October 29, 2011: Please note we are updating and revising this page. The new version should appear in November.
Below we define some of the special characteristics and powers of public diplomacy, examine some of the missteps that have brought American public diplomacy into disrepute and made it ineffectual, look at some demonstrably successful best practices that may form the basis of a rehabilitated public diplomacy capacity and suggest organizational reforms that would integrate public diplomacy insights into the foreign policy process in ways that would enormously enhance U.S. interactions with the world. We've divided our observations into five sections, which bear the following titles:
- Public Diplomacy: What It is, Why It's Needed and How It Could Work Well for America Again
- Public Diplomacy: A Profession within a Profession
- Deconstructing the Interactive Shibboleth
- The Field: Where Foreign Policy Succeeds or Fails
- Public Diplomacy Tomorrow: How to Make It Work, if We Want It to Work
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY TODAY AND TOMORROW
By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: WHAT IT IS, WHY IT'S NEEDED AND HOW IT COULD WORK WELL FOR AMERICA AGAIN
Music, art, drama, literature---there are so many way of sharing culture across national borders. Our lives are enormously broadened, deepened and enriched when we learn from one another, and governments often make it possible, through subsidies and various complex negotiations, for exhibits and performances to be mounted in distant countries. To the extent that familiarity increases mutual respect and understanding, the world benefits from a multiplicity of such interactions, and public diplomacy uses some of these cultural and intellectual resources to good effect.
However, the purpose of public diplomacy, which employs other media as well as the arts, and the reason it deserves strong support and generous funding by the American people has little to do with idealism or purely benevolent inclinations, however much the authors of this article are delighted to encourage and enjoy the arts as private citizens.
Public diplomacy is what America does when the U.S. needs popular support in other countries for American policy, which is almost always the case. Public diplomacy, well done, pressures governments to do what leaders might be less inclined to do behind the closed doors of traditional diplomacy. In short, cultural and intellectual interaction for public diplomacy purposes isn’t chummy chitchat. It’s a carefully articulated, infinitely modulated, multi-media campaign for achieving essential national goals. Public diplomacy, along with traditional diplomacy, works hard to avoid that hideous waste of life and resources called war, which is seldom as cheap or conclusive as habitual hawks would have us believe.
Government-to-government diplomacy is an ancient and essential function, but public diplomacy is a newer tool that only governments with good things to share and relatively little to hide can use effectively. As the diplomatic tool par excellence of democracy, public diplomacy operates by precept and example. Public diplomats disseminate information that can stand up to critical or even hostile examination—and when truth penetrates secretive or corrupt regimes the hold of tyranny erodes. Conversely, should an exemplar of good governance fall into patterns of deceit, dishonesty, abuse of power, corruption or hypocrisy, the way back is difficult. Credibility has been lost. “Psychological operations” won’t regenerate confidence in U.S. leadership. Smarter policy and intellectually-respectable public diplomacy may.
The Shambles that’s U.S. PD Today
The ramshackle public diplomacy architecture created in 1999, when the functionally-coherent Unites States Information Agency (USIA), a world-respected advocate for American values and policy, was married, shotgun-style, to the State Department, has never performed as its cost-cutting designers promised. Bits and pieces of a once coordinated whole were scattered dysfunctionally among the offices and bureaus of a chronically underfunded State Department. Even the once authoritative VOA was devalued and dismembered, its remains hardly differentiated from the proliferation of voices aimed manipulatively at slivers of audience here and there.
Although the tried and true educational exchanges and international visitor programs housed in the bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs may appear to have been unaffected during this post-USIA decade, since they are funded and staffed through a separate budget line, ECA’s programs have been more or less privatized. They are subject to the whims of competing sub-contractors, each intent on delivering less for more. Many influential programs, such as university-to-university exchanges, therefore, no longer exist. Even the enormously popular Sister City program is now under the gun.
Much worse lay in store for USIA’s information function, which was protected by no budgetary firewalls after consolidation. The problem? It seemed to have no lucrative contracts on offer. Working unheralded for fifty years, thanks to the Smith-Mundt Act’s restrictions against “propagandizing” the American public, USIA information officers funneled accurate, timely information to audiences abroad. These finely tuned mechanisms for providing contextually-sophisticated materials to foreign media didn’t just languish under the new dispensation. Although the State Department now ostentatiously revels in a quick adopter approach to new communications devices, America’s ability to design and transmit policy imperatives to carefully picked foreign audiences was allowed to atrophy by traditional diplomats who never appreciated the immense value of open communications with foreign publics. After 9/11, the Pentagon leapt to fill this vacuum, throwing billions at untested contractors for “strategic communications” programs, some intentionally deceptive, as war propaganda tends to be, others merely inept, all tending to undermine the credibility of U.S. information programs overall. According to an AP story on 2/5/09, the Pentagon planned to spend $4.7 billion—in one fiscal year!—for its overt and covert information operations. Budgeting ever more for propaganda masquerading as information, the Pentagon reaps skeptics not friends. What thrifty little old USIA could have done with money like that!
