Panel I: Strengthening Public Diplomacy
JOSHUA MURAVCHIK: We have unilaterally disarmed ourselves of the weapons of ideological warfare. Ironically, that great hawk, Senator Jesse Helms, was at the forefront of this effort. I do not believe that Senator George McGovern, that quintessential dove, imagined in his wildest dreams that he could disarm us of the weapons of military warfare as thoroughly as we've been disarmed ideologically.
What makes this situation especially intolerable is that we are facing an immense global problem in terms of attitudes toward the United States. The numbers of people telling poll-takers that they have unfavorable feelings about the U.S. are much higher than the numbers counting themselves as favorable--even in a country like Kuwait, which we rescued not long ago. In our ally Saudi Arabia, 49 percent said they were "very unfavorable," while only 7 percent said "very favorable," a ratio of seven to one.
Perhaps even more astonishing, the proportions are roughly the same among our European allies. That is, in Germany, the "very unfavorables" are 30 percent; the "very favorables," 4 percent. In Spain, 39 percent "very unfavorable," 3 percent "very favorable;" Turkey, 67 percent to 3 percent, "very unfavorable" to "very favorable." And when they asked this question in Pakistan, there's no number at all that appears under "very favorable," just an asterisk to indicate that the numbers are too low to measure.
We are facing this enormous problem, and we are largely bereft of the tools with which to respond to it. And that disarmament is all the more astonishing in light of the fact that our victory in the Cold War was largely the product of our victory on the ideological front.
Winning the Cold War
We waged ideological battle vigorously in the Cold War. In the early phase, from the late 1940s until the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, a great part of that work was done by the CIA, which created Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, sponsored the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and gave different kinds of help to people behind the Iron Curtain and in contested areas.
When the Church Committee exposés made it impossible to continue in this manner, much of the work of the war of ideas was taken over by the USIA. Other parts of it were carried on in new ways--and in the full light of day--by the National Endowment for Democracy, and we managed to keep the radios in business with new and publicly disclosed management. Today, however, since the abolition of the USIA, we have no dedicated mechanism for carrying on this kind of work.
Three Essential Goals
We ought to aim to achieve three main goals.
First, we must try to influence the trajectory of the Islamic world. It is in crisis about its identity, its weakness, and its relationship to the non-Muslim world. We need to find ways to strengthen and support those within the Islamic world who have a vision of Islam that is peaceful and that welcomes coexistence.
Second, we need to anathematize terrorism. On a global plane, this has not been accomplished. Americans are horrified by terrorism, but the Islamic world is not. Yassir Arafat and his PLO remain the poster child of the Islamic world. There seems to be no disrepute attached to the fact that this is a leader and a movement whose métier was and is terrorism.
In the wake of 9/11, Kofi Annan tried to sell the U.N. on a new international convention against terrorism, but the Organization of the Islamic Conference vetoed it. They explicitly said, "We will not support this unless it's rewritten to say terrorism in behalf of bad causes is bad, but terrorism in behalf of good causes is okay."
This attitude is indulged more often than not by much of the rest of the world, including by most European governments. This year, the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution, as it had last year, endorsing Palestinian terrorism as an exercise of human rights, and every single European Union member seated on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, with the exception of Germany, either voted in favor or abstained. Most voted in favor. Britain abstained.
Third, the key problem we have in Europe and elsewhere is the understandable fear of American power. Never has there been such an absence of balance of power in the world, with one nation mightier than all the others put together. It is completely understandable that this is disquieting to others. We need to assuage this by articulating our sense of the purposes of American power and the limits on its use.
To this point, we are doing none of these things. Instead, Secretary of State Colin Powell brought in an advertising executive to, as he put it, "rebrand America." In her confirmation hearings, Powell said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's Rice, so she can sell America to the world."
The main product of her tenure was a Web site and glossy booklet about the "Mosques of America." I kept hearing in my mind the implied message of this campaign: "You should like us; we like you. And lots of us are Muslims, too." It apparently never occurred to the authors of this stratagem that the fact that we have Catholic churches in this country has done nothing for our standing among the Spaniards or the French.
We need a serious effort to wage this war of ideas, and to do that we must have an agency devoted to it. The State Department, into which the functions of the former USIA have been folded, is the least likely institution to carry out this mission because the métier of diplomats is the soft sell.
