America’s Dialogue with the World: A Review Essay

This review first appeared on WhirledView.

The Public Diplomacy Council’s book America’s Dialogue with the World is to be released today—Wednesday, December 6—in a launching at Washington, D.C.‘s prestigious National Press Club. This coincides, unfortunately, with the MSM’s feeding frenzy revolving around the release of the Iraq Study Group’s long awaited assessment of what went wrong in Iraq and how to fix it—much of which had been leaked already. In fact, both of these problems need serious attention, and now.

The question this latest work published by the Public Diplomacy Council asks—and proposes remedies for—is what went wrong with America’s image abroad and what can we do about it. The Council’s first publishing endeavor was the well received Engaging the Arab & Islamic Worlds through Public Diplomacy edited by William A. Rugh and released in 2004.

Most chapters in the Council’s latest readable, 194 page book follow the format of a conference on public diplomacy which the organization held in October 2005. A few additional chapters have been added to fill in gaps.

The book’s introduction and conclusion were written by the Council’s Executive Director, retired veteran U.S. Foreign Service Officer William P. Kiehl. The appendices feature a report and five recommendations from the Council on what needs to be done to improve America’s image abroad, a dissenting report by four of the 20 member Council and a transcript of remarks by Karen Hughes, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, at that October conference.

This book is written primarily by American practitioners—most, but not all of whom—are specialists in the field. Although I have never met several of the authors, others are former colleagues whom I knew in various capacities during my 27 plus year career (1970-1998) with the U.S. Information Agency (1953-99). The Agency, established by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the “keeper” and coordinator of America’s image abroad during most of the Cold War.

America’s Dialogue with the World is not a text book for a college class—although specific chapters could form part of an instructor’s reading list. It is not a “how to do it” manual for “wannabe” public diplomacy specialists or a preparatory book for the Foreign Service exam. It is also not an exercise in political partisanship. Moreover, it is not a theoretical treatise designed for academicians. So, what is it?

I think it is meant for Americans who are seriously concerned about the poor U.S. image abroad and want to understand—beyond the headlines and the reports—what went wrong and what needs to happen to rectify the problem.

As certain authors of this book contend as I do, administration policies particularly, but not exclusively, towards the Middle East—read foremost Iraq and Israel-Palestine—are the Gargantuan problems, but the other is that the structure and the process of the means by which the U.S. tended and marketed America’s image abroad were decimated after the end of the Cold War. This happened as part of the “Peace Dividend.” They were never restored-even in the aftermath of 9/11.

Above all, the authors of America’s Dialogue with the World raise fundamental questions for both private American citizens and official policy makers about how and why America’s image abroad remains at such a low ebb and why this matters for the long term pursuit of the U.S. national interest.

Each author in turn also describes—from his or her perspective—what needs to be done to begin to nudge the public opinion needles upward. Just look at the results from various independent survey research organizations including Andrew Kohut at the Pew Charitable Trusts and the University of Maryland (PIPA) if you doubt that we have serious image problems abroad—and I don’t just mean throughout the Muslim world.

America’s Dialogue with the World looks at how U.S. public diplomacy functioned during the Cold War, the changes and challenges that it faces today, and the reasons it remains crucial for the U.S.—both through government officials and its private citizens—to communicate with foreigners. This is an assessment Patricia Lee Sharpe, one of my two co-bloggers here on WhirledView, and I heartily support. It is underscored in our article on the subject published in the October 2006 Foreign Service Journal as well as various posts on the topic here on WhirledView.

Ambassador Pamela Hyde Smith also addresses this same problem in her article The Hard Road Back to Soft Power in the current issue of The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.

Dialogue, not monologue, might be nice for a change

Since public diplomacy is itself so multifaceted, there should be no surprise that the various authors highlight different pieces of this 64,000 piece jigsaw puzzle as they describe it from their own experiences and vantage points.

If there are common threads that run through many, if not all, of the chapters in this book, it seems to me one of the most important is that America’s communications with the world have, for far too long, been way too much a one way street—or in Ambassador Anthony C. Quainton’s words “an extended lecture” rather than a dialogue.

