually do a much better job of partnering with our democratic partners and allies in a systematic way to leverage our collective strengths, both in a technology space and the economic space and more broadly. We can do a much better job at thinking about how to actually effectively leverage one another and build that collective strength. I mean, I think that if we think about where… I mean, the vast majority of the US alliances are with countries with whom we deeply share democratic values, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yep.

Laura Rosenberger:

But the formal parts of those alliances have all been built around the military dimensions of our strength.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that’s right, yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

And you know, the challenge is that, it’s not that the military domain does not remain an important one, it certainly does. But so much in this competition is playing out in the spaces that are non-military. And so-

Misha Zelinsky:

We haven’t military at all up until now, and it’s all been highly contested, right? So you’re completely correct.

Laura Rosenberger:

Right. Right, exactly. So, I think we need to do a much better job at thinking systematically about how do we build out our alliances in more formal ways to compete in those non-military spaces? And to build that tissue. I have to other things I would say on this. One is that, with the US retreat from multilateral institutions has been deeply, deeply damaging. And it’s just created huge space for Beijing and Moscow in particular to really, really gain traction in those institutions, and to manipulate them in a way, or influence them I should say, in a way that’s it’s more favorable to them. And there’s no question that these institutions have problems. And there’s no question that they need to be reformed and updated.

Laura Rosenberger:

But the US and our democratic allies should be driving that process of reform and update. Not seeding it to the autocrats. And right now that’s the position that we’re in. So that’s a huge problem. And we’ve got to engage there. And then I think the last piece I would say is, again, this goes back to this question of, where is this competition taking place? And there’s actually going to be a lot of areas where government is not the right actor to be leading the charge. Given how much of this competition is playing out on private sector terrain or civilians are the targets, and all this. You know, there are places where government can lead the charge. But government should not necessarily be in the driver’s seat on all these areas. Especially when it touches on issues of civil liberties, or the free market, or all that.

Laura Rosenberger:

So what we need to do… But we can’t completely say, okay, well governments hands off, somebody else is going to sort it out either, right? And so the challenge is to figure out, how do we build meaningful cross-sectoral cooperation on these issues? Again, not in a way that ends looking like the CCP where government is heavily intervening with private companies to direct where they go, and all this stuff, right? But we need to figure out meaningful ways of cooperation. It’s become really trite to talk about these issues, the whole of society problem, requiring whole of society solutions. That’s great. What does that mean, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that’s right.

Laura Rosenberger:

Let’s actually build the mechanisms that facilitate that kind of cooperation. So, I don’t think that at all satisfactorily answers the question that you posed of, what does it look like of democracies to articulate this affirmative vision? But I think those are some of the means to do it. Actually, one last point, sorry. This is an important one. We forget sometimes that autocracies have a lot of weaknesses. And again, there’s no question that many of them are very effectively leveraging their strengths, and prosecuting our weaknesses. We need to be much better about systematically prosecuting and going after autocratic weaknesses. And most of the ways that we would do that I think are leaning into democratic strengths. I mean, I am not all suggesting, and I do not believe that we should be adopting the tactics that autocrats are using. I think that’s a race to the bottom in which democracy loses.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s what I think.

Laura Rosenberger:

But I do think that harnessing democratic values an institutions is very much a way that we can help go on offense if you will. To your point earlier about the existence of democracies posing a threat. Our free press is not at all looked up on favorably in most of these closed spaces. And there’s a lot more we can be doing in some of these areas to enable that kind of approach.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so, it’s important too. But though I told you you’d get there with a podcast answer. But in terms of, jumping forward now, a little bit forward, it’s kind of scary to think, we’re kind of less than 100 days to the US election. I mean, how worried should we all be about 2020 election and potential foreign interference from Russia or others, CCP or others? I mean, people would have looked at the playbook from 2016. And should we be worried about it, is it going on now? Give me a positive picture or not.

Laura Rosenberger:

So, we should be worried about it. It is going on now. But this again, I think goes back a little bit to your important point about, how we see a lot of this through an election lens, but that may not always be the right lens. I don’t think any of these activities ever stopped after 2016, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

It’s not like it’s stopped and then it restarted. These are ongoing operations. And not all of it’s aimed at the election. That doesn’t mean it won’t affect the election in one way or another. But I think, I have a sort of variety of concerns, and I’ll just kind of quickly summarize. I will note that an official, and the Director of National Intelligence last week released a statement talking about 100 days out and the concern from China, from Russia and from Iran. Now, they all had… They were characterized differently in terms of what their goals are. And in my view, so far what I’ve seen from the PRC is that, it’s effort largely remains still at cultivating friendly voices, cultivating narrative space that is favorable to the CCP, and discrediting democracy.

