Washington's StratCom Surrender
The United States turned strategic communication into statecraft. Now it is dismantling the apparatus, and the cognitive battlefield will not wait for it to change its mind.
On 16 April 2025 Marco Rubio chose a friendly broadcaster to announce the closure of a small office inside the State Department. It was called R/FIMI, the unit tasked with countering information manipulation and interference originating abroad, the last institutional heir of the Global Engagement Center that Congress had stripped of its funding only months earlier, in December 2024. Rubio claimed the office had used public money to curtail Americans’ freedom of expression, described its work as incompatible with the founding principles of the United States, and presented the decision as a restoration of free speech.
In the months that followed the State Department completed the operation, dismantling even the last instruments dedicated to countering information manipulation campaigns run by foreign governments. More than the political ceremony, the acronym is what counts. FIMI, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, is the very conceptual framework that Brussels had adopted in 2023 as the pillar of its own strategy against hostile information operations. While the European External Action Service was building structures, procedures and operational capabilities around that concept, Washington was abolishing the office that bore its name. Two shores of the Atlantic, two opposing readings of the same threat.
A deliberate dismantling
The temptation is to file this away as routine housekeeping, one more office judged redundant and sacrificed by an administration that had promised to cut the size and cost of the federal machine. A reading of that kind catches only the surface of the problem. In the first months of Trump’s second term the Justice Department disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The infrastructure that monitored, analysed and exposed coordinated influence operations from abroad crumbled step by step, while the people promoting those cuts described them as a defence of civil liberties.
According to a former researcher quoted by Defense One, decisions of this kind risk compromising a country’s ability to sustain long conflicts and, in the final reckoning, to lose its great wars. The point does not concern the importance of R/FIMI as a single office. It concerns the choice made by the United States, the country that more than any other had helped turn strategic communication into an instrument of state power, to treat that entire field as a superfluous structure to be discarded.
To grasp the scale of the decision one has to step back and look at how the capability was born, what threats it set out to confront, and how much it cost to build. A study by the Istituto Affari Internazionali, written by Aurelio Insisa, reconstructs this evolution with unusual precision. The trajectory that emerges from his analysis runs in the opposite direction to the one Rubio described. It tells of the slow construction of an apparatus that successive administrations of differing persuasions came to regard as ever more necessary, up to the moment Washington decided to take it apart.
The cost of scrapping it
The idea took hold, over time, that every action of an institution produces communicative effects, that everything it does communicates something. For this reason whoever handles communication cannot be confined to explaining decisions already taken, but has to take part in the process that produces them. The United Nations under Kofi Annan reached this conclusion in the late 1990s, when a reform programme argued that what an organisation says and what it does form a single message. After 11 September the Pentagon arrived at a similar conviction. A Defense Science Board report stopped treating information as a mere support to policy and placed it at the centre of strategy.
NATO absorbed that lesson on Afghan ground. After 2006 the Alliance understood that military superiority did not automatically secure the political outcome in a conflict where legitimacy, public perception and the consent of the population shaped the result as much as operations in the field. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 turned that experience into a permanent priority. The Allied Joint Publication on strategic communications, issued in 2023, now treats every military action, including the absence of action and even silence, as a message acting within a contested cognitive space.
The European Union reached comparable conclusions, following a path marked once again by tensions with Russia. The East StratCom Task Force and the EUvsDisinfo project were born to identify and rebut false content, on a logic founded on the distinction between true and false. As the years passed an evident limit emerged: the most effective information campaigns do not necessarily depend on spreading falsehoods. They often amplify real facts, inflame existing conflicts and exploit social fractures already in place. A simple rebuttal is not enough to counter dynamics of this kind.
For this reason the European External Action Service gradually shifted its attention from individual content to the actors that produce it, the networks that spread it and the strategic objectives they pursue. From this evolution came the FIMI framework. It is precisely here that Aurelio Insisa’s analysis takes on a meaning that reaches beyond the American case. His conclusion suggests that Trump’s return may have closed, at least for the foreseeable future, the season of strategic communication as a stable function of the federal state. After more than twenty years of investment, adaptation and institutional consolidation, an apparatus built across different administrations has been dismantled in the space of a few months.