Unfortunately, merely redirecting money from Defense to State won’t improve the quality and impact of American public information programs quickly, because many of the experienced information officers who could pull things together are gone. As public diplomacy under the State Department was downgraded, denatured and defunded, many devoted and skilled officers retired early. Others just resigned out of misuse or disgust. The recruitment, training and assignment process now in place has not replaced this lost generation with a capable new cadre. Foreign service recruits aren’t dumb, and not enough of them have seen a future in public diplomacy. In 1986 there were 1742 PD-designated positions. Today there are 1332, a reduction of 24%. Worse yet, too many of these slots are filled by generalists with little training and less experience in public diplomacy. The Pentagon, by contrast, employs 27,000 for “recruitment, advertising and public relations – almost as many as the total State Department workforce.” And the attrition of State’s public diplomacy specialists continues.
The State Department’s organization chart tells all. There is no coherent well-integrated public diplomacy function with an attractive career ladder for specialists who may rise to share in major foreign policy decision-making. Public diplomacy used to have a well-organized, high morale home in an independent agency run by the likes of the legendary Edward R. Murrow. Who of his national stature would be willing to assume the powerless position of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy these days? None that we have seen. And when under-qualified people fill this critical position, America’s PD capacity erodes that much more. No wonder the Obama Administration has set up a White House Global Engagement Directorate to compensate for the skill and vision gap within the State Department, although we are not entirely surprised. An in-house PR capacity will always tempt a powerful executive.
A PROFESSION WITHIN A PROFESSION
Smile. Chat. Seek friends. Some people think that’s all there is to public diplomacy. So why can’t ordinary Americans do the job, on the cheap, especially those already working abroad in business, academic or humanitarian capacities? Amiable, savvy tourists could represent us, too, couldn’t they?
No, they can’t. None of them can.
The Citizen Diplomat Fallacy
Conflict of interest is one problem. Businessmen go abroad to make money. Though corporations may, from time to time, back a ballet tour or sponsor a conference, the event is usually selected to enhance the corporate image or to soften up or highlight some official with the power to grant concessions or contracts at home or abroad. Academics and humanitarians also have allegiances and values that trump what they often see as crass or transient national interest. This is not to say that PD specialists should not celebrate humanitarians as fine examples of American voluntarism. They should. But their skills and commitments are different.
Academics do make impressive speakers for PD programs, not only because of their subject matter expertise, but also because their outspokenness, in healthy doses, serves to exemplify the American commitment to free speech and free-wheeling politics. But few academics could happily, or in good conscience, devote themselves to the day-in day-out business of supporting U.S. policies without regard to their own deeply held partisan or philosophical inclinations. As for tourists, students and/or each decade’s version of the swashbuckling adventurer, they represent only themselves, which is fine. Goodness knows, when the authors travel, as private citizens now, we feel no need to mount a defense of policies we don’t agree with, although we sometimes, out of habit, slip into PD mode.
So—sorry! Only presently-serving Foreign Service Officers have the skills, information, experience, mandate and—this is very important—the sworn responsibility to represent current official policy, with no competing professional imperative, but pure and never so simply, which is why public diplomacy isn’t for amateurs.
However, it is also true that not all Foreign Service Officers are cut out to be public diplomats.
Obviously any FSO needs an excellent education; many FSOs these days have more than one degree, and previous experience in a host of professions or occupations doesn’t hurt. All diplomats, to be really useful, should be able to operate in one or more foreign languages and cultures, on entry into the service or by means of in-service training, and the Foreign Service should use and reward such competencies, making sure that officers arrive well prepared at post. Naturally all FSO candidates should know a good bit about foreign affairs and foreign policy, and they should also demonstrate a reasonably sophisticated understanding of their own country—history, geography, politics, economics, high and popular culture, etc., etc. Add top notch writing and analytical skills. Add curiosity. Add idealism and loyalty to country. And don’t forget excellent health, since most officers don’t spend more than a few years in the likes of Paris, London or Tokyo, if that. Mostly, without complaint, they represent us in Bamako, Baghdad, Bishkek.
Wow! Do such paragons exist? They do—and why not, in a population of some 300 million. They can be found and recruited, too. That’s why the Foreign Service exam has a well-earned reputation for difficulty.
But wait! We’re not finished. In addition to demonstrating the background qualifications sketched out above, successful FSO candidates will discover that each diplomatic specialty has its own tricks of the trade, some teachable to recruits, some that must be acquired by progressive experiences in the field under well-seasoned mentors. Public diplomacy alone draws on a vast reservoir of skills and tools, including media relations and placement, information technology, exchanges administration, speech-writing and public speaking, cultural center direction, seminar and conference organization, polling and public opinion feedback, liaison with local notables—a list that is not exhaustive. Nor does a laundry list even begin to suggest how tools, methods and skills are combined, some working progressively over time, some ideal for quick reaction situations, to support longstanding policy needs or to respond to sudden diplomatic crises. Given such an array of tools, all of which must be at hand in order to meet predictable (and, inevitably, unpredictable) demands in almost infinite variety, there’s no substitute for growing into PD competence under the guidance of senior public diplomacy officers.
Shortcuts That Seldom Work
The PD specialist’s job isn’t made easier by the curious lack of PD literacy that’s often found among US ambassadors and chiefs and deputy chiefs of mission abroad. Some are gems, well prepared for leadership at a given post. They have the experience and rank to maintain fruitful contact with the host country’s highest echelons of power and influence. They know how and when to use all their resources, including public diplomacy, to achieve US foreign policy goals. Too many others, unfortunately, need 24/7 oversight when it comes to public relations. Political appointees tend to be the most problematic from this point of view, although a happy few arrive already tempered by experience with the country or region.