We need an agency devoted exclusively to this mission, one which will serve as an advocate for it within the government. Anyone who has had experience in the government, or been a close observer, knows that unless a project is the chief priority of someone with institutional clout, that mission always loses out in the inevitable competition with other demands.
Joshua Muravchik, Ph.D., is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
DOUGLAS SEAY: I'd like to speak about Mr. Hyde's [Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL)] bill on public diplomacy, H.R. 3969, the Freedom Promotion Act. But first, I want to lay out the context of the problem, some of the proposed measures to address it, and what the legislation aims at doing. In this process, there were several surprises we came across.
It's been two years since 9/11, and in all that time, one phrase has been constantly heard: "Something must be done." Unfortunately, it's rarely followed with any concrete proposals of what to do. Everybody recognizes the problem, but in two years, very little has been done in terms of developing an agenda. So after 9/11, one of Mr. Hyde's immediate priorities was: Let's see what we can do.
The phrase he uses over and over again is, "How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue can't promote a better image of itself overseas?" The first step was to talk to everybody in the field. We knew we couldn't reinvent it. Let's talk to the experts. I think we talked to just about everybody we could find--in the government, non-government, active, retired, academia, the private sector, foreigners, Americans, everybody we could identify--and gathered their thoughts of what should be done.
That was the first surprise. There are a lot of good ideas, but nobody had an overall solution. There was no magic bullet. There are very few concrete solutions about what to do. That was a very big surprise.
The second surprise was that the problem was much larger and much deeper than we had realized. That became obvious in two hearings we had in late 2001 and early 2002. To me, the most striking thing was when we had the former Chairman of the Board of Broadcasting Governors, which oversees our international broadcasting, state, "We have no audience under the age of 25 in the Arab world." No audience. That's after half a century and several billion dollars of effort around the world. But no audience under the age of 25 in the Arab world. That's stunning.
As I said, there's no magic bullet; no one had a real overall solution. The one thing that kept on coming up was "Give us more money," but the reality is there's no point in giving people more money if the programs aren't proving to be effective.
Two Major Problems
There were two major problems. One is how we go about conducting public diplomacy, which includes international broadcasting. We saw a lot of the things there as antiquated, ineffective. Shortwave broadcasts simply don't compete in the modern world. They're really a World War II relic. The second is content. It's often unpersuasive, even to those who are able to access the information, which is a small minority of people.
There are very big problems in both. So we collected, as I said, all the proposals in the field and tried to put them in a single bill. The legislation was structured into three sections: The first dealt with the State Department, the second with exchanges, and the third with international broadcasting. They were fairly detailed, but these were the major elements.
In State, the first element was to enhance the visibility of public diplomacy and its role in terms of the decision-making in all functions of State. The second was to enhance the role and authority of the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. The third was to require an annual strategic plan on public diplomacy to be developed by the Secretary of State. That was to give focus to their efforts and to make certain they took it seriously.
The fourth is that the bill gave more money, or at least authorized more money, because once USIA was folded into State, they promised they would keep the money in activities that had been used by USIA, but, in fact, this amount has been reduced over the years. So it's much smaller than the original guarantees had been.
The second portion is the exchanges. Those are focused on the Muslim world, where everybody admits our largest problem is. Exchanges are at best a long-term addition to the menu of options that we have, but it's important to start now, and there are several simple things that we can do.
There were a lot of surprises, as I said. One of the most surprising was that there is no central database of exchange students that we've had over the past decades. We've said that this has got to be very easy to do.
The general situation is that individual programs know who their alumni are, but there's nowhere in the United States where we know who they all are and where they have gone, and we don't keep in touch with these people after this enormous investment of time and money. These are people who generally have a more positive image of the United States and could influence their colleagues and citizens overseas, but we just never followed up. So that's one of the things the legislation requires be done, is simply to develop a database.
International Broadcasting
The third element is international broadcasting, and this includes the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, all of those. As I said before, our international broadcasting efforts are overseen by the Board of Broadcasting Governors.
In many ways, this is the most important segment of public diplomacy because it reaches the most people overseas, but what we saw as the problem was that the decision-making and management structures were confused and overlapping. This was a virtually unanimous assessment by everyone we talked to, including people inside the structure of international broadcasting organizations.
