Source: United States Senator for Connecticut – Chris Murphy
WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) spoke on Wednesday at a U.S. Senate Appropriations hearing on President Biden’s FY24 budget request for the U.S. State Department and Foreign Operations with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Murphy applauded the State Department’s role in helping to secure the Windsor Framework on Northern Ireland and the normalization agreement between Kosovo and Serbia, as well as the budget’s request for a double digit percentage increase for the Global Engagement Center (GEC). Murphy questioned Blinken on the Department’s plan to reopen a U.S. Embassy in Libya and why the budget maintains FY23 levels of military aid to Tunisia despite its democratic backsliding.
Murphy highlighted the importance of the GEC and its upcoming reauthorization: “I’m of the belief that the GEC needs to take a primary, rather than secondary role, when it comes to the way in which we counter misinformation around the world. I think often the Department of Defense, which has a budget that dwarfs that of the GEC, doesn’t always have the sensitivities that the State Department does about what messages work and what doesn’t. But what concerns me more is that we have ahead of us the reauthorization of the GEC, we’ve got to put it back on the books, and there is really no way to combat Russian misinformation, their propaganda efforts, which are integral to their campaign against Ukraine, or China’s efforts to expand its reach without the GEC.
As other countries reopen their embassies in Libya, Murphy, author of the Expeditionary Diplomacy Act, pushed Blinken on getting American diplomats back on the ground: “Senator Risch and I led an effort to rewrite the Accountability Review Board process to try to give your folks a little bit more reason to reengage in those fragile places. I just worry that without a presence there in 2023, we’re going to have a hard time protecting our equities and a lot of taxpayer dollars that have been spent there. With this additional funding that you’ve put in the budget, do you have any timetable for our ability to reopen the embassy in Libya?”
On the FY24 budget request for aid to Tunisia, Murphy said: “It seems to me that President Saied has made up his mind to move away from a success story of democracy in Tunisia, towards a neo-autocracy. It seems that your budget, you know, is a bit of a middling ground and maybe that’s where you want to be, cutting economic funding, maintaining military funding, but then also opening up the possibility of additional military funding if Tunisia, quote ‘shows signs of a return to democratic governance.’ I kind of feel like they’ve made their decision, and I think that our funding and our policy should reflect that.”
You can read Murphy’s full exchange with Blinken:
MURPHY: “Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Good to see you, Mr. Secretary. The eyes of the world and the nation are rightly focused on Ukraine, on our broad set of competition challenges with China, the Middle East always gets an outsized share of attention from this country and this Congress, but I want to thank you for the work that your diplomats have done to achieve two preliminary, but very important, smaller scale diplomatic agreements in the past several weeks.
“First, the Windsor Framework, which the United States had a great interest in to make sure that peace is preserved in Northern Ireland ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and the normalization agreement between Kosovo and Serbia. The team that you have in place in that region is absolutely exceptional. Well, that is the beginning of what we hope is more accommodations between those two countries, a really important step. So, I just wanted to congratulate you and your team on the work that you have done on those two important achievements.
“I want to turn your attention to the Global Engagement Center because this is something you and I have talked about, and I appreciate the fact that we have continued to scale up the size of the Global Engagement Center and that your budget requests another double digit percentage increase. I’m of the belief that the GEC needs to take a primary, rather than secondary role, when it comes to the way in which we counter misinformation around the world. I think often the Department of Defense which has a budget that dwarfs that of the GEC doesn’t always have the sensitivities that the State Department does about what messages work and what doesn’t.
“But what concerns me more is that we have ahead of us the reauthorization of the GEC, we’ve got to put it back on the books, and there is really no way to combat Russian misinformation, their propaganda efforts, which are integral to their campaign against Ukraine, or China’s efforts to expand its reach without the GEC. So I just want to sneak in at least one more question, but ask you for a minute to talk about what impact it would have if we were not able to extend the GEC’s authorities beyond the end of 2024.”