And yet, year after year, whether the White House is occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, about 30 percent of American ambassadorships are distributed as political plums or political payoffs. Rewarded for their campaign fund-raising abilities, not for their knowledge of US foreign policy, not for their knowledge of the country they’ll be serving in, not for their proven ability to head an operation as complex as an American Embassy, these political ambassadors often need enormous amounts of care and feeding. Worse, instead of showing gratitude for the backup that prevents embarrassment all around, these politicals too often expect from the professionals at post the bowing and scraping they assume is automatically due to anyone with the supreme and exalted position of Ambassador. Political appointees with deep pockets are considered to have the ear of the President. In reality, they may or may not - but what’s the use if they lack diplomatic sense or the appropriate skills?
Similar drawbacks render the recurrent call for expanding the intake of lateral entry specialists to fill Foreign Service positions (or, as it’s often put, to shake up the moribund State Department) a counterproductive proposition. Diplomatic success in a complex, ever-changing world won’t be improved by bringing in hordes of people who’ve succeeded in other fields of endeavor, however well-honed their skill sets may be for non-diplomatic purposes. Ironically, special mi-level recruitment is also unnecessary. The Foreign Service entrance exam is, in fact, biased toward giving higher marks to mid-career professionals in their thirties and forties. Recent college graduates don’t do nearly as well.
As for those who continue to argue for a transformative fantasy cadre brought in from the outside and set to work well above the normal intake rungs (and pay levels) on the diplomatic career ladder, perhaps we have gone some way toward demonstrating that any new recruit has much to learn before he or she reaches professional competence in the Foreign Service. What’s more, the impact of queue-crashing, mid-level entries on post morale is unlikely to be positive—and whatever the sweeteners, the uncommitted too often don’t like the life once it’s theirs.
Clichés notwithstanding, diplomacy in our world is no tea party. Read the ever-lengthening roster of those who’ve given their lives in the line of duty. Their names are engraved on the marble walls of the State Department’s Diplomatic Entrance. The list grows longer every year.
Many Talents, Many Temperaments
Meanwhile, as with all professions, diplomacy’s sub-specialties call for different skills and different temperaments. Some FSOs excel at consular work. Others are terrific administrators with an uncanny ability to make the embassy machine work efficiently—and happily. Others are superb at gathering, analyzing and reporting on a country’s political events and/or economic trends while colleagues down the hall in USAID deeply understand the whole gamut of responsibilities involved in overseeing US aid for developmental and humanitarian purposes.
Public diplomacy is also a genuine specialty. It’s for those who are comfortable with the relatively unscripted give and take of public debate of live press conferences; for those who revel in performing on a tightrope stretched between cultures; for those who can adapt, translate, rephrase and improvise as the climate of opinion mutates; for those who can get it right without relying on tired (and unconvincing) boilerplate; for those who can smoothly handle an in-your-face challenge; for those who—at the drop of a hat—can make the media side of a visit by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State or a Senatorial delegation into a triumph for the US—and, needless to say, for the VIPs involved.
But all Foreign Service specialties share one quality: it takes training, commitment, perseverance and years of experience on the job to master the job.
DECONSTRUCTING THE INTERACTIVE SHIBBOLETH
USIA, as a communications agency, was quick to understand the usefulness of the computer, of the World Wide Web, of interactive press conferences and panel discussions first via telephone and later via satellite TV. USIA showed 16 mm films in the jungle, schlepped monitors and VCRs to provincial capitals where power often came from generators, and sometimes for extra special 35 mm film occasions, rented whole theaters. When annual inventory times came around, it took more than a few hours time to account for all the communications equipment required to keep a USIA post running. Meanwhile as radio technology improved, USIA kept urging that VOA signals be ever upgraded, though the integrity of VOA news, so hard fought for over the years, was eventually rather sadly compromised.
USIA wasn’t an early adapter in the trendy way the term is currently used, but once a new communications methodology looked as if it would perform reliably from Austria to Zimbabwe, USIA was ready to put it into service. What’s more, to keep it in service, USIA posts regularly employed highly competent, always available audio-visual specialists and, later, sysops, too, since there is no end to the upgrading of computer systems, once installed. Very seldom did a USIA program have to be delayed much less canceled for technical reasons. When USIA was ingested by the State Department, one of the glaring differences between the two cultures was USIA’s pragmatic embrace of communications technology and the State Department’s technophobia. Lately, however, it often seems as if the State Department is trying to make up for lost time, positioning itself precariously on the other extreme of the spectrum, as current public diplomacy recruits fall all over themselves to prove they can out-Facebook, out-Tweet and out-text the most desperate friend-seeker on the block. But State has failed to hire (or train staff from within its thinning information specialist ranks) enough information technology specialists to keep all these media running 24/7 while retaining its traditional knowledge workers – the reporters, writers, editors and reference specialists who cover the stories, provide the texts, and ferret out information on the specialized topics valued by US Embassies abroad.
