Q&A with Former Public Diplomat in Residence, Matthew Asada

This feature was included in CPD's 2023–2024 Annual Report. 

Matthew Asada was CPD's U.S. Public Diplomat in Residence from 2022 to 2024.

Can you share some of the highlights of your time at CPD?

I really enjoyed the teaching component of this two-year fellowship and collaborating with my Annenberg and CPD colleagues.  Each week, I looked forward to meeting with my undergraduate and graduate students and sharing lessons from my 20-year diplomatic career while learning from them at the same time.  Together we went beyond the classroom to learn from everything that America’s second largest city has to offer.  We visited Japan’s world-class public diplomacy engagement space in Hollywood, broke bread at an iftar at the Qatari Consul General’s residence in Beverly Hills and even crossed the border to Mexico to visit the U.S. Consulate General in Tijuana. 

The highlight was working with a Master of Public Diplomacy student, Otto Lamsam, on his practicum to deliver USC’s concluding event for the month-long celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.  We brought together a team from across the university and multiple schools and centers to deliver the first university performance of Defining Courage as part of USC’s Stroum Arts and Diplomacy series.  Defining Courage, a live-action, mixed-media storytelling of the Japanese American Nisei soldiers during WWII, was especially meaningful to me as my granduncle fought for the Medal of Honor-winning unit while his brother and sisters, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, were unjustly incarcarated for three years by the United States government.  More than ­­­500 people navigated the enhanced campus security procedures to join us for the April 30, 2024 performance in Bing Auditorium.  The evening ended with a reception with the event’s narrator ABC7 anchor David Ono and cast at the University Club next to the Nisei Rock Garden that USC President Folt had dedicated in 2022.

Tell us about your research at the Center. 

Building on most recent assignment as Deputy Commissioner General of the USA Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, I focused my research on global mega events (World’s Fairs, soccer World Cups, and the Olympics).  CPD supported my travel to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha, Qatar which resulted in the publication of the first intra-event comparison of the 2022 World Cup and the 2020 World’s Fair (Expo 2020).  I presented the research at events with the US-Qatar Business Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Public Diplomacy Council of America, Wharton School of Business, the inaugural Gulf Studies Symposium hosted by Georgetown University, and at CPD’s Summer Institute.

One of the priorities for Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been increased domestic engagement and telling the Department of State’s story to the American people.  I visited the University of Arkansas’ Special Collections, which houses some of the Department’s archival papers, to learn about the Department’s historical domestic presence.  Through this research I wrote the story of the Department’s domestic public diplomacy footprint – which at one time included three offices in California! – and their lessons for the future as the United States looks to host the world for the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.

In Los Angeles, I was also able to live Southern California’s diversity and learn more about my Japanese American family and their pre-WWII California life.  I traveled to their hometowns of Salinas (Monterrey County) and Dinuba (Tulare County) and visited the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.  I discovered how my 16-year grandfather wrote the U.S. Attorney General and through the power of his pen freed his father from five-month FBI detention.  I went back and shared that story at my grandfather’s high school in Dinuba, at the Poston II internment camp in Arizona and where he and my grandmother resetlled after the war in Seabrook, New Jersey.  In May 2024, the Department of State recognized me as their “Hometown Diplomat of the Month” for my robust domestic outreach and engagement efforts.

Where do you see public diplomacy heading in the next ten years?

We are at an incredibly exciting time in public diplomacy with the convergence of digital media and artificial intelligence, the continued importance of in-person engagement and the power of cultural and commercial diplomacy around global mega events.  Apropos global mega events, the United States has a once-in-a-generation moment to host the world with the Summer and Winter Olympics (2028 and 2034) and men and women’s soccer World Cups (2026 and 2027).  The last time we hosted these events was more than 30 years ago and we’re doing it now at a time of great power competition for the attention and affection of the non-aligned world.  USC has an opportunity as a thought-leader based in Los Angeles to lead these conversations about how the city and state can prepare for and leverage the moment, and the countries that will be sending teams and cultural and trade delegations to participate in the events.

In 2024, the American Foreign Service Association and the U.S. Foreign Service celebrated its 100th anniversary.  To mark the occasion, CPD published my online essay on “Diplomacy as a Profession: Reflections on a U.S. Foreign Service Career” which included observations on the next twenty years of diplomacy and the diplomatic workforce.

What’s your next assignment, and how might you apply what you learned at CPD?

I am currently assigned as the Press Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Accra.  I look forward to applying the storytelling lessons I learned at USC and absorbed in Los Angeles to the communications of the U.S. Mission to Ghana.  Ghana is having a moment with sports and the arts, diaspora connections, and commercial diplomacy.  I am excited to build on these initiatives – and their ties with Southern California – in this next chapter. 

Finally, I hope to continue my efforts to strengthen diplomacy and promote diversity within the Department of State.  My final publication from my time at USC came out on my first day in Ghana.  In the September 2024 issue of the Foreign Service Journal I recounted the story of the “Decade-Long Campaign to Reform Assignment Restriction Programs.”