Wars of Ideas

The State Department defines public diplomacy as “engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences.” Because this can be done by governments or by private actors, the chief virtue of this book, edited by Philip Seib, director of the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, is its generous scope. Along with U. S. international broadcasting, military strategic communication, and cultural diplomacy, it also contains chapters on outsourcing; the new social media (Web 2.0); the views from Russia, China, and Egypt; and the role of religion.

As hinted in the subtitle, public diplomacy does not consist wholly of persuading or pressuring foreigners to go along with U. S. policy in the short term. Some forms of public diplomacy work better in the long term and at arm’s length from policy, especially when that policy is unpopular. At the same time, it borders on wishful thinking to suggest that public diplomats will ever be able to “redirect” foreign policy. The longer they live overseas, the better they get at their jobs. But in most cases, this also means the less clout they have in Washington.

In the opening chapters, William Rugh, former ambassador to Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, wrestles with Joseph Nye’s useful but cloudy concept of “soft power”; and

Nicholas Cull, author of the definitive history of the U.S. Information Agency, crams a century of bureaucratic churning into 26 pages. Because most Americans are barely aware of how public diplomacy works, such an introduction may be necessary. But there’s no getting around the eye-glazing

nature of this material.

Since 9/11 the U. S. government has spent more than $600 million on a satellite TV service (Al Hurra) and an FM radio channel (Radio Sawa) aimed at Arab audiences. It has also lavished untold billions on military strategic communications, a term that overlaps with civilian public diplomacy but also refers to deceptive practices used in war. Both subjects are hard to get one’s mind around, but Toward a New Public Diplomacy does a fair job with the first.

In their chapter on Al Hurra, Shawn Powers and Ahmed El Gody recite the litany of criticisms leveled at the service since it was launched in 2004: Shoddy production; corrupt management; ethnic and religious bias; failure to compete in the crowded Arab market; excessive reliance on AP, Reuters, and the other wire services; and the occasional gross error of editorial judgment, such as “extensive and deferential coverage” of a Holocaust deniers’ conference in Iran.

Another contributor, Amelia Arsenault, cogently analyzes the promise—and pitfalls—of the new social media. To her credit, Arsenault questions the current cliché that these media are automatically on the side of freedom and democracy. As she notes, Web 2.0 has the potential of “engaging and/or alienating foreign constituencies” and can be used to “disseminate information and/or disinformation.” Yet what’s missing from these chapters, and from the discussion of news media in Neal Rosendorf’s chapter on cultural diplomacy, is a proper assessment of the older, more established components of international broadcasting: the Voice of America and the “surrogate” services, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and (more recently) Radio Free Asia, whose mission is to provide local, regional, and world news to populations in unfree and partly free media environments.

Despite the occasional lapse, most of these services have adapted quite well to the post-Cold War world, shifting to new regions and adopting new media platforms. For example, the Persian-language services of VOA and RFE/RL now attract a significant enough following in Iran that the government labors to jam their signals and block their websites. In a similar vein RFA has been winning industry awards for its on-the-ground reporting from restricted areas in China, Burma, and Vietnam.

The real story, untold in this volume, is that the Broadcasting Board of Governors has starved VOA and the surrogates to fatten Al Hurra and Radio Sawa—which plays Arab and Western pop music interspersed with news segments also taken from the wire services. In contrast, VOA and the better surrogates employ local journalists who risk and sometimes lose their lives to get on-the-ground stories. To call these efforts “propaganda” (Rosendorf), or assert flatly that they “do not work any more” (Powers/El Gody), is to do them a disservice.

It is also, ironically, to echo the Chinese view. According to Guolin Shen of Fudan University, VOA’s twin priorities of reporting the news and representing the U. S. government create a “contradiction” that necessarily destroys credibility. This is ironic, coming from a professor of journalism in a country whose own news media are systematically censored. As Shen notes, VOA was the main source of information during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and Beijing still labors to suppress both it and RFA.

The priorities of international broadcasting are more complex than those of the commercial news media. But then so is its mission. News organizations such as CNN send correspondents to remote hot spots but otherwise make no effort to cover local and regional events in nonaffluent, nonprofitable parts of the world. U.S. international broadcasters have much to learn from the commercial media, especially in the realm of audience research. But while the commercial media ask, “What do they want to hear?” American broadcasters must ask, “Given what is going on in their country, what do they need to hear?”