The Aura of the Newest Gadget
We Americans are so in love with gadgetry that, like serial monogamists, we find ourselves going gaga over each new electronic communications device, babbling on and on about the wonders of blogging, texting, tweeting and who knows what’s next on the horizon. Camera-equipped cell phones enabling twitter, the latter a recent State Department infatuation, seemed to have come into their own as important electronic media during the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections. Nevertheless, contrary to fonder expectations, there were some reliability problems. Reports from unknown witnesses, however, fervent, can be hard to assess, and even pictures don’t always tell the whole truth.
For example, when TV news channels showed shocking footage of a young woman bleeding to death on a street in Tehran, most everyone assumed she’d been demonstrating against a stolen election. Or maybe she wasn't a protester according to other reports, only a young woman returning home from a music lesson. And then her mother was interviewed, saying that she and her daughter had been involved in at least some of the protesting. And so on. Who to believe? Thus, even as texting and instant photo transmissions were keeping a secretive regime more or less honest, a caveat emerged. Both pictures and eye-witness data usually need contexting, analysis and information about the source who may or may not be well-informed or inclined to objectivity.
Film, radio, TV, the internet, video cassettes, CVRs, CDs and DVD, cell phones, even the land lines we grew up with – each of these also arrived with the aura of glamorous newness. Each breakthrough, Americans thought, would supplant all that had gone before. So far this has never happened. Though print is looking a little wobbly these days, especially here in the U.S., the demise of our major dailies is probably not imminent. No gadget, it seems, is the be-all and end-all its entranced early adopters claimed it to be. That said, public diplomacy today is fortunate to have this vast array of communications media at its disposal, some one-way, some interactive, each ready to serve a specific communications need, each demanding verve, intelligence, field knowledge and general good sense in its application.
Real People Still Matter
Meanwhile, plain old person-to-person interaction is still the gold standard for sharing sensitive information, for explaining complicated issues to key players and for hammering out agreement. This is the stuff of traditional diplomacy, of course, though public diplomats can also be found at the receptions and cocktail parties where a telling conversation may actually occur. They’re also to be found chatting in an editor’s office or sharing telling anecdotes over dinner with contacts they consider to be trustworthy informants.
Diplomacy, in fact, has always been about interaction. It’s about linking people and cultures, about talking, debating, mediating, explaining, persuading – and yes, listening, listening carefully, another somewhat obvious, but mindlessly-iterated mantra these days.
Let’s make it absolutely clear: geek monomania aside, the media are not the message; the media are useful public diplomacy tools. What’s more, however the message is conveyed, this computer age dictum always applies: garbage in, garbage out.
Talking to Whom about What?
Competent public diplomacy is always expressed in vocabularies and via media that are natural to those it’s aimed at, but what transpires isn’t chatter. It’s purposeful. It’s selective. Choosing an audience (or audiences) within any country is a three stage process. The first stage calls for identifying a country’s most important institutions, the second for knowing its most influential individuals; the third for establishing a tap into public opinion. Networks are also noted: who talks to whom; who likes or opposes whom; who influences whom and how. And ultimately this: who, in the end, makes what decisions. And when the list is narrowing, even this information comes into play: who likes music or books or movies – or sports. Then decision-makers and opinion-shapers can be invited to U.S.-sponsored cultural and social events that allow for serious talk around the edges.
When USIA was an independent agency, public diplomacy strategies were informed by opinion surveys designed and analyzed by well-qualified in-house survey research specialists, although the data was collected by locally-experienced professional polling organizations. This critical who-thinks-what-and why function is now located in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A perhaps unintended result of this bureaucratic decision is that survey design and results are divorced from the on-the-ground knowledge and program needs of field officers, who must have timely, regular feedback if their PD programs are to be relevant and effective. This needs to be changed.
Meanwhile, public diplomats have always tried to assess the effectiveness of their efforts. In the perhaps naive old days, the methods seemed obvious. An editorial appeared in a newspaper. Legislation was passed. A parliamentarian returned from a trip with a professedly deeper appreciation of the U.S. Soon policy changes. Feedback like this is often dismissed as anecdotal today, but such verifiable outcomes should not be minimized. Moreover, on any given day, let along in the long run, there are so many variables, including the political impact of natural calamities as well as spillover from revolutions in neighboring countries, that any pretense to rigorous quantification of public diplomacy outcomes must surely be undertaken with a considerable degree of admittedly rare social science modesty. Public diplomacy isn’t a profession for the timid.
Antennae up 24/7
Good diplomats have always listened, attentively – to people, to radio, to gossip, to popular music. They keep their eyes open, too – to graffiti, to TV programs and commercials, to body language and facial expressions, to art, including the cultural underground, to the life styles of all social strata. They read up on history and literature, they understand religion and folk lore; they recognize recurrent myths and the symbols. Above all, they speak the language. If they can cuss in it, so much the better, so long as they also know when colloquialisms are appropriate and when they aren't.
Those in tune with the exuberances and nuances of a culture can design and deliver messages that get through. The same alertness, seasoned with respect, makes every personal contact count. A local leader talking with a diplomat who’s sympathetic and too impressively well-informed to swallow garbage or spin, aka lies and distortion, is more likely to be candid and open to persuasion.
