Council on Foreign Relations: US Cyber Diplomacy Requires More Than an Office
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has moved the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, previously an office with a direct chain of command to the secretary of state, into the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. The move may reflect administration-wide “marginalization of cyber issues in foreign policy,” writes David P. Fidler for the Council on Foreign Relations. “Nothing communicates this attitude better,” he adds, than the president “express[ing] a desire to establish a joint cybersecurity unit with Russia” despite US intelligence agency reports that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. More broadly, reorganization and budget cuts in the State Department reflect the “America First” ethos that Donald Trump has espoused when forming both domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately, without “develop[ing] a comprehensive strategy” to face cybersecurity, today’s challenges in cyberspace may escalate to tomorrow’s full-blown crises. – YaleGlobal
Council on Foreign Relations: US Cyber Diplomacy Requires More Than an Office
Shakeup within State Department may be symptomatic of Trump administration’s dismissal of cybersecurity issues, even in the face of increased frequency of cyberattacks
Monday, August 7, 2017
David P. Fidler is Adjunct Senior Fellow for Cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations and is the James Louis Calamaras Professor of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University and an Associate Fellow with the Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House.
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