Public Diplomacy: America’s Embarrassing Failure to Take Its Message to the World

Lawrence J.

Haas

Read Larry's bio and previous columns

December 30, 2008

Public Diplomacy: America’s Embarrassing Failure to Take Its Message to the World

The intensely partisan debate over foreign policy of recent years has overshadowed one area of broad bipartisan consensus: America’s efforts at public diplomacy in the post-9/11 era have largely failed.

Public diplomacy is, in essence, the way that we, as a government and as a people, present ourselves to the rest of the world – how we explain our values of freedom and democracy and why we believe they provide the surest path to long-term peace and prosperity.

Of all the opportunities that incoming president Barack Obama can seize, none is more important for long-term U.S. national security than the chance to set public diplomacy on an effective course.

The stakes are too great to do otherwise. The war between the U.S.-led West and radical Islam will be determined as much by the “hearts and minds” of hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over as by our power to destroy terrorists and confront the states that sponsor them.

Today, terrorists recruit the young men and women in Islamic societies who have neither jobs nor prospects of a better life. We must provide an alternative story line, one that convinces them not to strap on suicide belts but, rather, to pursue freedom and democracy, to build effective structures of civil society, and to practice tolerance and promote opportunity.

The effort must be a multi-faceted one. In Soft Power, Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former top State and Defense Department official, suggests that public diplomacy has three dimensions.

The first is daily communication, the effort to explain U.S. policy to foreign audiences. Governments are usually better at communicating with domestic than foreign audiences, but Washington has impressive tools to reach the latter – including its vast array of TV, radio, and on-line networks, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The second is strategic communications, the effort to develop and promote basic themes about the United States, with methods akin to those of advertising or political campaigns. As the 9/11 Commission Report put it, “The U.S. Government must define what its message is, what it stands for.”

The third is interpersonal relationships, the effort to build long-lasting ties with key individuals through scholarships, exchanges, training, seminars, conferences and access to media.

To date, experts have been baffled by our post-9/11 failures – none more so than Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose book, From the Shadows, explains the vital role that public diplomacy played in America’s successful effort to win the Cold War.

“(P)ublic relations was invented in the United States,” Gates said in late 2007, “yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that Al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America.”

Miserable? Yes. Embarrassing? Indeed. Surprising? Hardly. For we are reaping the results of our unilateral retreat in the war of ideas that followed the end of the Cold War and, at the time, our eager embrace of the notion that, with communism dead, no other serious short-term threats would likely arise.

In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration and Congress abolished the United States Information Agency, the key agency through which the nation fought its war of ideas with the Soviet Union. In the heady thinking of that decade, the spread of free markets and rising living standards across the globe were supposed to reduce the threats to our well-being from abroad.

But while that “Washington Census” held sway in the West, a rabidly anti-modern, anti-American ideology spread along the rocky terrain of Afghanistan and in mosques and madrassas across the Muslim world, planting the seeds of death and destruction.

Thus came the bombings of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, of the World Trade Center in 1993, of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and of the USS Cole in 2000, all of which culminated in the flames of 9/11.

To reduce the chance of another attack, we must do more than take the fight to the enemy and fortify our homeland. We must reduce the appeal of the terrorist path by providing a compelling alternative.

Public diplomacy is no mere feel-good venture. It is a vital tool through which to achieve long-term security.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.