OPINION:
Today’s escalating international conflicts are a déjà vu struggle over values and ideas that dominated the Cold War. In times like these, even the most powerful country can run out of patience with the intricacies of traditional public diplomacy. However, investing in strategic public diplomacy can pay real dividends.
As China has demonstrated so clearly in Africa and South America (albeit for not-so-virtuous reasons), public diplomacy can influence foreign perceptions. From media outreach abroad to educational and arts exchanges, the 2024 Democracy Perception Index from www.allianceofdemocracies.org has shown that America’s international reputation has become worryingly negative over the last few years. The way the United States conducts public diplomacy is broken and needs to be fixed.
A country without public diplomacy is impoverished. A country with sprawling public diplomacy that lacks focus is worse because it can harm other foreign policy efforts. The new administration would benefit from a comprehensive audit of public diplomacy. We will undoubtedly find staggering redundancies, low return on investment, and incoherent messaging, just like within domestic policy but less publicly visible. Reallocating resources to focus on well-thought-out and executed programs is a simple concept, so simple that it has been implemented rarely.
Let us take scholarships for Saudi students to study in the U.S. (funded by the Saudi government as a bonus) as a positive example. Understandably, after 9/11/2001, Americans were wary of young, potentially hostile Saudis on our soil. Al Qaeda’s anti-American propaganda in Saudi Arabia had been effective. By 2005, the number of Saudi students in the U.S. had dwindled to 1,000, a historic low. The King Abdullah Scholarship Program began in 2006 to bring the best students here and to help rebuild U.S.-Saudi bilateral relations. By 2014, 111,000 young Saudis were studying in the U.S., and attitudes towards each other improved.
With huge unmet demand for participation in our exchange programs, the current trend is to expend more resources; instead, we should prioritize quality over quantity. First, our piecemeal programs need a unifying strategy to foster goodwill. American taxpayers have every right to expect the artists, students, and researchers we pay to send worldwide to advance. Simply allowing private citizens to experience other cultures is not enough.
Second, America’s story is worth telling. Too many projects get lost in cycles of national shame or dystopian projection. As political philosopher Russell Kirk wrote in 1990 in Chronicles, “Hope feeds on hope,” reminding us that despite setbacks, America is a young nation that can enter a renewal period. With America’s 250th birthday around the corner, actionable hope, fueled by renewed faith in our young nation’s vitality, should drive our public diplomacy.
Third, as Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” Advocating for human rights tone-deafly, devoid of cultural context, does more harm than good. For example, most recently, under a White House directive, many US embassies abroad actively promote LGBTQIA+ rights. This policy is perceived as deeply offensive in some cultures, from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East to Catholic-majority countries in South America. In countries that have experienced colonialism, it is often considered intellectual neocolonialism. Displaying a lack of cultural competence is counterproductive to mutual understanding.
Fourth, public diplomacy must catch up with the fast-evolving digital media landscape. Used globally to shape perceptions more quickly than any government-backed initiative, artificial intelligence (AI) has far-reaching implications for our defense, economy, and military. Intelligent use of public diplomacy must harness the latest technologies to supercharge our message to the world.
Recentering our public diplomacy on America’s core values of democracy and freedom can empower our allies to counter poverty, promote individual expression, and protect the persecuted.
Successive administrations have watched passively as disparate projects mushroom while they add their own pet issues to the cauldron. As we face our debt, we can measure our projects against goals that benefit the U.S. and, ultimately, the world.
Today, the Trump administration and the new Congress can embrace the clarity of purpose and cultural competence that define diplomacy at its best.
• Sonia Coman co-authored the field-defining book, New Directions in Organizational and Management History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022) and publishes on art and cultural affairs in France, Japan, Romania and the US. Ambassador Tatiana C. Gfoeller was a U.S. diplomat in Bahrain, Belgium, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Turkmenistan. She has taught political science at Georgetown University.
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