MAP Strategies Group CEO Mi-Ai Parrish joined fellow business leaders, top diplomats and higher education innovators at Arizona State University to brainstorm how the U.S. can regain and sustain its competitive edge in the world.

ASU Forum on Innovating for Competitive Statecraft, held over two days late last month, included numerous talks and workshops addressing everything from the role of disinformation and international law to the contributions of the humanities to the academic study of nuclear deterrence.

“Now we have institutionalized some of this disinformation. You’re seeing this with the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News,” Parrish told the crowd. “That’s going to play out deeply in the discussions about statecraft and the nature of media and disinformation and how we deal with those bad actors.”

“As journalists, we’re sort of OK with chaos in the information space. We want free speech and we want all of those opinions, but it’s been weaponized and, in some ways, indoctrinated. Fox News is on all the military bases. It’s the standard channel there. That’s being discussed more widely because of all the deliberate near-disinformation that’s going out in traditional media forms.”

ASU President Michael Crow gave the opening address, holding up the reinvention of the university over the past 20 years as an example of how good design can drive massive change.

“Even the military is not as rigid and not as egotistical and not as adoring of tradition as a university,” he said.

After Crow became president 20 years ago, ASU developed a charter and a set of design aspirations to enact the charter, with the goal of changing the culture at ASU as well as boosting the university’s role in serving the community.

“What would the charter be for competitive statecraft?” he asked.

Crow described how ASU changed the engineering program, creating transdisciplinary schools based on problem-solving and increasing the number and diversity of engineering students. “Your broadness of thinking has got to expand rapidly or we will not be ready. You need to train people in multiple pathways, and every person must be transdisciplinary and capable of thinking that way,” he said.

Parrish drew on decades of media experience to address mis- and disinformation and the social challenges being exposed during the current era.

“I’ve come to a place in my career, and it’s a humble place, where the truth isn’t the defense,” she said. “It’s part of the defense and part of the explanation, but we’re so completely bonkers, so completely out of any sort of norms, that it is not just the crazy person in the tin hat. These are elected officials, people in positions of tremendous power. We have allowed, through lack of rigor, laziness, confusion, I don’t know, to apply the old rules to a new state of reality where former President Trump lied literally 30,000 documented times and it was like, ‘another falsehood.’ This is not a falsehood. This is a lie.

And it’s not just the media space. It’s also advertising and marketing. It’s not something journalists can solve alone.”

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