The Field Matters
Whatever the policy-related action or understanding needed, it must be articulated and delivered somewhat differently for each public, each culture, each country, each individual. The mass media may work well for starters, but close and personal closes the deal. Policy is set in Washington; its success depends on calibration and modulation in the field. And always the process works like a constant feedback loop, which is not the same as a playback loop. Even a great song needs a new twist from time to time. Otherwise the audience feels insulted, demeaned, undervalued, taken for granted. This is not good. A good PD officer makes the people he or she is interacting with feel special, as if they are worth a personally-tailored message.
And, for that matter, they are.
THE FIELD: WHERE FOREIGN POLICY
SUCCEEDS OR FAILSForeign policy needs and goals are defined in Washington, but foreign policy succeeds or fails in the field. Attention is sought. Criticism is met. Competing influences are neutralized or co-opted. Friends are made. Alliances are built. Goals are achieved—or not. It helps hugely when policy is intrinsically attractive. Being militarily strong helps, too, up to a point. Overwhelming strength is often resented. It becomes, paradoxically, a disadvantage to be adroitly overcome, since no country wants to appear to have been coerced. But raw power flaunted or sheathed, even the U.S. can’t go it alone in today’s world. Public diplomacy’s role is to move governments by inspiring their citizens to see American goals as good for them, too.
The Trifecta: Information, Culture, Education
Public Diplomacy at post in the field works both directly and indirectly. It aims simultaneously for immediate and longer term impact, the two time lines corresponding roughly to the two branches of traditional PD work: information and culture. Sometimes the information function is confused with the manipulations better known today as propaganda, although PD’s need for reliability and credibility makes it more akin to journalism. Cultural programs are often dismissed as frills, expensive indulgences whose impact is difficult to measure, which is true, but only because conventional polling is at its weakest when assessing qualitative phenomena and complex interactions. Straddling the two, though not customarily administered as such, are the educational programs which involve knowledgeable Americans interacting with foreign audiences, short trips to the U.S. for promising mid-career foreign citizens, youth exchanges, academic exchanges like the Fulbright program and even, until recently, university linkages.
Informational, educational, cultural—these are the co-equal mutually-supportive elements of an effective PD program. Properly orchestrated, they enhance the overall American image, making the U.S. better understood and more attractive as an ally. They create lasting links between individuals and institutions, links which keep doors open, thus ensuring a hearing when tough or sensitive issues need support. They provide, via all media platforms, relevant, accurate and timely information to foreign publics whose mobilization is critical if American foreign policy goals are to be met.
Planning for Success
Because every country is different—even Canada and the United States differ in ways that would call for modulated communications strategies—a Washington-dictated, one-way, one-size-fits-all approach to public diplomacy, however tempting it might seem to bean counters, doesn’t work. Therefore, once Washington establishes policy priorities, experienced, skilled, perceptive and imaginative field officers must be trusted to devise ways to sell it.
In the past, USIA posts were required to submit an annual country plan assessing the state of the bilateral relationship, describing (in cooperation with the entire mission) how the post proposed to nourish the relationship while promoting, according to specified strategies, Washington’s policy priorities and, last but not least, requesting the financial, human and material resources to do so. Expectations for evaluation and feedback were built in. Naturally big posts in big countries enjoyed more staff and bigger budgets. But all posts in all countries were guaranteed sufficient resources—Public Affairs Officer plus American and/or locally-hired personnel; a vast range of highly-responsive, Washington-based backup services; firewalled budgetary authority; the wherewithal to run a full service American Center; an appropriate inventory of up-to-date equipment; and, last but not least, PD-controlled vehicles—to offer a high-quality, well-balanced, year-round program that could and would put America in the best possible light.
The State Department has a habit of bemoaning the lack of administrative skills among its high level officers—and yet, at every post, there was, for decades, a whole cadre of field-tested managers who were also Foreign Service Officers: the public diplomacy people. Even fairly junior officers had managerial responsibilities, and anyone who wanted to be a Public Affairs Officer had to be an adroit CEO, a dollar-squeezing CFO, a supervisor with a knack for delegating, a program coordinator, a cultural impresario, a human resources geni, a master of media, a public relations whiz, a social psychologist, a linguist, a self-confident performer—and make it all look smooth and easy to the public, which is why, perhaps, the typical State Department officer found it so difficult to appreciate what those public diplomacy colleagues were doing. Even today there are calls for outside hires to supply the State Department with managerial talent. Meanwhile, the superb managers that State acquired when it absorbed USIA, were ignored or devalued. Many, therefore, retired prematurely. Although a very few prospered and even became Ambassadors, Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Consuls General, most public diplomacy operational skills are in a state of disuse bordering on atrophy and will soon be lost, except as recorded in the memoirs of better times. Talk about squandering capital!
The Information Imperative
Someone has to figure out how to make American policy goals accessible and attractive. Someone has to counter the inevitable misinformation, disinformation and plain old misunderstandings. That’s what information officers do every hour of every day, when they aren’t feeding media reaction to Washington and the Embassy’s front office. So IOs act and react, using deft combinations of all available media. On an easy day, things work according to plan. As often or not, a government falls, a leader dies, an earthquake flattens a city, another country throws a monkey wrench into the works—and an IO needs to react quickly, reporting the latest developments and hoping for guidance in time to stay ahead of the game. Sometimes there is no guidance. Improvisation is necessary. An experienced IO usually makes the right guess. PAOs and IOs also advise ambassadors and consuls on whether and how to meet the press. They create talking points, they write speeches, they turn bad news into good press. They make the Ambassador look good.
