It is widely accepted that public diplomacy has been a major failure of the Bush administration. The direction American public diplomacy should take under a new president - Democratic or Republican - is a topic of importance in defining America's global role in the post-Bush era.
While John McCain remains associated with the unpopular 43rd president, many commentators view a Barack Obama presidency as a change to rejuvenate America's standing in the eyes of the world. As Timothy Garton Ash has written: "If 'soft power' means 'the power to attract', then Obama is the personification of American soft power." Thomas Friedman echoed this sentiment, writing in the New York Times that Obama's candidacy "has done more to improve America's image abroad than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years."
But any new administration must work under the assumption that whatever honeymoon the outside world will have with a "non-George Bush" in the White House will be short-lived. Though Obama is generally well liked overseas, foreign leaders and publics do harbour concerns about his experience and prejudices about his ethnic background. In an era of instant communication - and revelations - no national leader today can expect permanent world popularity.
The new administration should also not give overseas audiences the false hope that its arrival on the world scene will mean a sudden, drastic departure from the policies of Bush, despite his low reputation at home and abroad. The American political system, which leads presidential candidates to adopt "centrist" positions, leaves the options for restructuring American foreign policy limited. This includes Iraq, a fiasco that will take years to settle.
While not pretending to offer a totally revamped foreign policy, the upcoming administration should, however, immediately focus on results-oriented overseas initiatives (such as closing Guantanamo, allowing far more Iraqi refugees into the US and making US embassies appear less like fortresses) that would win the approval of world foreign opinion. Unconditional overseas disaster-relief assistance, including for food, should be given the highest priority, making sure such aid is not a one-shot, made-for-US-TV publicity stunt, but a firm commitment to help countries in distress for as long as America can.
Furthermore, while taking "unilateral" steps overseas that would indicate that the US seeks to be a more responsible global citizen, the new president should signal that he intends to restore diplomacy - including public diplomacy, whose practitioners, in principle, should carefully listen to overseas opinion - to its rightful place in the US foreign-policy process. Talking with "enemies", while raising some highbrows domestically (although opposition to negotiations with North Korea was rare among the American public), would provide evidence that the new administration is gradually abandoning the militaristic approach to international affairs that made Bush so unpopular overseas. Another demonstration of this new attitude would be to appoint an internationally respected public figure as UN ambassador.
The US should also quietly abandon the rhetorical excesses of the Bush administration's "us" vs. "them" mentality, including the misleading terms "war on terror" and "islamo-fascism", offensive to many Muslims. The White House and state department should also stop trumpeting America's "values" overseas - a constant refrain of Bush-style propaganda that, in the eyes of the world, showed the US, as it devastated Iraq supposedly to give it the gift of democracy, at its most narcissistic and hypocritical.
Moreover, in the Internet age, marked by a cacophony of opinions, it is unrealistic for the new administration to develop a definitive "message" (or set of "messages") about the nature of America that the US government can communicate beyond its borders with strict, Soviet-style discipline. To be sure, American diplomats should present US foreign policy clearly and publicly, but public diplomacy - one of many American voices heard overseas, ranging from Hollywood to NGOs - should tell, objectively, America's complicated story, warts and all, through as many information, educational and cultural programmes as possible. It should aim to provide the context so often missing from soundbites about (and propaganda against) America, which (some say) constantly reinvents itself and cannot be explained or understood by simplistic slogans.
With a new team in Washington, the US government should also underscore that the United States will open more doors to foreign visitors. To this end, the state department, while continuing to improve visa services, should join forces with the US travel industry to press the department of homeland security into making entry into the US a more civilised process. Meanwhile, US government-supported long-term educational exchanges, which have earned America so many friends abroad for decades, should be given the importance - and funding - they deserve. Overseas, for those who are interested in America (but, in many cases, including young people, can't afford to travel or study there) the US should open new cultural centres and libraries, which Obama has proposed and McCain would certainly not oppose, given his statement that dismantling the US Information Agency, which ran these centres in the cold war, "amounted to unilateral disarmament in the struggle of ideas."
Finally, the new administration should provide the public diplomacy and the US international broadcasting bureaucracy, considered by many commentators to be dysfunctional, a sense of purpose, better organisation and adequate resources. In recent years, there have been dozens of reports about the need to revamp public diplomacy (pdf). Meeting this challenge should be a high priority for the new president, who should appoint as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs a trusted, respected and a tough, Washington-savvy confidant with diplomatic, international, broadcasting and bureaucratic experience - a qualification sorely lacking in Bush appointees Karen Hughes and Charlotte Beers, whose expertise, respectively, consisted of political campaigning and advertising.