The problem with that is it hinders development of new ideas and their implementation. What we tried to do was to clarify the decision-making and management structures, because the central purpose of this portion of the legislation was to encourage innovation in all aspects. This was the central goal. The old ways of doing things clearly don't work, or don't work well enough, so we need to begin developing and implementing new ways of accomplishing this goal, to which no one seems to have a comprehensive solution.
We have to try a range of new things and do so quickly, but we can't expect success. Therefore, in a sense, we encourage failure because failure means you're at least trying new things. There's going to be a high ratio of failure, or at least a lack of initial goals, but the point is to try and try again, and eventually find what works and what doesn't work.
We need to encourage that innovation, not simply settle upon a model and put it forth without any idea of how it works. Part of what we are also asking to be done is a great deal of audience surveys. Is the message reaching the population? Is it actually changing attitudes? These are very difficult things to measure, but they're essential if you want to develop an effective service.
Reinventing Public Diplomacy
We're in fact trying--not just the people in Congress, but the entire public diplomacy structure in the United States--to reinvent exactly what public diplomacy is, and that's an open-ended process.
The problem is you can't legislate innovation. What you can do, and what the legislation tries to do, is to raise the profile and the importance of public diplomacy within the government and within the public at large. You can remove obstacles; you can create structures that allow decisions to be made and implemented more easily; you can increase resources; and you can use the bully pulpit. I think that is about the extent of what Congress can do. It's up to other people in the executive branch and the wider society to add to that.
I've been very encouraged--I'll speak for myself here and not necessarily for anyone else in my office--in many areas, especially international broadcasting, because they're at least trying new ideas. They're at least trying to innovate; but it's not without controversy, and it's not without resistance, and there are legitimate differences about how one should proceed. The potential problems in decision-making and management become quite significant when that is your goal.
The third surprise was that we had expected Mr. Hyde to take the lead on proposing legislation, but also that the subject would soon be flooded with other bills. In fact, it stood out there for a long time by itself. People talked about it, certainly in Congress, about how important this was, how something needed to be done, but virtually nothing was done--very surprising; very difficult to get people to move beyond recognition of the problem, to actually propose concrete solutions.
I'm happy to say that the legislation passed the House last year. It passed unanimously even though we had large spending increases, to which virtually no one raised objections except for the budget officials at OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. It is now in this year's State authorization bill and is ready to go to conference.
What Should Public Diplomacy Do?
I just want to say a word about my view--and again, I don't want to attribute this to any of my colleagues--of just what public diplomacy should do. I admit I am a minority in this area, but I think it's important to say.
It is not to make the United States more familiar to people overseas. They're already too familiar with us: TV, radio, our popular culture--they're saturated with it. The second is not to show our values or our tolerance. Most people in surveys overseas understand the United States and respect our freedoms; they respect our values. These are not things that they're really all that confused about.
And it is not to provide news. That may have been necessary in the past when there were difficulties in getting news, but in today's modern media, from almost anywhere around the world, you can pull down any number of news services. It's simply no longer a central function.
What it should be is focusing on selling our policies. Our policies are the center of the problem. Around the world, people see our policies as aimed against them, whether they are or not, and they have a lot of people saying that. They have a lot of people in governments and our enemies saying that very thing, and we simply haven't participated in the debate.
So that is one of the key aspects, if not the focus, of what public diplomacy should be: to sell those policies, not simply to present them as though people around the world can see them objectively. That's something we simply haven't done very well in the past. We haven't participated in the debates.
--Douglas Seay is a Senior Professional Staff Member with the House Committee on International Relations.
WILLIAM H. MAURER, JR .: Before I get into my litany of what I believe should be done differently in PD (public diplomacy), I would like to acknowledge that there were some very positive aspects that accompanied the integration of USIA's public diplomacy functions into the State Department, not the least of which was the collocation of those charged with explicating the policy in the same place with those who make it.
The proximity of the Under Secretary's office to that of the Secretary enhances the possibility that public diplomacy considerations might be factored into the foreign policy process more regularly than perhaps they have ever been. The functional PD elements of IIP (International Information Programs) and ECA (Education and Cultural Affairs) were also moved intact and could function largely as they had in the past within the new structure. While I may personally feel that the abolition of an independent agency to coordinate PD was a mistake, what's done is done, and I believe that, with some adjustments, PD can be successful within the State Department structure.