Two flagship educational programs funded by the U.S. have been the least affected by the shattering of a once coherent public diplomacy enterprise. The Fulbright program is a two-way exchange of academic researchers, professors and students. The International Visitor Program brings foreigners nearing career peak to the US for two to four weeks of escort-led professional appointments interspersed with tourism. In very different but complementary ways, each program fosters familiarity with America and Americans that usually translates into useful long term good will. Yet Fulbright and International Visitors programs hardly scratch the surface of what can and should be done. They lack the multiplier effect of lasting institution-to-institution ties that typically result from multi-year university-to-university linkages or even ongoing classroom to classroom exchanges between high schools, both lost in the consolidation shuffle or thereafter. Institutional relationships also have the advantage of increasing the number of Americans with a deeper knowledge of our increasingly interconnected world.
Finally, it makes a certain sense to include under the educational rubric the recruiting of academics and other experts who contribute their knowledge, in person or via interactive media, to address issues or themes needing attention in a given country. Knowledgeable Americans may also be asked to join seminars or conferences with local scholars or government administrators or judges or—well, the range of counterparts is practically infinite, depending on the knowledge gaps the field post deems it important to fill.
Cultural programs are the easiest to describe and the hardest perhaps to understand. Why must the U.S. government spend good money to send writers, musicians, dancers or exhibits of art and photography around the globe, especially when American pop culture permeates the world? For one thing, pop culture is not universally admired. It’s often seen as violent and sex-obsessed. Arts programming counteracts that image and cements relationships with cultural leaders, who have considerable influence in the many countries where the arts are more highly valued than they generally in America. What’s more, many a politically important relationship is rooted in a confidence-building mutual appreciation of some poet or violinist or photographer.
Private Sector Dividends
The success of the international visitor program depends on private citizens in cities all across the country. They volunteer to help foreigners understand what makes America America . These are the people who draw up schedules, who accompany visitors and their official escorts to local appointments, who show them the sights and invite them to dinner. There’s been an attempt to try to dignify this function by coining the term “citizen diplomacy,” but this is a mistake. The true value of these volunteers is the volunteers themselves, not as diplomats, but as representative Americans whose friendly helpfulness quickly dispels the negative stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture. The most appreciated reward for volunteers: enjoyable stimulating encounters with fascinating people. But a little more personal recognition for an important job well done might also be in order.
With the big ticket cultural items, private support is also essential. Transporting and housing a theatre company or an orchestra or a dance ensemble is very expensive. Nobody finds it amiss if a corporation sponsors a performance with a few discreetly placed banners or a display ad in the program. However, and this is very important, even the most generous sponsor doesn’t get to choose the performance or control the invitation list. Public diplomacy is about activities orchestrated for the primary benefit of furthering America’s interests abroad. Each recital, each lecture, each press conference, whatever its intrinsic interest, plays a part in this larger purpose.
The Heart of Public Diplomacy
The heart of a public diplomacy program abroad has always been the American Center, a welcoming full service information operation with a good collection of books and journals and banks of computers and a congenial professional staff to help each visitor, whatever his or her rank, make the best possible use of them. To save money in recent years, American Centers have been closed and materials have been transferred to an “American Corner” in a local library. Studies indicate that usage suffers badly, which should surprise no one. Other studies show that the use of American information materials housed in fortress embassies falls by 85%. Either people can’t get in at all - or they’re unwilling to put up with elaborate security barriers that come across as insulting.
Without a center or a library, PD loses an important in house program venue for conferences, films, exhibits, discussions, English teaching - and even holiday parties. No local person says with a pleased smile, “And there’s the American Center!” while showing visitors around the city. Even when policy issues vex bilateral relations, the U.S. reputation for intellectual achievement, for cultural vitality and for high quality education, shines out from the American Center. When economically disadvantaged students have free access to these facilities, the American Center says something valuable about American society. Above all, an American Center declares that America wants to engage the world on an intellectual and cultural level, not just with missiles and Special Forces. Yes, it costs money to run an American Center. But it was, and could be again, money well spent, if the State Department’s budget and regard for public diplomacy were what it should be—and if security experts were willing to cooperate.
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY TOMORROW: HOW TO MAKE IT WORK, IF WE WANT IT TO WORK
For twenty years America’s leaders neglected public diplomacy. After the U.S. had won the Cold War and the U.S.S.R. fell apart, people who should have known better crowed about the “end of history,” the Secretary of State spoke of the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” in a unipolar world, and USIA was absorbed and dismembered by the State Department.
Then history restarted. Russia got uppity, “cheese-eating Old Europe” rebelled, China and India reinvented themselves, and the Muslim World bestirred itself. But the George W. Bush administration had already decided, well before 9/11, that the U.S. didn’t need diplomacy, alliances or negotiation to work its will on the world. Raw unilateral power would do. By the end of 2008, America was hated, its wars weren’t going well and its economy had crashed. The days of go-it-alone were over. Even the Bush administration knew that diplomacy needed another chance.