BLINKEN: “Yeah, really, thank you for raising that. Also, thank you for your leadership on this. This is a front in the conflict that Senator Rubio was just talking about, that is information, and we have competitors, adversaries, who are using information, or more accurately misinformation and disinformation, against us, virtually every minute of the day and against our allies and partners. Both to drive wedges between us and also to misinform publics in profound ways. The GEC, for us, is a critical tool in actually being able to deal with that. And as you know, what it’s doing is working with other agencies to direct, to lead, to synchronize, to coordinate, our efforts to understand these trends in foreign malign actors trying to spread disinformation and propaganda outside of the United States. Both to understand it, to expose it, to share that information with others, and to help them develop tools to combat it. We have campaigns through the GEC to, as I said, to expose, to educate, to mitigate disinformation.
“It is now the premier information sharing platform internationally. For this we have dozens of countries that are participating with us, among other things. Just to cite a few examples: we’ve exposed through the GEC, Russian websites that have been pushing misinformation, disinformation, including about Ukraine, again in countries around the world. Disinformation coming from China in third countries about elections, again, about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. We have done tremendous work, I think doing open source mapping of some of the uses that China has made of surveillance technology and data collection. I could go on but the point is it’s a very effective vehicle for doing this and if we lose that we are in effect disarming ourselves in this aspect of competition.”
MURPHY: “Here, here, and I hope that those of us who have worked in a bipartisan way to support the GEC, will continue to do that. I want to turn your attention to North Africa for a moment. Senator Coons has led the effort in trying to increase our ability to operate in fragile environments and there are a number of them in North Africa, one of them is Libya.
“Your budget requests a six percent increase in worldwide security protection funding for local forces to make sure that we have a diplomatic presence in dangerous places, and [there are] few more dangerous places than Libya. But other countries are reopening their diplomatic presence there. Senator Risch and I led an effort to rewrite the Accountability Review Board process to try to give your folks a little bit more reason to reengage in those fragile places. I just worry that without a presence there in 2023, we’re going to have a hard time protecting our equities and a lot of taxpayer dollars that have been spent there. With this additional funding that you’ve put in the budget, do you have any timetable for our ability to reopen the embassy in Libya?”
BLINKEN: “Senator, I can’t give you a timetable, other than to say that it’s something we’re very actively working on, and like you, I want to see us be able to re-establish an ongoing presence in Libya. There’s also an important moment where through the work of the UN envoy, there may be, emphasized, may be, a path forward to moving Libya in a better direction, including getting elections for legitimate government. And our diplomats are deeply engaged in that but obviously it would be a lot easier and more effective if they were on the ground day in day out. So we’re working on it. We want to work with you, work with this Committee, on what would be necessary to support that.”
MURPHY: “And lastly, on Tunisia. I know that you are just as concerned as this Committee is about the dramatic turn in Tunisia away from democracy, [with] an eleven percent turnout in the so called ‘elections’. It seems to me that President Saied has made up his mind to move away from a success story of democracy in Tunisia, towards a neo-autocracy. It seems that your budget, you know, is a bit of a middling ground and maybe that’s where you want to be, cutting economic funding, maintaining military funding, but then also opening up the possibility of additional military funding if Tunisia, quote ‘shows signs of a return to democratic governance.’ I kind of feel like they’ve made their decision, and I think that our funding and our policy should reflect that, but your budget suggests that you still have hope that Tunisia can return to the rule of law, is that correct?
BLINKEN: “Hope is always important, but of course, it has to be grounded in reality. I’ve met with President Saied on a number of occasions, including most recently, I guess the African Leaders Summit, at the end of last year. We’re engaged with the Tunisian Government. We are indeed concerned about what we’ve seen over the last year.
“There’s another aspect of this that’s critically important that also goes to our budget, which is the most critical thing they can do on the economic side, is actually get an IMF agreement, and we’ve been strongly encouraging them to do that because the economy risks falling off the deep end. So, we need to see that, but we also want to see steps taken to put Tunisia fully back on the democratic path it was on.”
MURPHY: “Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”
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