Where We Stand: Our Principles On Utilizing Public Diplomacy for Security and Prosperity

Public diplomacy must be deployed consistently over time because the attitudes of foreign publics change over periods of years, not weeks or days. Moreover, it must be conducted systematically according to standards that allow measurement of prevailing message content and opinion changes.

Effective in helping to end the Cold War under the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), public diplomacy is now needed again to combat the root causes of foreign terrorism. Public diplomacy promotes national interests and security by informing and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad. Compared to traditional diplomacy that seeks government-to-government cooperation, public diplomacy relies on public relations, person-to-person exchanges, foreign broadcasting, cultural, and educational programs managed through U.S. Embassy Public Diplomacy sections to build bridges of understanding.

Regrettably, America’s overseas voice is still gasping from the effects of budgetary cutbacks in the mid-1990s, when Congress and the White House believed that foreign communication efforts could be retired after the end of the Cold War. A haphazard merger of USIA into the Department of State in 1999 further weakened public diplomacy’s role by distributing USIA assets within the department and making the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy a largely advisory position.

This is especially critical in a parent agency that has the primary mission of government-to-government diplomacy, which is best done discreetly, as opposed to the open communication of public diplomacy, which seeks to influence broad attitudes and opinions.

Across the federal bureaucracy, departments and agencies with similar public diplomacy functions should coordinate their efforts to eliminate overlap and avoid working at cross-purposes. U.S. public diplomacy and U.S. military communications efforts must be synchronous, while the Broadcasting Board of Governors should ensure that part of its programming content supports U.S. development objectives for receiving countries.

Likewise, all American diplomats should be cognizant of the public diplomacy mission and how it supports U.S. foreign policy interests in different ways than their own.

Moreover,U.S. citizens should not be barred from monitoring the content of public diplomacy messages to foreign audiences.

Such a doctrine should establish the purpose of public diplomacy and provide broad guidelines for using various channels to reach multiple audiences. U.S. military doctrine guides communications decision-making in the armed forces. Public diplomacy should have its own set of principles as well.

Congress should ensure that budgetary authority and reporting flow from the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy through a new Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy Operations to the public diplomacy/public-affairs area directors to the Public Diplomacy Sections in the embassies. Ambassadors and regional assistant secretaries should retain inputs to public diplomacy personnel performance evaluations, but overall responsibility for writing them should be returned to the public diplomacy hierarchy. This must be the structure until the State Department itself is reformed into an institution that supports diverse missions.

The old USIA media and public opinion research office, currently located in the State Department’s classified Intelligence and Research Bureau, should be moved to the public diplomacy Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), where it can help to shape public diplomacy programs and recommend approaches to engaging free and captive media around the world instead of languishing in a restricted- access intelligence office. The USIA Foreign Press Centers, currently parceled out to State Department’s domestic Public Affairs Bureau, should also fall under IIP, which works with foreign audiences.

The White House Office of Global Communications, now a press agent function, could coordinate public diplomacy programs among government agencies, but that mission ideally should be managed from the NSC, where a coordinator would have more fluid contact with existing foreign area directors. The coordinator should have authority to bring together State Department, Department of Defense, Agency for International Development (USAID), and National Endowment for Democracy communications program managers to coordinate strategy and ensure cooperative efforts. Foreign broadcasting under the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) should be reorganized to eliminate ineffective and duplicate services. Eventually, all broadcast operations should be consolidated under one roof (a reformed Voice of America) with services tailored by channel and content to priority countries and regions. Although the BBG should remain journalistically independent, its non-news programming should support State Department public diplomacy and USAID country development goals.

USIA came into the State Department with a balance of trained foreign and civil service personnel attuned to the foreign communication mission. That expertise is now being replenished with public diplomacy training at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Although the institute provides career training for junior public diplomacy officers, both public diplomacy and the domestic public affairs staff should be given continuing career training similar to the training provided to U.S. military public affairs officers. They should have exchange opportunities with the Department of Defense and with private industry public relations departments. Finally, State Department political, economic, and consular officers should receive public diplomacy familiarization as part of their initial training.

Public diplomacy’s outreach should not be limited to impersonal “arms-reach” programs such as the Internet, radio, and television broadcasting. U.S.-funded library operations in major city centers should be revived on a country-by-country basis where Internet use and access to printed information are limited. Where foreign audiences are starved for information, U.S. public diplomacy should seize the opportunity to supply it. Coordinating with USAID on the provision of foreign-language textbooks to host-country educational institutions is a good example.

Under Smith–Mundt, Voice of America editorials explaining the menace of drug trafficking cannot be repeated in the United States, even though American travelers can hear them overseas or read them on the Internet. Domestic and overseas messages now need to be one and the same.

Communications intended for overseas audiences should be directed to them first, but third-party access and dissemination in the United States should not be prohibited. The Administration should also create a private-sector institution, a form of independent, federally funded research and development center, that would be charged with gathering and analyzing the information required by the U.S. government to advance America’s position in the ideological war of ideas.