That having been said, however, any new structure, however carefully constructed, can benefit from an objective critique to ascertain whether what was initially envisioned was realized in actual practice. Prior to my retirement, I spent a year working in the new organization, and I believe the structure needs to be tweaked if some key capabilities, which have been compromised, are to be restored.
The major difficulty hindering the Under Secretary for PD from doing his or her job is the fact that the Under Secretary does not have the tools needed to effectively orchestrate a worldwide and country-specific public diplomacy offensive. As long as Congress continues to earmark all PD funding (and I urge them to do so), the Under Secretary has the money at her disposal, which cannot be siphoned off for some other purpose.
Resources, however, are not limited to money. In public diplomacy, having the right personnel in the right place to accomplish the mission is essential. The biggest handicaps to realizing PD's potential within the Department are the absence of country-specific expertise within the Under Secretary's office and the lack of any direct linkage between the Under Secretary's office and the field posts that have to implement PD activities.
Public Diplomacy in the Field
Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of the reorganization of the PD function after integration is the fact that the Under Secretary, unlike the former Director of USIA, does not have any direct authority over the PD field operations. In fact, the PD offices in the regional bureaus do not have such authority either.
PAOs (public affairs officers) work only for their ambassadors or DCMs (deputy chiefs of mission) and in some cases actually report to others at post such as political officers. In a bureaucracy, the person who evaluates you and thereby determines your promotions is all-powerful. Thus, if a PAO knows he or she should be out jawboning with journalists on an important issue but is being pressured at post to write some political reports instead, the PAO has no recourse but to do what the boss at post wants.
The Under Secretary should have some say over how the PD resources are being used in the field, and those resources include the people as well as the money. Not having a cadre in the field that reports, at least in part, to the Under Secretary makes me pessimistic as to the ultimate success of many of our PD efforts.
Right now, there is a lot of informal interchange among PD types because everyone knows one another. Therefore, some problems are finessed despite the bureaucratic hurdles. As time goes on, however, and more and more PD officers move into other jobs and non-PD officers move into PD slots, the lack of formal lines of authority back to the Under Secretary's office in Washington could create serious disconnects in getting the PD mission accomplished.
Due to budget cuts over the past decade or so, some 60 percent of our PD operations overseas are one-officer posts. In those cases where the incumbent PAO may be from another specialty, not having a direct supervisory link to headquarters expertise, guidance, and support is problematic at best. One possible way to fix this anomaly would be for the ambassador to serve as the PAO's rating officer with the Under Secretary's office providing the reviewing statement. With a direct link to the Under Secretary's office, the PAO's position at post will be strengthened and the PAO's public diplomacy efforts will be highlighted in the evaluation of his or her performance.
Regional Expertise in Washington
When USIA's integration into State was mapped out, moving the USIA area offices into the regional bureaus at State looked logical on paper. However logical this may have looked at the time, by doing so, the Under Secretary for PD was robbed of the in-house, country-specific expertise that is necessary in dealing with a world in which one size decidedly does not fit all.
Another reality is that while the regional bureaus may have benefited from the addition of PD expertise to ensure its inclusion in policy decisions, some of the bureaus did not feel the need for more "regional experts" since they already had their own country desks. Thus, not only did the new structure compromise the Under Secretary's ability to do her job, but the PD country desk officers were often seen as superfluous in their new locations.
One overarching problem is how PD officers view their roles and how other Department officers see theirs. There is a Chinese-Korean proverb that says: "Sleeping in the same bed with Different Dreams." Although PD officers and their colleagues from other specialties talk about "PD," they often are imagining different things.
PD officers view their roles as primarily to develop programs and to distribute information that explains U.S. policy. Some in the Department seem to feel that successful PD is anything that makes the State Department look good. Others in the Department are more concerned with gathering information and formulating policy. Both of these roles are essential, but the PD officers laboring within the regional bureaus work for different bosses and are cut off from the program elements of PD with whom they should work to get the PD job done.
Under the present structure, when the Under Secretary needs information about audiences, attitudes, or program activities in a specific country, she must go through a regional bureau's front office, which will staff out the request, often but not always, to the PD office in the bureau. The response will be cleared through several layers before it gets back to the Under Secretary, and, even assuming the reply has not been overly "massaged" in the process, getting it back will take some time.
