America’s tough sell

The office of undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs has become a reliable generator of exactly two news stories. There’s the appointment of a new public diplomacy chief, when the media note how tough a job it will be to correct the United States’ historically low standing in global public opinion. Then there’s the resignation of that public diplomacy chief a few months or years later, when the media note how she failed to halt historically sharp drops in global public opinion about the United States.

Karen Hughes, the fourth woman to hold the public diplomacy post since it was created in 1999, worked some interesting variations on that cycle. From a purely process-oriented standpoint, she is probably the most successful public diplomacy czarina so far, having increased the office’s budget by more than a third to almost $1 billion a year. Hughes also departed radically from the “brand America” strategy instituted by her two post-9/11 predecessors, pulling the plug on Hi Magazine (a glossy, misguided attempt to draw mindshare among Arab teenyboppers) and generally leaving pop concepts such as the never-popular Radio Sawa station and Al Hurra television network to fend for themselves.

Instead, Hughes applied pressure on problems that were both damaging to America’s image and potentially fixable: the security-mad post-9/11 practice of holding up student visas; a dearth of overseas-study scholarships for American students looking to learn Arabic, Farsi and Chinese; and institutional rigidity that was preventing U.S. ambassadors from maintaining higher public profiles in their assigned countries.

Even those achievements seem fairly modest for a position Hughes has called an umbrella for “the many ways that our government reaches out to engage and inform people around the world about our country, our values and our policies.” Reports of Hughes’ resignation this week gleefully pointed to a recent Pew Research Center report that found opinions about the United States at frighteningly low levels throughout the Muslim world. But Hughes’ inability to solve anti-Americanism was less a reflection on her talents than on the impossibility of her job.

The public diplomacy office was created after Congress abolished the U.S. Information Agency and devolved its duties to the State Department and the nominally independent Broadcast Board of Governors (which runs the radio and TV efforts mentioned above, and Voice of America).

The impetus for that move -- that the end of the Cold War obviated the need for the United States to tend its image abroad -- proved premature, but the realization that we are no longer pursuing the 20th century goal of bringing information and culture into sealed-off societies is still valid. The people of the Arab countries and the wider Muslim world have no trouble getting access to American media and culture. That they still have a low opinion of the country indicates there’s something wrong with the show or something wrong with the audience. The problem is not in the transmission.

That doesn’t mean there are no lessons from Cold War public diplomacy that may be applied to the struggle against radical Islamism. Ideology is still important, and there is a middle ground of people in the predominantly Arab and Muslim world -- the modern equivalent of the uncommitted European leftists the United States tried to woo in the 1950s through the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom -- who are open to a rational argument even from a country whose foreign policies they deplore.

Sadly, the one area in which the State Department could actually be contributing to this important debate -- by providing a full-throated defense of American policy and a stage for opposing views -- is the one that the department has refused to engage. The public diplomacy office, and Hughes herself during her overseas tours, scrupulously avoided taking on the kind of political controversies that might be interesting to the media-attentive classes of Arab society. Expanding student exchanges, as Hughes has tried to do, advances this goal, albeit not at a level that would make much difference in terms of foreign relations.

The challenge has never been getting fair-minded people to agree that there are things to admire about Americans and our society. Hughes was fond of noting that the initials PD “remind us that public diplomacy is people-driven.” But people do not make diplomacy. Governments do. New York and Los Angeles already do a creditable job of selling American culture to the world. Washington’s job should be selling U.S. policy.

If Hughes, who enjoyed such a long and reportedly cordial relationship with the president, was unable to achieve that goal, it’s unlikely that future public diplomacy chiefs will fare any better. That’s an argument for eliminating this frequently vacant job. But if Washington decides the task is still worth doing, here’s one idea: While requesting more funding from the House in April, Hughes noted that public diplomacy “now has a place at the most senior policy tables.” Perhaps that place should be made even more prominent, so that the job becomes part of the crafting of foreign policy, not just the selling of it.