The Last Supporter

The conference was about disinformation. It produced a small diplomatic incident instead.

On October 7 and 8, the Brussels-based nonprofit EU DisinfoLab held its annual conference on foreign information manipulation. The program included a panel with a title that did the damage: “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back.” FIMI is the industry term for foreign information manipulation and interference. The panel was scheduled to follow an address by a judge of the International Criminal Court whom the United States has sanctioned.

Washington noticed. According to Reuters, citing three US officials and diplomatic correspondence, the State Department spent several days pressing its counterparts in Lithuania, Canada, and France to withdraw their support for the event. The American argument, in essence: a conference that lists the United States as an information threat, and gives a platform to a sanctioned ICC judge, is not a neutral forum. Allies should not lend it their names.

It worked, mostly. Canada and Lithuania — both listed as the conference’s “main supporters” — distanced themselves. The European Union’s own foreign service, the External Action Service, also quietly disappeared from the supporters list, though Reuters could not confirm whether the State Department had contacted Brussels.

One name stayed on the list: France. Paris is now the conference’s only remaining “main supporter.”

The French position is the mirror image of the American one. Paris has not publicly explained its decision in detail, but the logic is familiar: information manipulation is information manipulation, whoever does it, and a research conference should be able to say so. From the French point of view, leaning on allies to abandon a panel because Washington dislikes the topic is itself a form of pressure on open debate — the very thing the conference exists to study.

Both sides have a point, and both know it. The United States is not wrong that the panel’s framing was pointed; “acknowledge, adapt, push back” is not the language of neutral inquiry. France is not wrong that a country confident in its position can afford to let researchers talk. The question underneath is the one that keeps recurring in the transatlantic relationship: who gets to set the terms of the argument?

There is a pétanque term for what happened on that supporters list. When your boule is knocked out and only one of yours is left holding the ground, you play around it. France is now playing around its own boule. Whether the terrain holds is another question — the conference is over, the panel happened, and the only thing left on the record is who stayed and who left.