Opportunity Still Beckons
Unfortunately, while the State Department puzzled over what to do with its public diplomacy step-child, the Pentagon began to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on PD simulacra. The resulting series of highly visible fiascos will undermine the credibility of the real thing for years to come, assuming that the State Department can regain control over communications with foreign publics—or seriously cares to. Unfortunately, nine months into the Obama administration, there is no sign that the State Department’s budget will be proportionate to the need for savvy communications on a global scale. If State goes hungry, public diplomacy will continue to subsist at starvation level. Budgets speak. It looks as if America’s foreign policy will remain over-militarized.
Discouraging as this is, it’s important to remember that moving money from one department to another isn’t as easy as it should be. Here’s the conundrum: the president proposes a budget and Congress signs the checks, but the State and Defense Department budgets are processed through separate Congressional committees, each subject to outside influence. When it comes to lobbying Congress, the Pentagon and its generous contractors are far more adept than Foggy Bottom, especially since State’s limp goody bag attracts very few well-heeled lobbyists.
Yet, even if the merest fraction of Pentagon funds could be transferred to the State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy to beef up PD staffing and enhance PD programming, that pittance (from the Pentagon point of view) could make a vast difference—providing, of course, the money is protected from the departmental raiders who have made a habit of siphoning PD-intended funds and staff slots into other State Department offices. Ever since consolidation in 1999, funds intended for educational exchanges and certain cultural programs have been firewalled by law, which is to say, they can be put to no other use. Yet, as we have explained elsewhere, a well-balanced public diplomacy program is not limited to those highly visible educational exchanges and cultural events. All public diplomacy funding, including desperately needed budget increases for beefed up information programs and the reestablishment of American centers abroad, should be equally non-fungible. Otherwise, even if the Pentagon lets more than a few dollars slip through its fingers, public diplomacy’s ability to influence events will continue to be compromised.
But we can dream. Barack Obama’s popularity remains fairly high abroad, his speech in Cairo had resonance in the Islamic world, and his decision to work with the Europeans while also engaging the Russians and Chinese shows signs of paying off. He may yet wake up to the power of and need for a more securely institutionalized public diplomacy capacity. However, as time goes on and hard choices are made, his popularity could slip, and his ability to massage budgets would lessen accordingly. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton’s travels to India, the Far East, Africa and Latin America have been well-planned and well-received. Hopefully, as the U.S. withdraws from Iraq and finds a sensible and sustainable equilibrium in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration will realize that fluid situations create great opportunities for public diplomacy, assuming the tool kit is kept well-stocked and at the ready. To the extent that Obama strenuously reaffirms the values of the rule of law, due process, the separation of powers, open government, the unacceptability of torture, and the inalienable civil rights of every citizen, public diplomacy can help America to regain its dangerously diminished moral and intellectual preeminence. But the tool kit isn’t ready, because public diplomacy has been systematically neglected for twenty years. At minimum, the State Department’s organizational chart must be revamped, the PD mission must be explicitly reaffirmed, the budget must be enhanced and protected and leadership recruitment must be based on more rigorous qualifications.
Off-Target Leadership Choices
When the Obama administration nominated the very visible and internationally well liked Hillary Clinton for Secretary State, we watched, with high hopes, to see who would be nominated to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy job. For the past twenty years, under both Bush and Clinton administrations, the top PD position had been filled by otherwise brilliant people who did not understand that public diplomacy is like nothing else in the communications world. Two disappointing incumbents were stars in the advertising and public relations worlds. But promoting America isn’t the same as selling cars or colas. Then came a presidential crony who may have understood Texas politics and American motherhood, but she ludicrously misread the mentality of educated Muslim women and was equally out of her depth when attempting to communicate on other global issues.
Unfortunately the Obama administration has followed the lead of its predecessors in nominating, as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, a figure whose public pronouncements to date suggest a shallow understanding of diplomacy and, worse, a superficial understanding of the wider world. Judith McHale, late of the Discovery Channel, attempted to pad her largely irrelevant vita by stressing, during her Congressional confirmation hearing that growing up as the child of a Foreign Service Officer made her especially qualified for the job. Now the authors of this series are both mothers of Foreign Service brats, and over the years we have known many more. Believe us; that experience alone does not translate into a credible qualification for leading this country’s public diplomacy efforts. Indeed, McHale to date is proof that more, by far, is needed. More seriously, we wonder how many more truly qualified candidates were offered the job and turned it down.
Why wouldn’t they? Who of any major caliber would want to be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy as the position is presently constituted? Who would take a job that has become powerless by design? There are only two ways to attract top talent to lead America’s public diplomacy efforts again. (1) Recreate USIA as an independent agency with a clear mandate, a seat on the National Security Council and an adequate budget. (2) Or, at minimum, restructure the State Department’s organizational chart to give the Under Secretary direct supervisory control over public diplomacy staff, budget and programming within the Department and at US missions abroad.
Confused and Neglected Mandates
Oddly enough, the two founding mandates for handling public diplomacy within the State Department were sweeping enough to have attracted the most ambitious talents: (1) The Under Secretary would be responsible for coordinating all US government public diplomacy efforts. Notice that no exception was carved out to allow the military or any other agency to conduct go-it-alone public diplomacy programs whether or not funds were available internally. (2) Meanwhile, the Under Secretary would not only oversee the day-to-day operations of public diplomacy within the Department of State, but also represent the US government on the BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors), a bipartisan board of directors that oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and an increasingly confused array of US government supported foreign broadcasting spin-offs.
