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There are many problems in approaching the idea of Public Diplomacy, some of which are noted in the article and comments above.

Political culture, in my view, is the greatest problem. Effective and pro-active PD programs can be done, but the successful ones tend to be long-term programs where you plant seeds now and get results 5,10, 20 years down the road. Today’s politics simply does not work at that long a horizon. For Congress, it’s a two- or six-year window; for the White House, it’s four, maybe eight. A Fulbright scholarship to an American University will hardly be expired by the time the next election comes around. How is that graduate supposed to demonstrate the utility of the program in that period of time?

Do exchange programs have impact? I’d say so. Pik Botha, who took part in an International Visitors Program in the US designed to show him how integration can work, claimed that it was that program that convinced him that apartheid had to go. When Tony Blair became British PM, 63% of his Cabinet had been to the US on USG-sponsored programs. Did that have something to do with British support in Afghanistan and Iraq? I certainly think so.

Bean-counting is another governmental factor that interferes with PD. Setting up an exchange program from overseas meant selecting an individual or group to take part in a thematic trip to the US. But it also meant that you had to have a few alternates standing by as, inevitably, one or two wouldn’t be able to travel at the appointed time and have only last-minute notice. When USIA went into State, the flexibility to slot alternates went away. The bookkeeping was ‘too fast and loose’ for State accountants. And let’s not even get into the six-week to six-month delays in getting visas to travel to the US!

State’s bureaucratic culture is also a major inhibitor in the use of new media. Probably the most hierarchical agency in the USG, nothing goes out without out being cleared at many levels. That can often make information management moot.

For example, if anyone below the level of POTUS gives a major speech on a Friday evening, a cleared transcript is not going to be available to the field until Monday at best; more likely, Tuesday. That obviates the need, clearly. It also ignores the fact that CNN and every other news agency has already put out their version of the story. Those versions are what local media are going to run with; they just won’t wait for a few days to get the full text.

Before I retired in 2004, I tried to sell a program to State to have the (mostly junior) officers assigned to the various town in Iraq work jointly on a blog about their daily activities (I acknowledged that an editor would probably be necessary to keep the higher levels comfortable). Laughed right out of the office.

A lot of the problems could be solved with more money. And more staff, please. At least enough to maintain a functional PD office 24/7. The world is a 24/7 place, after all. But except for the very small Operations Center, PD in the US-based bureaucracy works 8:30-5:30, M-F. Never mind that the Arab Gulf states work Sat-Th, with an 8 or 9 hour time difference.

For PD to work successfully, it has to be taken seriously. ‘Being there at the take-off’ is very much part of that. But so too is the recognition–also in Murrow’s words–that the most important distance is the ‘last three feet’ between a representative of the US and a foreign interlocutor. PD, before it was rolled (I use the term advisedly) into State, had already taken a major staffing cut as part of the ‘peace dividend’. In India, foreigns staff was cut from around 2,500 to just over 200; American staff from around 30 to 12. In Saudi Arabia, from PD branch posts in Jeddah and Dhahran, and the local HQ in Riyadh, with total staffing of around 50 in 1992, it was reduced to only Jeddah and Riyadh, with a total staffing of 12 locals and 4 Americans when I arrived there in 2001. I was able to get Dhahran re-opened and staff increased by half a dozen, but that was and is hardly enough.

The stumbling block is, I believe, the pervasive belief that IO as well as Public Diplomacy are deceptive. Not only has “propaganda” become a bad word, but so to has “influence”, which was intentionally stricken from Karen Hughes’ definition of public diplomacy on her website. What is public diplomacy if it not to influence?

The military has realized that the modern media environment demands truth because transparency will be imposed and we cannot afford to trust and credibility, unlike our adversary which is so often given the benefit of the doubt.

You may be interested in this post on the principles of Smith-Mundt, which has a direct bearing on the discussion here. Also, this post may be of interest considered the topic of how IO is conducted recently.

Good discussion.

-Matt

The fragment I heard driving to work was about how the narrator of the piece encountered people in remote areas, in other countries, who had very strong opinions about the US. He brought up a woman in the Philippines who said something very negative, along the lines of the US ‘raping’ her country. He didn’t bother to tell us who she was or how she came to think that, though. Sorry, I can’t remember the exact phraseology.

So, this got me to thinking about how, when you are so powerful a country as the US, and used by other political actors in other countries (as a an outlet for anger, to deflect from personal failings, as ideological enemies) that you have to engage the negativities of those political actors.
So, you have to find a way to communicate the weakness of the other side of the argument. Take immigration for example. We can talk about whether we have a border fence or whether we should have more temporary visas, or whatever, but, you can also (and I would do this on the sly to not seem obvious) show how the other guys mistakes are leading to the problem. Well, I don’t know. Maybe that’s not the right example. Just brain storming.

Still. We are always reactive and never proactive, it seems.

“We can’t even carry out what is essentially a marketing campaign since a wide part of the political spectrum today has no confidence whatsoever in America and sees it as fundamentally dishonest to try to advance any positive view of our efforts.”

And Zen:

“I think you are right that the political culture – generally critical, adversarial and negative- represents an enormous stumbling block to doing IO.”

In the past we were able to carry out the kind of campaigns that Shannon writes about and Matt refers to:

“Edward R. Murrow, the only chief of the United States Information Agency who regularly attended National Security Council Meetings, famously stated that public diplomacy must not only be in on the “crash landings” but also at the “take-offs.”

Today, if any member of the MSM did this, they would be accused of being a pawn of the government. I am afraid our past successes has led to a period of self-loathing, that only a system threatening perturbation, coming at a time when we have a visionary leader, will erase our national pastime of “navel gazing.”

As a nation, we were blessed to have an almost unbroken chain of leaders from Roosevelt to Reagan who were able to communicate and maintain the heroic myth that every nation has as it’s cornerstone. The past twenty years reflect how barren our field of dreams has become.

I think you are right that the political culture – generally critical, adversarial and negative- represents an enormous stumbling block to doing IO. In no small part because a significant number of the elite and the media have a visceral reaction against any positive political messages about America because their whole political identity is bound up as critics of “the system” and cultivating grievances regarding our shortcomings.

We rely on openness and accountability to secure a free state but that makes it nearly impossible to carry out clandestine operations or even a hard ball marketing campaign. Americans simply won’t trust or support a program they cannot see into even if they intellectually they understand really need it. No politician is going to stick their neck out to support a program they cannot defend.

We can’t even carry out what is essentially a marketing campaign since a wide part of the political spectrum today has no confidence whatsoever in America and sees it as fundamentally dishonest to try to advance any positive view of our efforts.