Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel discussed the Islamic State’s influential social media presence and how the U.S. can counter it on campus Thursday. The 90-minute discussion [...] focused on the work of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a State Department anti-extremism initiative, which Stengel oversees. 

Now, acting as the US State Department's Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Stengel sat down with AJ+ presenter Dena Takuri on Wednesday to discuss the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). The gathering brings together more than 1,000 young innovators, investors, and government officials with the goal of establishing socially and environmentally conscious businesses around the world.

The much-maligned U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry and his highly media-literate deputy, Richard Stengel (a former editor of Time magazine), is re-embracing public diplomacy as a major weapon in the West’s arsenal by dramatizing such issues, as in the Cold War. Europe would do well to follow suit.  For in the long run, ideas must do much of the work.

Members of the Twitterati might be useful in spreading a new kind of American diplomacy abroad. "We need to use soft power in hard places," says one of America's top diplomats, and social media is just the way to apply it. [...] He's (Undersecretary Stengel) looking to the country's artists, musicians, athletes and citizens abroad to be the engines of discourse, amplified and distributed through the power of the Internet, mobile phones and social networks.

“We've seen a sharp decline in the volume of ISIL messaging and social media,” said Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs during a September 25, 2015,interview with the Voice of America’s Pamela Dockins.  “I think the scales are shifting.”