What’s getting in the way of accomplishing these mandates? Lack of clarity, focus and bureaucratic infighting within the State Department, for one thing, plus constant turf battles with the Pentagon, which has expanded its jurisdiction to development projects as well as public diplomacy over the past decade. Moreover, when the new Secretary of State announces that her department’s mission is “diplomacy, development and defense,” it’s not clear which entity is doing what and who is responsible to whom, a bad sign for the proper performance of any of those functions. The result is bound to be confusion, gaps, duplication, those turf-battles and unhappiness. What’s more, since the Pentagon’s wish list is always munificently funded—the military’s strategic communications operation alone receives more, by many multiples, than the entire State Department, filling the step-child position of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy can’t help but be an extremely challenging head hunting operation.
We say step-child because there are also enough internal organizational complications to make a really qualified candidate hesitate to take the position. The Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, one of six Under Secretaries, has no control and not much influence over PD staffing abroad or in Washington. This is the province of State’s human resources bureaucracy in cooperation with the geographic bureaus, who often fill PD slots at embassies and consulates with unenthusiastic under-qualified or unqualified officers—when the slots aren’t left vacant, that is. Needless to say, the quality of public diplomacy programs suffers, and the Foreign Service is diminished by the lack of a pipeline for training an experienced cadre of public diplomacy experts.
Once again the Pentagon is there to fill the gap, using its bottomless resources to assign strategic communications teams to US Embassies. The teams’ often incompatible activities and narrow focus undermine the credibility of outspent, out-staffed public diplomacy efforts. Other agencies show signs of doing the same. Just as there is no longer one VOA speaking clearly and proudly for America, America’s public diplomacy voice is becoming a fragmented, incoherent, cacophony, each strain speaking for some one agency or department, none speaking for the U.S. as a whole.
Clearly, then, the Under Secretary for PD is fulfilling neither mandate. Tails don’t wag dogs, so the puny PD operation in the State Department certainly can’t influence, let alone oversee PD-like operations in the Pentagon, and the Under Secretary occupies an equally powerless slot within the tradition-bound State Department itself. Let’s face it. Even without a designated seat on the National Security Council, the Director of the small, independent USIA was far more powerful and influential.
What to Do?
The studies and recommendations proffered (and ignored) since 9/11 are too numerous to list here. The mere fact that they exist indicates that something is seriously wrong with America’s public diplomacy picture. Recommendations have ranged from simply establishing a permanent seat on the National Security Council for the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy to creating a non-governmental entity called “USA-World Trust” to be funded jointly by the US government and the American private sector. In the latter case, of course, the resulting organization would be one more addition to the ever proliferating ranks of “non-governmental” organizations receiving federal funding. It would lack the clout and the strong claim to international attention that’s automatically accorded to an organization speaking as America’s official voice. What’s more, the US would cease to have a coherent public diplomacy presence in the world at the very time when public persuasion is increasingly essential to preserving America’s ability to influence world affairs.
A more attractive and reasonably feasible option for reorganization is a modest reform proposal originating with figures who know public diplomacy and the State Department well. If implemented, it would by statute unify control of existing State Department public diplomacy staff, programs and funds both in Washington and in missions abroad under the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. This proposal for well-defined PD consolidation is referred to in the final document of a conference held at White Oak this past winter. Conference participants included American public diplomacy specialists as well as prominent concerned citizens. In our view, the internal restructuring proposed in the White Oak document represents the bare minimum of what needs to be done. What it dramatically fails to do is to address the Under Secretary’s current inability to coordinate public diplomacy efforts government-wide. Furthermore, modest and sensible as this proposal may be, experience to date suggests that State’s internal fiefdoms and vested interests will continue to obstruct the emergence of an effective, unified, influential public diplomacy operation within the Department itself. Bureaucratic politics can be deadly.
Others have suggested the creation of a hybrid new civilian program agency that would house development and humanitarian assistance as well as public diplomacy operations, but the two functions, so destructively absorbed into the State Department ten years ago, are simply too different to be jointly administered. America’s foreign policy encompasses the entire world, which means that America’s public diplomacy program must also have global scope. Foreign aid programs, on the other hand, are concentrated in areas with very specific needs. As if this obvious mismatch were not disqualification enough, it should be noted that, during the 1930s evidently, a similar marriage of development and public diplomacy was tried. It didn’t last for long.
All in all, then, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that public diplomacy and development support should once again be housed in separate agencies, each with appropriate provisions for cooperation and coordination with the State Department, of course. We’ve done this before and very well. We can do it again. As US economic power shrinks, not absolutely, but in comparison to rising economies like China, India and Brazil, as the various regions of the world jockey for more respect and a bigger role within global decision-making bodies, as restive or submerged ethnic groups challenge international borders and internal governance, as religion reasserts itself as a world-changing force, as environmental and climate-related issues claim ever greater attention and established political and economic doctrines fall increasingly under challenge, as the world is bombarded by old media and new media churning out entertainment, information and disinformation and as nuclear ambitions and capabilities proliferate, the U.S. needs every communications skill and device it can muster simply to maintain let alone extend its influence. Now more than ever public diplomacy matters. Isn’t it time to reclaim the profession we invented and that others, very cleverly, are copying? Why should we find ourselves beaten at our own game?