State Department Taps New Top China Official

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here. Wanna feel old? Karl Mathiesen, a senior reporter over at Politico, can help: He’s been waiting on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the State Department for six years. As he pointed out in a follow-up email, that’s about the same length of time as World War II—and he has had two children since filing the request. State’s response to the frustrated reporter? “We truly appreciate your continued patience.”

(Sidebar: If anyone at the State Department is reading this, Robbie also has three FOIA requests from 2017 alone that he hasn’t heard back on, so if you could help get that sorted out, it would be greatly appreciated.)

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The State Department’s “China House” has a new boss, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is finally making gains, and the results are in from a White House-sponsored AI hacking challenge.

‘China House’ Has a New Headmaster

The State Department has tapped a senior diplomat to lead its new initiative focused on countering China on the world stage, three people familiar with the matter confirmed to SitRep.

Mark Lambert is slated to become the next head of the Office of China Coordination at the State Department. Dubbed the “China House,” the office, which was established last year, oversees coordination among the U.S. diplomatic corps on countering China in regions beyond just the Asia-Pacific.

Eyes on the global prize. The China House is aimed at tracking and coordinating responses to China’s geopolitical power plays in Latin America, Africa, Eurasia, and elsewhere. It mirrors a similar entity in the CIA, the China Mission Center, which was set up in 2021, as Bloomberg reported at the time and the agency later announced.

The new man with a plan. Lambert, SitRep sources say, is well respected and will bring more heft to the nascent State Department office. (Kudos to Reuters, which first reported the news.)

Lambert is set to land one of the most important diplomatic assignments in Washington at a time when the State Department has faced staffing issues and criticism from Capitol Hill over its management of China-related policies—both from progressives on the left saying the Biden administration is being too hawkish and stumbling the United States toward a cold war and from Republicans who say it isn’t doing enough to counter China’s growing geopolitical influence.

This appointment signals that the Biden administration is doubling down on its hawkish approach to China and reorienting how federal agencies focus on Beijing’s activities globally.

Another diplomat, Rick Waters, previously led the China House but left in June to join the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. Lambert, his replacement, is expected to also be named deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan, the sources told SitRep.

Lambert was formerly the U.S. special envoy for North Korea and also in 2020 established an office dedicated to blunting the rise of authoritarian influence (aka China) at the United Nations and other international institutions. That came after an embarrassing diplomatic defeat for the Trump administration when a U.S.-backed candidate to run a top U.N. agency was routed by the Chinese candidate. Lambert also served two stints at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing as well as in Vietnam and Japan. (Interestingly, his first post in the State Department was in Bogotá at the height of Colombia’s war against notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.)

Team Biden’s pet diplomatic project. The China House, a brainchild of top Biden administration officials (as we first reported in September 2021), faced criticism from the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for adding new bureaucratic layers and overlapping authorities to a department already mired in red tape. Sen. James Risch later greenlit the creation of the China House after the State Department made changes to how it would function and coordinate on countering China.

Still, unlike many senior State Department posts, Lambert won’t have to face a Senate confirmation for this role.

When approached for comment on Lambert, a State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the move.

Let’s Get Personnel

British Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps has been tapped by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as the nation’s new defense minister, the Financial Times first reported.

Klaus Korhonen is departing his post as Finland’s ambassador to NATO after four years on the job, he announced on Twitter. He will be replaced by Piritta Asunmaa.

Scholar Hanna Notte has joined the Center for Nonproliferation Studies as the new director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Another day, another coup. We’re now up to nine coups in Africa in the past three years, all in West Africa or the Sahel region. This week, longtime Gabonese leader Ali Bongo was deposed by a new military junta, following the ouster of Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, by his own military junta last month. The epidemic of coups has led many inside and outside the U.S. government to push for a dramatic rethink of how the West and the international community should engage countries in these regions of Africa—particularly since terrorist groups linked to the Islamic State and al Qaeda have gained ground after decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism campaigns.

Whether that rethink will actually lead to major policy changes, such as shifting away from training security forces and focusing more on development and governance projects, remains to be seen, as Robbie reports this week.

