The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.
The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.
It comes as the United States is at war with Iran, whose government has for decades operated one of the world’s most sophisticated and prolific state disinformation apparatuses, and as Russian and Chinese influence operations continue to target American allies across Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.
“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”
Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.
A state department spokesperson told the Guardian that Sarah B Rogers, the under secretary for public diplomacy nominated in March, had made countering foreign “anti-American” propaganda “a top priority”, and that the department would take “an assertive stance on this pernicious issue” by “fully harnessing every tool in our diplomatic toolkit”.
The spokesperson did not directly address the cable’s endorsement of X or its directive to coordinate with military psychological operations units.
The state department also noted that Rogers had already drawn attention for a separate report to Congress identifying Code Pink and several other leftwing activist organizations as vectors of Chinese influence operations inside the United States.
It is not common for the state department to openly combine public diplomacy with military psychological operations. But attempts to counter foreign disinformation are not new, although previous administrations funded it through the Global Engagement Center, which lost its funding just before Donald Trump returned to office and had been made the poster child of supposed censorship of conservative speech – though their remit had always been to target foreign disinformation outside the United States .
Last year, the FBI had its foreign influence taskforce dissolved and the state department shuttered the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub.
The cable also endorses Elon Musk’s platform X by name – specifically its Community Notes feature – as an “innovative” and “crowdsourced” instrument to cull disinformation in “countering anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech or privacy”.
That endorsement comes as the European Union has already fined X €120m ($137.5m) under its Digital Services Act for deceptive practices – the first such fine under the law – and has opened further investigations into the platform’s AI tools and recommendation algorithms.
Musk, who owns X, had an influential special advisory role in the Trump administration through the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge).
The cable instructs embassy staff to ensure that US foreign assistance is visibly branded, directing consular posts to use “prominent, flag-forward branding” so that foreign audiences know when aid or programming is coming from the American government.
Offices and embassies globally are also told to increase the availability of international news and independent analysis translated into local languages, in effect tasking embassies with becoming distribution hubs for foreign-language media in countries where, the cable notes, “anti-American propaganda is pervasive or where information is restricted”.
More than 700 “American spaces” – the cultural centers, libraries and exchange hubs the US government funds in countries around the world – are to be repositioned under the guidance as platforms for uncensored information and promoted explicitly as free speech “zones.”