Were the Under Secretary to have a coterie of regional PD experts, working directly for her, she could operate faster and have people at hand who know what she had in mind and who have the requisite PD field experience to make it happen. The elements of ECA and IIP all can give her what they are doing in specific cases, but she has no one to pull it all together and explain how this mosaic of activities and programs is supporting U.S. policy and getting (or not getting) the job done.
The Under Secretary's need for in-house expertise and the regional bureaus' requirement for PD input at the policymaking level could both be addressed by leaving a couple of senior PD officers in the regional bureaus to cement the PD-policy connection but moving the worker bees responsible for field support from the regional bureaus to the domain of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.
To summarize, the PD budget should be en-hanced and protected from non-PD uses. A direct supervisory link between the Under Secretary's office and the field posts needs to be formalized. The Under Secretary should be provided with a coterie of regional PD experts to help manage worldwide activities.
In the big scheme of things, these suggestions are not all that draconian. Bureaucracies being bureaucracies, any change--even one that is beneficial--is often resisted. Even those who might find their jobs easier to do if adjustments were to be made resist because they are comfortable living with the status quo.
I suspect that, if change is going to come, it will come down from the top or from the outside since, to quote that late, great American comedian George Gobel, "There is more than one way to skin a cat, but no matter how you do it, there is no way you will get the cat to cooperate."
William H. Maurer, Jr., is a former Director of the United States Information Agency.
AMBASSADOR WILLIAM A. RUGH: Let me focus on the interagency process in public diplomacy, which is my assignment, and let me focus quite narrowly for purposes of illustration by contrasting the situation we have today, with the interagency process, with the situation we had in a previous international crisis, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990.
I picked those two because at that time, we had a major foreign policy problem and military problem that the United States was facing, and it involved the public diplomacy element. Today, we have a similar international crisis, with not only military and diplomatic, but also public diplomacy aspects.
By way of introduction, it seems to me that the crises in public diplomacy have increased as the resources and means to deal with them, in terms of public diplomacy, have diminished over the last decade or 20 years.
The interagency process, and this includes all U.S. government agencies, including the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department and other agencies of government, including now Homeland Security, it seems to me, works better in the field. That is, it works better at embassies abroad than it does in Washington, partly because an embassy is a small unit in which people have face-to-face interchange, and ambassadors and political officers have a better appreciation of what public diplomacy is because they see the PAO, the cultural attaché, and the information officer every day and learn to appreciate what he or she does.
Problems in the Field
Nevertheless, there are problems in the field as well as in Washington, and the interagency process is not working as well as it used to. Let me focus on the previous crisis, and then I'll come to the current situation by contrast.
In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, we formed an interagency committee. USIA and the State Department co-chaired the committee. Its steering committee met every single day. We were on the phone throughout the day talking to each other. We had a weekly plenary meeting that was chaired by USIA and State as co-equals, which also included the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, CIA, and others.
Those other agencies were clearly subordinate, in the public diplomacy policy development process, to the State Department and USIA. It was a tandem arrangement between State and USIA, with State making policy as it is supposed to do and USIA undertaking the public diplomacy effort, which is developing public diplomacy guidance, establishing foreign public opinion, doing reaction analyses, and developing programs to deal with those problems. The focus, of course, was on the immediate urgent crisis, but we continued under that system to manage the long-term programs, such as the programs of educational exchange and others.
We developed many projects and products during that crisis. We undertook to produce a film. The purpose of the film was to demonstrate the overwhelming power of the United States and the coalition that was arrayed against Saddam Hussein and to persuade Saddam and his advisers to withdraw from Kuwait without a conflict.
The film admittedly didn't succeed because Saddam, for his own reasons, did not withdraw without a fight, but I think the process of developing that film was interesting because it illustrated that the idea for the film came out of a cooperative effort. It was an appropriate public diplomacy activity--aimed at the public primarily in the Arab world, but all over the world and also the Iraqi public.
The idea for the film came out of discussions between USIA and State. It was developed with USIA resources, with film production talent at USIA, since USIA had done films for many years. It used footage provided by the Defense Department acting as a subordinate player, not the dominant one. The film was reviewed by the Secretary of State and by the President himself before it went out. And that was just one example.
