Public diplomacy is one of the most powerful tools a president has to inform and influence the world by communicating American values and interests. By engaging with citizens overseas, we expand and extend our national security through the dissemination of news, information, culture, education, entrepreneurship and everything else that make a democracy strong.

By some measures, President Trump has altered the perception of American foreign policy more in the past seven days than his predecessors did in the past seven decades. A nation that built its brand around the world as open to the world’s needy and ambitious is now viewed, after Mr. Trump’s immigration executive order, as closing its doors in a way it never did even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.