Perhaps this is so because, as former long-time CNN international correspondent Ralph Begleiter writes, “American ignorance about—or putting it more politely, inattention to—the world has contributed significantly to inattention to the U.S. image abroad . . . If we want to improve the way we look to others, we must improve the way we behave toward them. That includes learning more about others as we encourage them to learn about us.”

This, as the book’s title suggests, means dialogue. Dialogue includes listening as well as speaking. It also means gaining the respect of foreigners for America and, if possible, U.S. foreign policies, not necessarily winning the popularity contest. In the late Alice Stone Ilchman’s terms, it also means Americans need to learn to become cosmopolitan—or citizens of the world. I like this word and I thank her for it. She explained how she had been working on becoming a “cosmopolitan” since her youth. In retrospect, so have I.

Many books and articles on public diplomacy discuss the efficacy of educational and other international exchange programs in making long term friends for America – one person at a time. This book is no exception. What it adds to the discussion of such exchanges, however, is Jerrold Keilson’s chapter on how and why USAID, the Peace Corps and even U.S. military training programs for foreign military officers (IMET) can and should become part of the public diplomacy dialogue. The chapter’s near the end—but it is well worth reading.

John Brown’s lament on the tortured history and demise of fine arts programming by the U.S. government abroad almost makes one—especially those of us who live in New Mexico where culture is not only a core commercial endeavor but also part of the society’s soul—want to weep. Brown describes why and how the U.S. has all too rarely engaged its artistic and cultural communities—one of this society’s most important assets—allowing instead the world to see American culture and society degraded through the eyes of fifth rate television soap operas and Grade B, or worse, Hollywood movies.

The bottom line, however, remains the bottom line

With the end of the Cold War, the promised “peace dividend” resulted in a turning inwards and a foreign affairs agency starvation diet from 1996 onwards. Thank you Jesse Helms, the traveled-nowhere Republican majority Congress, and the Clinton Administration’s Madeline Albright and Strobe Talbot all too ready to sell out the U.S. Information Agency, the keeper of our image abroad, because—well—according to Francis Fukuyama “history had ended.”

The finale for public diplomacy was the demise of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999. This single coordinating organizational structure was splintered. The fracture was compound. Some staff was absorbed into the much larger State Department; others went with the remains of the Voice of America into the umbrella of the new International Broadcasting Board; as many as possible left in anguish and disgust.

Cultural centers overseas were closed for either lack of funds or, in my view, too often inflated security concerns in the aftermath of 9/11. The once single broadcasting voice, the Voice of America, was left a skeleton of its former self under the direction of a new international broadcasting entity.

Funds for international broadcasting were directed towards politically sexy new pop-entertainment stations aimed at either the Arab world or Iran. Meanwhile, VOA, the core broadcasting unit that included English, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian and various other language services, was left to starve—or survive on meager rations. See Adam Clayton Powell III’s Chapter Many Voices: Is Anyone Listening? for a sobering look at what has happened to America’s voice abroad since 1999.

America’s Dialogue with the World concludes with the Public Diplomacy Council’s five recommendations for change.

The tragedy is that after 9/11 and the thus far 30 plus studies of “what went wrong with America’s image” and what can be done to improve the situation is that—in reality—so little has been done.

What needs to happen, as the Council stressed, means substantial increases in language trained and culturally sensitive public diplomacy staff overseas as well as the re-creation of some kind of coordinating organization in Washington. This will require substantial additional funds—the Council estimates either three or four times above the current amount—and a simple one-time “shot in the arm” approach will not suffice. But think about it: this would be a mere pittance compared with the amount that has just been thrown away on the 100,000 or so contractors in Iraq.

What also needs to happen is that Humpty-Dumpy, or some kind of autonomous Washington-based coordinating structure needs to be reestablished to do what the old USIA once did. There are various proposals afoot—including the one by the Council as to where it should be located. There is, however, disagreement about which permutation makes the best sense. Yet in the end, almost any of the proposals I have seen would be better than the grossly under-funded, understaffed, jerry-rigged, bumbling and fractured arrangement the US has now.

Originally posted on WhirledView by Patricia Kushlis on Wednesday, 06 December 2006