We organized interviews for the President with Arab journalists. We organized statements by the President that were carried by all USIA media, including the Voice of America, WorldNet, the Wireless File, and others. At that time, the Voice of America was part of the USIA structure with an autonomous position, but it was very supportive of our public diplomacy.
In the next panel, you'll hear from a real expert, Alan Heil, who will tell you how that functioned. But in my perception, sitting in USIA and looking at the VOA, the staff at the VOA had such journalistic integrity and independence that they provided honest reporting of what was going on in American public opinion, but they also broadcast all important official American statements. They did interviews with U.S. officials during that crisis, and they provided for audiences around the world a wonderful effort of support for our public diplomacy effort without being totally controlled in a policy sense by the State Department.
The Fragmentation Problem
Let me move to the current situation. Because of the decline in funding, which caused a decline in staff, as Bill Maurer has talked about, and because of the merger of USIA and State in 1999, we've seen a dramatic decrease in the effectiveness of public diplomacy and the interagency process. Public diplomacy, as Bill has indicated, has been fragmented because public diplomacy officers have been scattered around to the Department of State and must work through layers of non-public diplomacy officers.
As Ed Feulner said in his introductory remarks, public diplomacy officers have a different mindset and a different role from State Department officers. They are a profession; they are a skill, a learned skill; they look at the world somewhat differently; and they provide a complementary role and a complementary function to State Department officers, to political and economic officers and ambassadors.
Now, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq have thrust the Department of Defense into the forefront of our foreign policy, and it has taken over what appears superficially to be a role in public diplomacy. But I would argue that the Defense Department doesn't do public diplomacy.
The Defense Department's focus is not on a foreign target audience; its focus is on primarily an American audience. The State Department focus is on foreign officials. Public diplomacy officers focus on a foreign audience other than officials, primarily. The Defense Department, in its public statements and in its films and all of its PR efforts, is focused, I would argue, primarily on an American audience, and DoD is not so concerned about foreign reaction.
The exception was perhaps during the war in Iraq, when we had a DoD briefing officer in Doha, Qatar who had a few foreign journalists in his audience, so he had to answer some foreign questions, but the daily briefings by the Defense Department here in Washington and by the State Department and by the White House answered American questions. They don't answer foreign questions. And that's an important difference.
We now have the addition of the Department of Homeland Security into the mix. The integration of Homeland Security personnel into the process of processing visas and dealing with visa requests abroad and at home has added another group of people who do not focus on public diplomacy and do not focus on the national interest as related to foreign opinion, but relate to security.
Balancing Security and Educational Exchange
After 9/11, we have justifiably increased our concern about security, but I would argue that there are ways to balance security with educational exchange without harming either one, and we haven't found that yet. We are still leaning too far in the direction of security to the detriment of educational exchange and the exchange of persons.
Finally, there is public diplomacy that is being carried out by the U.S. government and its various agencies today, but it is less coordinated than it ever was. The complete separation of the broadcasting function from the State Department completed a process that was always an arm's-length, autonomous arrangement between USIA and State on the one hand and VOA on the other, but it has led to some unfortunate innovations. I respect the interest in innovations, but I think there are some innovations that have gone in the wrong direction.
I think the creation of the Middle East network, Radio Sawa, in place of the Arabic service of the Voice of America is a mistake because it focuses only on people under 30 and has reduced, in comparison to the Arabic service of the Voice of America, the amount of news and the amount of important material about American opinion and about American activities.
The problem with VOA in the past was not the content of the program. The content was excellent. I'm talking about the Arabic service and the English service in particular. The problem was the signal. People couldn't hear it. If we had improved the signal so that listeners could listen on medium wave all over the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim worlds, and kept the VOA program, we would be much better off than we are today with Radio Sawa, which has probably a better signal and a pretty good audience, according to reports in some places where we're broadcasting on FM; but the content is disappointing and is not as supportive of our public diplomacy effort as the content of VOA used to be.
In conclusion, what we need is better coordination; better integration of our various agencies, including Homeland Security; a reassertion of the primacy of the State Department and the public diplomacy professionals in public diplomacy; and an increase in professionalism, a focus on public diplomacy as a profession, organizational cohesion, and greater efficiency, as Bill talked about. I think we have a chance to turn this around if we focus on the public diplomacy function, which we have not yet done.
