An email conversation about my post about USAID not being under Smith-Mundt included a comment (from a third party) that USAID had been “muzzled” in the U.S. for years.  Several government reports support this statement, but not because of Smith-Mundt.  They also note the “muzzling” isn’t specific to the U.S.

From the 2003 GAO Report on Public Diplomacy:

Officers responding to our survey, those with whom we met overseas, and numerous other State officials also pointed to the amount of extra time public diplomacy practitioners are required to spend on administrative, budgetary, and personnel matters due to the unique nature of the program. For example, embassy public affairs section officials in one country told us that the planned filming of USAID projects was held up because embassy procedures did not allow making advance cash payments to the television crew. Instead, the embassy preferred either making electronic fund transfers in dollars or issuing checks. The officials noted that, unlike in the United States, businesses in the developing world usually demand cash payments in advance because they do not have sufficient working capital to provide services and then wait for payment. Also, the businesses often do not have bank accounts that can accept electronic fund transfers in dollars. In this case, getting the television crew paid and working required the head of the public affairs section to become personally involved in persuading the embassy administrative section to act.

This tracks with the assessment of the recent report from the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy noting a focus on bureaucracy rather than public diplomacy. 

From the 2003 report by Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, commonly referred to as the Djerejian Report:

When we asked the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) how much of his budget of $13 billion goes to public diplomacy, he answered, “Almost none.” He explained that AID is generally prohibited from using program funds to disseminate information about its activities – a restriction that the Advisory Group recommends be ended immediately. But, in a broad sense, a great deal of AID’s work is public diplomacy at its best. AID’s programs, in the words of one of its top
officials, are “American values in action.” …

How many people in the Arab and Muslim world, or anywhere else for that matter, know the extent of AID’s activities? Too few. …

As noted, we recommend that AID – which, like many other government agencies, is subject to extensive Congressional earmarking (more than 90 percent of its programs) – be free from burdensome legal restrictions on publicizing its work. A portion of funding from every major project should be devoted to communicating the project’s benefits to the public. “We are the message,” one AID official said to us, but “we get people saying, ‘Why don’t you publicize what you do?’”

While the GAO report captured the administrative obstacles to publicizing the activities, the Djerejian Report makes it clear USAID was outside of U.S. Public Diplomacy efforts.  No where in either report is a mention of some constraint to raising awareness brought on by Smith-Mundt, only by administrative and bureaucratic barriers.  Both reports, as well as others, note USAID has been muzzled, but for very different, and more easily corrected, reasons. 

Has progress been made?  Yes.  Is it enough?  No, more must be done. 

Here’s what Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (and Public Affairs)* says are his goals:

U.S. engagement in the world and the Department of State’s engagement of the American public are indispensable to the conduct of foreign policy. James K. Glassman leads America’s public diplomacy outreach, which includes communications with international audiences, cultural programming, academic grants, educational exchanges, international visitor programs, and U.S. government efforts to confront ideological support for terrorism. He oversees the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Public Affairs and International Information Programs, and participates in foreign policy development. The focus of the Under Secretary’s tenure will be in three areas:

1. leading the U.S. government effort in the global ideological engagement,

2. building on the strengths of U.S. educational and cultural exchanges, and

3. bringing fresh and vital technologies to bear on all of our efforts.

“The task ahead is to tell the world the story of a good and compassionate nation and, at the same time, to engage in the most important ideological contest of our time – a contest that we will win.”

Jim laid these out of in his CFR speech a couple of days ago, which I recommend reading but I don’t have time to delve into here and do it justice.  A couple of excerpts:

Here is our desired end state:  a world in which the use of violence to achieve political, religious, or social objectives is no longer considered acceptable.  Efforts to radicalize and recruit new members are no longer successful, and the perpetrators of violent extremism are condemned and isolated.

How do we achieve such a world?  In three ways.  First, by confronting the ideology that justifies and enables the violence.  We try to remove the fake veneer on the reputation of extremists and allow publics to see the shame and hostility of life in terrorism. …

Second, and probably most important, we achieve such a world by offering, often in cooperation with the private sector and using the best technology, a full range of productive alternatives to violent extremism.

The shorthand for this policy is diversion — powerful and lasting diversion, channeling potential recruits from violence with the attractions of entertainment, technology, sports, education and culture, business, in addition to politics and economics. …

The third means to achieve this safer, freer world is to create a broad awareness of the war of ideas throughout the U.S. government, business, academia, and elsewhere, so that those institutions can put in effect their own projects or help us with ours spontaneously, rather than through top-down direction.

We’ve already done some reorganization to help in this overall effort.  You may be hearing these phrases at some point.  We’ve created something we call the Global Strategic Engagement Center, which is an interagency group located at State whose job it is to be a clearinghouse for war of ideas programs, the first clearinghouse of its type, to provide day-to-day direction and make sure that the job is done. [emphasis is mine]

It is refreshing to hear an Under Secretary actually speak knowledgeably about public diplomacy. 

Will the Global Strategic Engagement Center the appropriately bureaucratic name to replace “USIA”?  I saw appropriately because using “information” and “communication” won’t work, neither will "agency".  Seems like a good, middle of the road. 

Now, is it pronounced "G-SEC" or "G-StratEc" or simply "G-Strat"?  Three letter abbreviations are spelled out, four are pronounced (C-N-A-S and P-N-S-R excepted of course). 