Now let us follow the real money. By one estimate, the current budget for military strategic communication is 20 times larger than that for all aspects of civilian public diplomacy. To be sure, this includes combat-related information operations as well as the Pentagon’s massive public affairs apparatus. But the Defense Department is also heavily involved in “telling America’s story” (the old USIA slogan) to foreign populations.

To the soldiers involved, this duty is a matter of necessity, not choice. When America was attacked on 9/11, civilian public diplomacy was in disarray, and to decision-makers both inside and outside the Bush administration, it seemed more efficient to have the military pinch-hit than to revive instruments of public diplomacy that had lain fallow for a decade. The trouble is, this short-term solution became a long-term trend best described by military analyst Matt Armstrong: “American public diplomacy wears combat boots.”

Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton have both called for a reversal of this trend. And early last year Congress threatened to reduce appropriations for strategic communication (without, of course, increasing them for public diplomacy). But little has changed, and as the military ramps up for a new surge in Afghanistan, its ability to fight the “battle of ideas” is in urgent need of objective scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the chapter by Abiodun Williams contains no such scrutiny. To the key question of whether the military should conduct public diplomacy, Williams’s reply is to restate the obvious: The Pentagon has been given the resources to do so, and soldiers are already the dominant face of America throughout the world. To the related question of whether the military can conduct public diplomacy, he offers two examples—“the Berlin airlift during the Cold War and Operation Unified Assistance following the 2004 tsumani”—that, while admirable, can scarcely be seen as typical examples of public diplomacy.

Further, Williams strains credulity by suggesting that the State Department is really in charge of strategic communication. At one point he declares that “the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs”—the office occupied by Karen Hughes and James Glassman during the Bush administration—actually “leads the U. S. public diplomacy effort.” This is simply not the case. That office, currently occupied by former Discovery Channel president and CEO Judith McHale, is at best a bully pulpit, with a minuscule staff and no budgetary or programmatic -authority within State, never mind Defense.

For the rest, Williams does little more than recite current military doctrine, complete with frequent repetition of the word must, as in “must listen carefully,” “must .  .  . confront .  .  . misperceptions and fears,” “must leverage the power of personal relationships,” “must adapt to the local information environments.” Such wish-laden boilerplate brings to mind the wry comment of one foreign service officer well versed in the latest counterinsurgency doctrine: “If the only way to defeat violent extremism is to help every at-risk society become free, prosperous, and well governed, then there’s not enough money on God’s green earth, not to mention wisdom and judgment, to do that.”

On culture, two key issues are raised by Ambassador Rugh: that America’s literature, art, and performing arts are less well known today than ever; and that our popular culture, while ubi-

quitous and obviously alluring to youth, has at best a mixed impact. Based on his experience in Arab countries, Rugh writes that “some” perceive America “as a decadent, self-indulgent, and uncontrolled society” and “do not admire or respect what they see in our films or hear in our music, but regard it as a negative influence.”

This same question arises in Neal Rosendorf’s chapter on cultural diplomacy. But his answer is disappointing. Expressing his own “faith that on

balance, now as in the past, America’s popular culture is a reflection of something powerfully positive about the United States,” he concludes on a cavalier note: “Ultimately, America has to reconcile itself to the perceived (and actual) good and bad of its culture via The Popeye principle: “ ‘I Yam What I Yam.’ ” I Yam What I Yam? Isn’t this what the last administration stood accused of in the realm of foreign policy?

Finally, Jennifer Marshall and Thomas Farr argue that of all the messages America could be sharing with the world, the most timely and valuable include our experience “reconciling the dual authorities of state and religion,” our “insight about how religiously grounded norms might legitimately influence public policy,” and our “robust vision of religious liberty as the foundation of democratic order.” Marshall/Farr point out that the task of conveying this message is encumbered by three obstacles: the antireligious bias of the educated classes; the harsh treatment of religion in popular culture, especially youth culture; and the tendency in many parts of world, including the United States, to confuse the American constitutional ban on the establishment of religion (which was designed to encourage its flourishing) with the antireligious bias of French-style secularism (laïcité).

Apart from educating foreign service officers to better understand other faiths and the place of religion in American life and politics, Marshall and Farr make few practical suggestions. Instead, they offer a cogent and readable account of what the message should be—thereby making their chapter an interesting bookend with Ar-senault’s on social media, which says very little about message.

It might seem a simple matter to put these pieces together and, say, use social media to foster a global conversation about the many benefits of religious freedom. But to do this right would require a deeper reservoir of regional expertise, knowledge of America’s founding principles, and plain old resources than can currently be summoned by any of the players in public diplomacy.


Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, is the author of the forthcoming America’s Cultural Footprint: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Yale).