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In October 2025, representatives from dozens of countries gathered in Singapore for the annual meeting of the International Counter Ransomware Initiative (CRI). Founded by the United States in 2021, the global collective is aimed at combating ransomware, an increasingly prevalent type of cyberattack in which hackers lock victims out of their computer systems unless they agree to pay a hefty sum. It has since grown to include 74 member states and organizations.

For the first time in five years, the initiative’s annual gathering was not held in Washington, and U.S. representation was noticeably lacking.

In October 2025, representatives from dozens of countries gathered in Singapore for the annual meeting of the International Counter Ransomware Initiative (CRI). Founded by the United States in 2021, the global collective is aimed at combating ransomware, an increasingly prevalent type of cyberattack in which hackers lock victims out of their computer systems unless they agree to pay a hefty sum. It has since grown to include 74 member states and organizations.

For the first time in five years, the initiative’s annual gathering was not held in Washington, and U.S. representation was noticeably lacking.

“Traditionally, we have a huge contingent from the U.S.,” David Koh, the head of Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, told an audience at a cybersecurity conference in Washington a few weeks later, sitting onstage with his counterparts from Australia and Japan. “This year was different because almost no one from the U.S. administration came.”

The Biden administration made multilateral cyber-engagement one of its key policy priorities, appointing the United States’ first-ever ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy to head a new State Department bureau focused on international cyber- and technology cooperation. It supplemented its leadership of the CRI with a multilateral pledge to curb the misuse of commercial spyware, put forward an international cyberspace and digital strategy, and oversaw a significant expansion of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), tasked with defending the United States from cyberthreats. But widespread cuts to the U.S. government workforce under President Donald Trump over the past year have impacted nearly all of those efforts.

In explaining why that matters, Koh did not mince words. “You can’t look people in the eye if you’re not showing up,” he said. “My concern is that if we don’t do enough of it, then someone else will take the narrative.”

“The U.S. plays a unique role because of the global space we operate on across law enforcement, diplomatic, cyberdefense, and intelligence.”

That someone else, he made clear during his remarks, is China. The world’s second-largest economy has positioned itself as a formidable technological rival to the United States, establishing a near-equal footing (and in some cases, leading) in critical technologies such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, batteries, biotechnology, and quantum computing. On many of those fronts, Beijing is now providing countries in the middle with viable alternatives. And at the same time, China has emerged as the prime cyber-adversary to the United States and its traditional allies.

“The U.S. plays a unique role because of the global space we operate on across law enforcement, diplomatic, cyberdefense, and intelligence,” said Anne Neuberger, who served as the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology in the Biden administration—a role in which she created and spearheaded the CRI. “So, when we step back, it clearly has an impact.”

In assessing the nature of this impact, I spoke to more than a dozen current and former diplomats and government officials from the United States and a half-dozen other countries. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. Just about all of them share a nascent but nagging concern: that amid mounting cyberthreats around the world, Washington is pulling back from leadership at the worst possible time.

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman, the acting head of U.S. Cyber Command and acting director of the National Security Agency, testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington on April 9, 2025. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

In 2024, a group of cyberattackers linked to the Chinese government and dubbed Salt Typhoon infiltrated at least........

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