The end of the Hillary Clinton era in US public diplomacy

One cannot look at the history of US public diplomacy without being struck by the degree to which it is susceptible to changes in its leadership. Other Western states do not seem nearly so volatile in this regard. Whatever the quality of public diplomacy personnel in the field, in the United States the scramble for resources from the legislature, the battle to be heard at the policymaking table and the ability to corral one's own bureaucracy or manage an ever tricky interagency process usually rests on the personality at the top. In the old days of the United States Information Agency (USIA) – the one-stop shop for American public diplomacy from 1953 to 1999 – fortunes rose and fell with the choice of leader. The last golden age of that agency rested on the leadership of Charles Z. Wick and especially his friendship with President Reagan. USIA's decline owed much to leadership problems of his successors.¹ In the years since USIA merged into the Department of State, the leadership of US public diplomacy has flowed from both the Secretary of State and their Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. Given these currents, the departure of any Secretary of State is an obvious moment to take stock of the progress of US public diplomacy. When that Secretary is a person with the global public profile of Hillary Clinton, the argument for doing so is overwhelming.

It is difficult to underestimate the public diplomacy problems that Hillary Clinton inherited when she came into office in 2009. The Bush administration's approach to foreign policy and most especially its war in Iraq had alienated much of the world. Although the Bush administration soon learned to pay attention to public diplomacy, its diplomats faced an uphill battle rebuilding an effective apparatus out of the mess left by the merger of USIA into the State Department in 1999. Leadership especially proved to be an ongoing problem. The fast turnover of and long gaps between the appointments of Under Secretaries raised as many problems as the relative merits or demerits of those who served. The best of Bush's Under Secretaries – James K. Glassman – was only in office for 6 months. On top of this, the Secretaries of State left their own stamp. Colin Powell led a charge to digitization, though the most obvious achievements were inside the department's firewall, finally pushing old-school technophobes to embrace Websites, e-mail and personal data devices. Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice touted what she termed transformational diplomacy, which amounted to a deployment of resources away from Europe and into the Middle East. Judging by the scant attention given to public diplomacy in her memoirs, the subject was hardly a preoccupation. Hillary Clinton could not afford the luxury of not attending to public diplomacy issues and approached her tenure accordingly.

The international agenda for the Obama administration was set in the President's first inaugural address in which he memorably pledged to ‘extend a hand’ to enemy governments ‘if you are willing to unclench your fist’ and promised to the people of the Muslim world to ‘seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and respect’.² The departure of the Bush administration gave the image of the United States an immediate boost: the country bounced to the head of Anholt-GfK Nation Brand Index in one of the very few dramatic movements yet seen in that surprisingly stable run of data. Hillary Clinton's job became maintaining the positive momentum and to actually deliver on the President's pledge of outreach. Her tenure was characterized by a frenetic pace of trips, which frequently included meetings with the ordinary people of America's target countries. Her preexisting profile gave her an undoubted head start but it was not always easy. She became a channel for waves of public revulsion against some aspects of the United States and its approach. In Pakistan, in 2011, she bore the brunt of much public anger over civilian deaths from drone strikes. But under her guidance the cumulative picture gradually became one of a country, which was prepared to, in the preferred terminology of the moment, ‘engage’ in international opinion. Clinton became the public face of an approach, which she touted as ‘Smart Power’, a concept that blended hard power (military and economic) and the soft power of the attractiveness of American values and culture, approaches that brought an emphasis on public diplomacy to the fore of the US foreign policy. She touted ‘civilian power’ as a reaction to the seeming militarization of America's place in the world.³

Clinton's key lieutenants in her outreach were her Under Secretaries of State for Public Diplomacy: first the TV executive and campaign contributor, Judith McHale, and then the former journalist and veteran of the Bill Clinton National Security Council staff, Tara Sonenshine. McHale's stewardship saw the belated correction of a number of the errors of the administrative structure created in 1999 and important work to build a solid foundation for the future practice of US public diplomacy. Her effectiveness, however, was disputed within the Department and few mourned her early departure. Sonenshine, who took office in early 2012, has worked to reenergize public diplomacy in the field and has maintained an impressive active speaking schedule domestically in the effort to explain the important role that public diplomacy plays in the US foreign policy. Her remaining in office under Secretary Kerry promises to bring welcome continuity to the administration of US public diplomacy.

While the Under Secretary's direct province is limited to the two public diplomacy bureaus, International Information Programs and Educational and Cultural Affairs, respectively, and the PD officers who serve overseas, to be effective public diplomacy has to be everyone's concern and the work extended to incorporate other elements of the Department and the wider US bureaucracy. Hillary Clinton's allies to this end included the Secretary of Defense for most of her tenure, Robert Gates. Since the end of the Cold War and more especially the attacks of 11 September 2011, the Department of Defense had become a central player in the projection of America's image. Gates saw the danger of this and went so far as to argue that resources be diverted away from his department to strengthen the State Department's diplomatic capacity including its approach to Public Diplomacy. Within the wider bureaucracy, Hillary Clinton built on the precedent established during the tenure of Undersecretary Karen Hughes (2005–2007) to maintain the department's civilian leadership in a number of important cross-government initiatives including the inter-agency counter radicalization effort. This effort has evolved into a Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), located at State, which pools resources from State, Defense and CIA to push back against Islamic extremism over new media. Under the leadership of Ambassador Richard LeBaron, the CSCC wisely decoupled its work from any attempt to sell the United States to focus instead on connecting the potential targets of radicalization with online materials that undermine extremist claims and keep other approaches to politics open.