Ambassador William A. Rugh is President and Chief Executive Officer of America-Mideast Educational and Training Services .
SHERRI MUELLER: Special thanks to the Heritage Foundation for this welcome opportunity and for focusing a spotlight on the urgent imperative of regaining America's voice overseas.
Please consider this question, reportedly asked in a real job interview. You're driving alone in your car on a wild, stormy, rainy night, and you see three people at a bus stop: an elderly lady who looks gravely ill, an old friend who once saved your life, and the perfect man (or woman) of your dreams.
Knowing your car holds only one passenger, to whom would you offer a ride? You could pick up the fragile old lady, or you could take your friend, because after all, you owe that person your life; however, you may never be able to find the man or woman of your dreams again.
The candidate who was hired answered, "I would give the car keys to my friend, let her take the little old lady to a hospital, and I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the man or woman of my dreams."
I hope that this story illustrates what I hope the results of our deliberations will be: that we will think about creative alternatives to the challenges we face. The challenges are compelling.
Focusing on Financial Resources
I couldn't begin a talk about strengthening U.S. government-sponsored exchanges and the public-private sector partnerships that sustain them without first focusing on financial resources. The State Department's budget for these activities was cut very dramatically in the mid-1990s.
Last year, when I was in Beijing, I asked the cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy how many International Visitor Program slots she had each year for Chinese leaders. She replied, "90." Ninety slots for a population of 1.29 billion people: We're not even scratching the surface.
Many of these federally funded exchange programs leverage remarkable private funding and support from volunteer citizen diplomats. Citizen diplomacy, a subset of public diplomacy, is the notion that the individual has the right, even the responsibility, to help shape U.S. foreign relations.
Let's take the International Visitor Program as an example of private-sector involvement. Most of you here--and I know many of you have been heavily involved in that program over the years--know that the State Department brings foreign leaders to the United States for two to three weeks to meet with their professional counterparts and to help them develop a better understanding of the history and heritage of the United States.
Almost all money, a base budget of about $50 million, is spent in this country. In a survey in 2000, U.S. ambassadors ranked the State Department's International Visitor Program first of the 64 tools of public diplomacy at their disposal.
The National Council for International Visitors, my organization, is a nonprofit and the private-sector partner of the State Department. Our program agency members and 95 community organizations help administer the International Visitor Program. Approximately 80,000 volunteer citizen diplomats are involved in NCIV member activities each year. Yet our members and organizations with similar missions need more exchange program participants if they're to keep their local funders interested and their volunteers, both professional resources as well as host families, engaged.
Importance of Citizen Diplomats
We're under-utilizing citizen diplomats, one of our most remarkable and cost-effective assets. These volunteers, working with coalitions, such as COLEAD [Coalition for American Leadership Abroad] and the Alliance [Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange], are persuasive advocates in conveying to the U.S. Congress the positive impact exchanges have on U.S. communities.
I want to say special thanks to Hill colleagues on both sides of the aisle who are working hard to appropriate adequate resources and strengthen infrastructure for U.S. government-sponsored ex-changes. The field needs outspoken champions in Congress who will articulate the importance of making the long-term investment in building those personal, human connections that really come in handy when our leaders are trying to negotiate security arrangements, or hammer out a trade agreement, or perhaps establish procedures for containing an epidemic.
Ambassador Rugh mentioned security requirements and making sure they don't damage exchanges. On April 16, the Public Diplomacy Council, the Public Diplomacy Institute, and the Alliance sponsored a wonderful forum that focused on sustaining exchanges while securing borders. Rather than rehearse the concerns raised, such as the possibility of losing major market share of international students in our country when higher education is one of our major exports, I refer you to the report on that meeting.
International Exchange and Domestic Education.
Another challenge is to strengthen the connection between international exchange programs and domestic education concerns. We're all rightly concerned with the Pew Global Attitudes Report that documents the dramatically escalating negative stereotypes of the United States, but equally sobering is the National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey, which demonstrated that knowledge of geography among young adults in the United States continues to trail that of young adults in most other countries. For instance, only 17 percent of our young adults could find Afghanistan on a world map.