The asymmetry no one chooses
At this point Insisa’s analysis widens beyond the specific American case and poses a more ambitious question: is strategic communication possible in contemporary democracies? He identifies two main obstacles. The first is bureaucratic. Institutions tend to defend competences, resources and spaces of autonomy, generating a fragmentation that conflicts with the very idea of integrated communication. The second is political. Polarisation and the rise of populist leaderships can call into question the entire infrastructure built up over the years, as the American case demonstrates. Both obstacles are real. Both, however, seem to sink their roots into a deeper matter: the cost a democracy bears in order to remain one.
Across the twentieth century Western democracies developed an increasingly troubled relationship with the very concept of propaganda. The experience of the totalitarian regimes turned the word into something to be associated with external enemies or internal opponents, rendering it incompatible with the image liberal societies held of themselves. Since then every attempt to influence perceptions, behaviours and opinions has had to contend with an added constraint: preserving credibility, transparency and consistency with declared principles. That balance demands procedures, checks, public debate and continuous verification. It demands time.
Authoritarian powers operate in a different setting. China uses strategic communication and external propaganda as established instruments of its statecraft. Russia has long regarded the information space as a permanent terrain of geopolitical competition. Neither system faces an internal reckoning comparable to the one that marks Western democracies over the relationship between influence, persuasion and freedom of expression. Their respective leaderships need not justify the existence of these activities before a critical public opinion, nor measure themselves against the same level of institutional scrutiny.
For this reason Western vulnerability cannot be explained by organisational limits, political errors or technological delays alone. Part of the asymmetry derives from the very characteristics of open societies. The rules that guarantee pluralism, transparency and democratic oversight produce enormous advantages on the political and civic plane, yet they also introduce constraints the authoritarian adversary does not share. In this sense the gap does not arise solely from what the West does or fails to do. It arises also from the conditions within which the West chooses to operate.
Europe inherits an unfinished site
After the American withdrawal, what remains is an infrastructure still incomplete on the European side of the Atlantic, while the country that had decisively helped develop its concepts, instruments and practices chooses to step away from it. The European External Action Service keeps investing in capabilities devoted to countering information manipulation, consolidating the very approach Washington has progressively abandoned. It is here that one of the questions raised by Aurelio Insisa resurfaces: the growing distance between a supranational actor willing to develop a common strategy and member states that often struggle to do the same, whether for political and institutional limits or simply for a divergence of priorities.
The situation recalls a dynamic already seen in other areas of Western security. The United States retains its central role in deterrence, in the projection of power and in the guarantees offered to allies, yet it reduces its involvement in certain specific sectors, leaving Europeans with a growing share of the responsibility. The information domain appears to be sliding into this category, the pattern I have described elsewhere as delegating hegemony. Washington continues to present itself as the leader of the Western alliance, while relinquishing the very instruments with which it had helped define the contest in the cognitive and informational space.
The risk emerges plainly from Insisa’s own analysis. If strategic communication loses the capacity to anticipate, interpret and shape the information environment, it ends up turning into a purely defensive function. Instead of understanding the dynamics of the competition and acting upon them, it confines itself to responding to campaigns already under way. The difference is substantial: from a strategic instrument it becomes an instrument of catch-up.
Europe thus finds itself having to sustain an approach that its principal ally treats as less and less of a priority. It has to do so with limited resources, with competences distributed across different institutions, and with a political cohesion that remains incomplete. The fracture does not stop at the management of disinformation or influence operations. It touches the way the two shores of the Atlantic interpret the very nature of contemporary geopolitical competition. For years Europeans and Americans worked to build a shared vision of the information domain. Today that convergence looks less assured, and the distance keeps widening.
See you soon.