Laura Rosenberger:

But I really don’t think that we are going to see, or that we are seeing anything from the PRC that looks like what Russia has done in the US, election context, right? I just don’t think that’s in Beijing’s interest per se. And I think they’re playing a slightly different game. You know, with Russia, Russia’s the chaos agent. Putin’s Russia is a chaos agent, right? And so I think we see the same thing going on. Four years ago, so much of what we saw in the space of chaos was exploiting issues and party-system in the United States. And of course those issues have really come back to the fore here. But interestingly enough, a lot of what we’re seeing at the moment, and there’s been some recent reporting on this, is information operations that are really around the coronavirus. Which has of course become a very politicized issue in the United States.

Laura Rosenberger:

And seeking to exploit that is a means of undermining people’s faith in the process in the institution. Not about reelection per se, but it’s about persistent pulling Americans apart from one another and pitting them against each other. So I think that, I am concerned about that. Your Iran I think is a sort of much smaller player here that does have potential to do some things, we’ve seen them do some things. I think their goals are largely similar to Russia’s, and that sort of chaos agent space. But I think, honestly my biggest concern is, especially coupled with the domestic challenges we’re facing here in the US, all the challenges that we’re going to face in the voting process with coronavirus. And changes that are having to be made is in fact that, we’ll sort of get to the immediate aftermath of election day, election night, next day, and start to have a lot of information operations that are basically aimed at discrediting the process itself.

Laura Rosenberger:

Whether or not there’s any evidence to back that up. And I certainly see directions could play heavily in that. And I think that we’re a little bit primed right now frankly, to question the integrity of the process. And so, that to me is actually one of the most concerning scenarios. Not necessarily that there’s interference in the actual voting process, but that doubt is cast on the outcome itself. And elections are an institution that are based on trust, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Rosenberger:

And so, if that’s thrown into doubts and people start to… don’t believe it he legitimacy of the outcome, that could throw the US into a real crisis.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah. Particularly if say, you have a long process of counting postal ballots or mail-in votes over a period of days, that would certainly… You could imagine that would create a window of chaos. Now, I could obviously go all night my time, or morning your time, but I’m sure it’s very early where you are, and I’m sure you’re desperate to get some coffee. But I can’t let you go, Laura, without asking the trademark Diplomates hokey Australian lame question as part of the seque from heavy foreign policy misinformation campaign leads to very boring trite questions about barbecues and people. But I’m here at Laura’s, three Australians, who’s coming along and why?

Laura Rosenberger:

Now, it’s a tough question. It’s a very tough question.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s the toughest one of the night, so far, so yeah.

Laura Rosenberger:

So many to choose from.

Misha Zelinsky:

Crocodile Dundee and many others.

Laura Rosenberger:

Yeah. I promise you, I won’t go down that path. So I think, my first would be Cate Blanchett, who’s amazing for so many reasons. But in particular having earlier in the pandemic binge watch Mrs. America, and watch her play Phyllis Schlafly who for anybody in Australia who’s not familiar, was a very conservative anti-feminist activist in the US who I actually had the chance to meet when I was in college. I was a very, very active feminist on campus. And Phyllis Schlafly came to speak. And I remember it very vividly. And so watching Cate Blanchett sort of transform herself into Phyllis Schlafly was quite the amazing thing.

Laura Rosenberger:

So really, really appreciated her in that role. And I think that story of the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, and this very virulent anti-feminist movement is something that I think a lot of people don’t really know. And so I was really glad to have that story told. The second, I will confess to have consulted with my sister on this question, having gotten a slight heads-up from you to expect this.

Misha Zelinsky:

Oh, you can’t listen to [crosstalk 00:53:45] on how this is done. You’ve ruined the entire premise of the show.

Laura Rosenberger:

Oh no!

Misha Zelinsky:

I’m joking. I’m joking, joking. Yes folks, I do give the questions in advance, there it is. Anyway, so keep going, you and your sister…

Laura Rosenberger:

My sister tells me that Hugh Jackman, I cannot leave Hugh Jackman off my list. She thinks he’s the ultimate showman, and I think of course this is also very, very true. And I think the last one I would say is from a very different angle. Penny Wong, Senator Penny Wong. I just think she’s been such a powerful voice on these issues that we’ve talked about today in this conversation, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Absolutely.

Laura Rosenberger:

These challenges that we face as democracies from autocrats, and I just really admire the way in which she has approached these issues, and her principle commitment to them. So that would be my third sort of curve ball example there, or invitation there.

Misha Zelinsky:

Oh, I think Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman will have their work cut out keeping up to a Penny Wong cross examination. But it’s up to them. We can just sit and watch. But look, Laura Rosenberger, thanks so much for joining us. It’s been a fascinating chat. And I look forward to catching up again soon.

Laura Rosenberger:

Wonderful. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Misha. This was great fun. I really enjoyed it.

Misha Zelinsky:

See you next time. Cheers.