One can’t but savour the circularity, and ironies, of history — inspired by “the American story” in 2007, Ambassador Fu Ying hired foreign PR firms to promote “the China Story” in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2012, Xi Jinping formally adopted the approach and now, 14 years later, Trump’s US regime is in turn promoting its version of “the American story” globally:

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, theguardian.com/us-news…, 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. …

The cable instructs … 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.