Within the wider State Department, signature Clinton public diplomacy initiatives included a big push in the area of gender and women's issues, including the creation of the post of Ambassador at large for Global Women's Issues. In the days immediately before Secretary Clinton's departure from office, this post and its associated supporting office became permanent. No less significant, during Hillary Clinton's tenure the Department gave renewed attention to the development of partnerships with the non-governmental and corporate sectors. The threads of this work were drawn together in the Global Partnership Initiative, led by a Special Representative for Global Partnerships, Kris Balderston. This unit built on Bush era partnership activity, such as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, with projects including a global initiative for clean cooking stoves and other projects that made a real difference in millions of lives around the world. By 2012, the department had 800 partners some of whom were unexpected including the Chinese and Indian governments.⁴ Such projects gave the United States renewed relevance to a global audience and helped build a more favorable reputation based on a positive impact. Although Secretary Clinton placed great emphasis on both issues of gender and partnership, it was a third area that would become most closely associated with her term in office: new technology.

From the outset, Secretary of State Clinton emphasized the need to embrace new technology – a theme that her innovation advisor Alec Ross touted as ‘Twenty First Century Statecraft’. This had two prongs. The first was a diplomatic emphasis on the need for open Internet connectivity and free international exchange online. Some observers felt that the Obama administration's staunch support for the Internet's corporate big hitters on issues of intellectual property indicated that the commitment to freedom had rather obvious limits. The second prong was an attempt to integrate new technology into the practice of diplomacy. Within the State Department, initiatives that had been small scale and experimental during the final months of the Bush era now became large scale: most embassies acquired Twitter feeds. The bureau of International Information Programs launched Facebook platforms tied to the most significant issues facing the United States and the Department was favorably reported in the press for its mastery of SMS and other methods of ‘getting the message out’. While the Clinton State Department displayed some remarkable instances of creative engagement using the new media, the work was often undermined by old media thinking and procedures. The department's default approach was to use the new media in broadcast mode to push out statements. Such two-way engagement as happened was often circumscribed by requirements to ‘clear’ contributions to on-line dialogue with the Department hierarchy even when the content of those tweets or postings did not concern a matter of high policy. Ross's frame of ‘Twenty-First-Century Statecraft’ was indicative of the problem. The phrase emphasized the assumptions of traditional ‘Westphalian’ diplomacy with the nation state as the supreme building block of international life. New technology, however, has the ability to create communities of interest that transcend geographical space and challenge the primacy of states. Perhaps, future generations will look back and see online public diplomacy not as ‘Twenty-First-Century Statecraft’ but as post-state craft. With an approach founded in the old era, the State Department's digital outreach often missed the potential of the new media to build dynamic relationships and facilitate a two-way flow of information. It was as if the air force had acquired a new fighter jet with fantastic abilities in the skies but insisted on driving it round on the Eisenhower-era highway system. If the United States is to truly flourish in the digital realm, it must be prepared to move beyond the rigidity of the past or temptations to see the new media as some sort of diplomatic master switch to persuade the world, and allow its public diplomats in the field to use these new methods to build open-ended relationships – which was always their strength.

For all her success, the final months of Hillary Clinton's tenure were overshadowed by tragedy: the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stephens and his team in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. In the overheated atmosphere of a Presidential election campaign, the Benghazi killings became a domestic political football. Secretary Clinton worked hard to retain a focus on the realities of the case and her responsiveness to the Senate was one factor that prevented the affair from taking off in quite the way the administration's enemies hoped. The Benghazi tragedy raises the temptation for Clinton's successors to continue to move America's diplomats back from forward positions like the Benghazi consulate to the relative safety of the super-secure US embassy compounds, which have sprung up like latter-day crusader castles in capitals around the world. Such a move would undermine the public diplomacy successes of the Hillary Clinton era. Regardless of the strengths of new technology and the value of a charismatic leader at the helm, public diplomacy will always rest in the last analysis on the work of Foreign Service Officers in the field working to build relationships across what JFK's head public diplomat, Edward R. Murrow, termed ‘the last three feet’ separating one individual from another. Hillary Clinton embodied this lesson and led the way by example.

Hillary Clinton's departure provoked the inevitable flurry of media speculation on whether she intends to run for president in 2016. Her contribution to the field of public diplomacy as Secretary of State augers well. Plainly, were she to attain that office, it would be no bad thing for America's ongoing conversation with the world on which so much of our shared well-being depends.