Budget battles. Japan’s Defense Ministry put forward a $53 billion budget request on Thursday, the agency’s largest-ever. The ask for 2024—the 12th consecutive year that Japan’s defense budget has shot up—comes as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida looks to check China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific. This time, Tokyo is looking to invest more than $5 billion to build its own fleet of standoff missiles, nearly $9 billion for air and missile defenses, and about $500 million to work on a next-generation fighter jet with the United Kingdom and Italy.

The news comes just two days after North Korea conducted drills with its entire military and one day after it launched two ballistic missiles following U.S.-South Korean air exercises over the Yellow Sea.

Road to Crimea. Ukraine’s recent battlefield victories could help Kyiv pave the way toward liberating annexed Crimea, the country’s top diplomat, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Wednesday after Ukrainian troops retook the town of Robotyne. “Having entrenched on its [Robotyne’s] flanks, we are opening the way to Tokmak and, eventually, Melitopol and the administrative border with Crimea,” Kuleba said at a meeting in Paris. Russia claims that its forces are still holding on to part of the village.

Snapshot

Seen from above, agricultural workers harvest a large field of barley in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region, near the border with Russia, on Aug. 30. Pierre Crom/Getty Images

From the Field

FP tech reporter Rishi Iyengar traveled to Las Vegas this month to watch a White House-backed artificial intelligence red-teaming exercise at the DEF CON hacker convention, where thousands of participants tried to get chatbots to surreptitiously spy on users. He wrote about the event from the convention and now has an update on the results.

More than 2,200 people took part in the AI red-teaming exercise at DEF CON, exchanging a total of 164,208 messages with chatbots from eight of the top AI companies. It was a bid to dupe publicly available AI systems and to see what vulnerabilities exist for bad actors to exploit the latest disruptive technology. The red-teaming exercise was backed by an increasingly jittery U.S. government, which fears that AI could disrupt cybersecurity and governments and contribute to disinformation and crime in ways unintended by its creators. (By the way, Foreign Policy’s Summer 2023 print issue is devoted to AI and what it means to global governance, national security, and geopolitics.)

The organizers released the results of the exercise on Tuesday. DEF CON participants had an overall success rate of around 45 percent in completing the series of hacking challenges on the platform built by Scale, an AI-testing company. Of the 21 challenges, the most popular among participants entailed trying to convince the chatbots to give up a hidden credit card number, followed by one in which they were tasked with convincing it to do bad math (think 2+2=5). Other tasks that saw high engagement were coaxing the AI into spouting geographic misinformation and also into claiming that it was sentient.

“Public red teaming helps us identify unique threat surfaces, as we’ll see when we dig into the data, as well as activate a wider group of voices to weigh in on the policy discussion around AI security,” Kellee Wicker, the director of the science and technology innovation program at the Wilson Center, said in a statement Tuesday.

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, Aug. 31: The U.N. Security Council meets to discuss Ukraine. The European Union’s foreign ministers are set to roll up their sleeves at an informal meeting in Toledo, Spain.

Friday, Sept. 1: Singaporeans go to the polls to elect the country’s ninth president since independence, with three candidates vying to replace Halimah Yacob. Russia’s so-called “gay propaganda” ban restricting freedom of expression on sexual orientation is set to take effect.

Monday, Sept. 4: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are set to meet in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi to discuss the Ukraine grain export deal that the Kremlin declined to renew last month. Kenya hosts the inaugural Africa Climate Summit.

Tuesday, Sept. 5: The annual U.N. General Assembly meeting begins in New York. Indonesia hosts the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Jakarta, with the crisis in Myanmar at the top of the agenda. Laos will succeed Indonesia as next year’s chair of the 10-country bloc.

Quote of the Week

“As the detonation sucked the air out of the aircraft’s cabin, I would wager that the last thought in the doomed dome of [Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s skull was ‘Putin!’, preceded by one of the many profanities in which the former jailbird and hotdog salesman was so fluent.”

—Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, wagering in a Daily Mail op-ed last week that the doomed boss of Russia’s Wagner Group went down cursing Putin.

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• BRICS Expansion Is No Triumph for China by C. Raja Mohan

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Funked up. Gabonese President Ali Bongo may be out of a job after military officers toppled him in a coup this week and put him under house arrest, but the deposed leader still has soul, musically speaking. Under the nom de plume Alain Bongo, the Gabonese president had a brief music career (back when his dad was president and close with the Godfather of Soul, James Brown) and put out the 1978 album A Brand New Man. Here’s the title track.