There are many ways to forge links between exchanges and domestic education. NCIV's LEADers in Education Initiative, expanding the International Thanksgiving Fellowship Program, the Fulbright Teacher Program--these are excellent models, but many are unknown, and they involve only a small percentage of eligible participants.
Exchanges would also be strengthened if we developed a viable form for distilling the lessons we've learned from decades of implementing them. We need to view the field more holistically, identifying ways to share best practices and generating synergy among programs. We do not always think of the military when we study exchanges, yet the Department of Defense does a lot with exchanges and training, and values person-to-person relationships.
There is an article in the current issue of The Atlantic where Robert Kaplan quotes a Marine lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton: "We want an empire not of colonies or protectorates, but of personal relationships." The author notes: "The formal base rights that we have in 40 countries may in the future be less significant than the number of friendships maintained between U.S. officers and their foreign counterparts."
How do we bring U.S. practitioners together from different agencies and with the private sector to exchange ideas and share best practices? Perhaps the Interagency Working Group at State can play a greater role. Those of us in the private sector are working on a summit on citizen diplomacy. We're talking to our sister cities colleagues, who have proposed a White House conference on citizen diplomacy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the one President Eisenhower hosted in 1956.
Among the lessons that merit consideration, participants in exchange programs learn more about the United States, who we are as a people, and what we value by how the program is administered than by what some expert tells them about the U.S. governmental system and democratic values. The credibility of both the exchange program and the participant is preserved by private-sector involvement and assuring access to a wide range of institutions, opinions, and experiences.
British scholar Giles Scott Smith recently completed an article analyzing Margaret Thatcher's 1967 experience as a participant in the International Visitor Program, when she was an up-and-coming member of Parliament. He writes, "The openness of the program, allowing remarkable freedom of access for the visitor to American social and political life, has definitely been one of its most valuable assets. Visitors expecting a propaganda exercise were pleasantly surprised to find it a very different experience."
Exchanges are more than a two-way street. There are exciting models out there. Burlington, Vermont's mayor, Peter Clavelle, talks about his tripartite sister city relationship with the Palestinian city of Bethlehem and the Israeli city of Arad. He described a sister lake partnership where Burlington's Lake Champlain region is linked via exchanges of biologists and municipal officials to the communities around Lake Ohrid, on the border of Macedonia and Albania, and Lake Toba in Indonesia. The Lake Champlain experience inspired the creation of LakeNet, a global network of more than 900 people and organizations in 90 countries working on the management of sustainable lakes.
Many Americans and many foreign leaders, scholars, and even younger leaders cannot spend a long time away from careers or families. It is important not to sacrifice any of the longer-term academic programs. The Fulbright Exchange Program is one of our truly fine accomplishments, but we must greatly increase the number of short-term exchanges, including Americans going abroad. We need to share what we have learned about making these shorter sojourns more productive.
It is dangerous to focus most of our attention on resources and exchanges with the current crisis spots around the world. Of course we must do that, but we must make sure we're not pulling resources away from places where we've just made a critical mass of investments, such as in the former Soviet Union, or where we have never made the investment our own immediate self-interest demands, such as in Latin America.
Telling America's Story
In recent discussions of U.S. public diplomacy, there's been much emphasis on what is our message. Years ago, whenever I walked into the old USIA building and I saw the plaque with the inscription "Telling America's story," I always wanted to see that inscription extended to "Telling America's story is done best by good listeners."
Our volunteer citizen diplomats are good listeners, and the best way to strengthen exchanges is to expand opportunities for effective citizen diplomacy, not only by having them host exchange program participants, but also by having them serve as citizen ambassadors on brief trips overseas to meet with program alumni. A comprehensive citizen ambassador program would be a powerful, uniquely American way to reinvigorate U.S. exchange programs.
The Voice of America is not only an impressive radio operation; it is also the volunteer effort that speaks volumes to official exchange program participants about who we are as a country, what we value, our belief that the individual can make a difference, and our belief in the primacy of the private sector and the freedoms we celebrated just last week.
There's a plaque in a D.C. park dedicated to Edward R. Murrow. It reads, "He helped the world know what America at its honest best could be." We need to redouble our efforts to help the world know what America at its honest best could be.
Sherri Mueller, Ph.D., is President of the National Council for International Visitors.