* I generally (and flippantly) write the title parenthetical because the “PD and PA” title buys into the fantasy belief of a bifurcated information environment of the U.S. information environment and a separate non-U.S. information environment.  I’m (not) sorry, but there is a global information environment.  There was one GIE sixty years ago and there’s one GIE today.  That’s the first reason.  The second is that only those paying close attention think of Sean McCormack as working for the same person who oversees global information operations for State and ostensibly the USG.  Of course there are those who don’t know who McCormack is…

Archibald MacLeish, a major proponent for cultural diplomacy sixty-five years ago, once proclaimed “the world is wired for sound.”  In this spirit, a decade and a bit later Willis Conover, the most famous American American’s have never heard of, went on the air at the Voice of America with his jazz show.  This was followed by the State Department asking several musicians to travel abroad as part of a counter-propaganda campaign based in cultural diplomacy. 

A New York Times article, When Ambassadors Had Rhythm, looks at a photo exhibition about one such U.S. effort.  Worth a read, the article describes how Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., father of Mountain Runner friend ACP III, suggested “real Americana” instead of elitist orchestras (my words not his). 

Noteworthy paragraphs in the article:

Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school-integration laws. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.”

Administration officials feared that this broadside, especially from someone so genial as “Ambassador Satchmo,” would trigger a diplomatic disaster. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Attorney General Herbert Brownell that the situation in Arkansas was “ruining our foreign policy.” Two weeks later, facing pressure from many quarters, Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas. Armstrong praised the move and agreed to go on a concert tour of South America.

The jazzmen’s independence made some officials nervous. But the shrewder diplomats knew that on balance it helped the cause. The idea was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union, freedom over Communism, and here was evidence that an American — even a black man — could criticize his government and not be punished.

Not mentioned in the article is the contents of an anonymous letter in Armstrong’s (if you’ve ever heard me play a note, you’d know there’s no relation, well that, and there is one other characteristic) FBI file that read Armstrong “is a communist, why does State Dept. give him a passport?” 

For more on this subject, including a compelling argument that the damage on our international reputation and image by Communist propaganda pointing out America’s racial problems contributing to support at the highest levels for Civil Rights legislation, as hinted at above, see Mary Dudziak’s book, Cold War Civil Rights (review here).

Related: Winning over hearts, minds, and ears at Foreign Policy who brings to our attention U.S. Ambassador James Cason, who cut an album in Paraguay’s native language.

Not at the Combined Arms Center Inter-Agency Symposium.  During the Q&A of the Stability Operations Panel:

One audience member posed a general question for the panel "what is the feasibility of reestablishing US Information Agency (USIA)?"

Answer was "We absolutely must"

A follow on question by another Audience Member was "How do we make that happen?"

The Answer was "Legislation makes that happen"

Anyone else find it fun to read questions about recreating USIA in Defense Department forums?  They happen at State (I asked Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy Chairman Bill Hybl about it — I couldn’t help myself), but it is so obvious at Defense and seemingly there’s more enthusiasm for it there as well. 

(H/T Chris Albon)

There appears to be a shift the posture American public diplomacy underway.  Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (and Public Affairs) Jim Glassman, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, stakes out a stance for public diplomacy more like the aggressive information activities of the early Cold War than the passive beauty contest of the last couple of decades.  

In this op-ed, Jim describes his goal of leaving a “robust legacy” for the next administration.  In laying out what is likely the first of many position statements in the coming weeks, he demonstrates a confidence not seen in the position since (and for a long while before) 9/11:

Unlike the containment policy of the Cold War, today’s diversion policy may not primarily be the responsibility of government.  My own job, as the interagency leader for the war of ideas, is to mobilize every possible American asset – public and private, human and technological – in the effort.

He continues to set a new and very active course for public diplomacy.  It is clear the “fast” tools of public diplomacy, information activities, are his low-hanging fruit to be picked and fixed in his six months in office (although four may be a more realistic number due to the normal end of term turnover), but the “slow” engagements through exchanges are not ignored. 

Invoking language more commonly seen from the Defense Department, in fact Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates is named in his essay while the Secretary of State does not, he states the need to “confront the ideology of violent extremism directly.” 

The most credible voices here are those of Muslims themselves – especially Islamists – who have publicly disavowed al Qaeda’s methods and theology. Lately such apostates include Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who laid the foundation for the movement’s bloody ideology and has now repudiated it, and Noman Benotman, a Libyan close to Osama bin Laden who rebuked al Qaeda bluntly last year.

Our public diplomacy efforts should encourage Muslims, individuals and groups, to spread the denunciations of violence by these men and others far and wide. But non-Muslim Americans themselves should not shrink from confidently opposing poisonous ideas either.

This is followed by, as he calls it, the “diversion” that inculcates against extremism.

The task is not to persuade potential recruits to become like Americans or Europeans, but to divert them from becoming terrorists.

We do that by helping to build networks (virtual and physical) and countermovements – not just political but cultural, social, athletic and more: mothers against violence, video gamers, soccer enthusiasts, young entrepreneurs, Islamic democrats. For example, there is an emerging global network of families of Islamic victims of terrorist attacks. While winning hearts and minds would be an admirable feat, the war of ideas needs to adopt the more immediate and realistic goal of diverting impressionable segments of the population from being recruited into violent extremism.

There is a token, and out of place and seemingly forced, mention of Iran. 

More important is the end, which returns to the purpose of information activities to elicit support and build networks of allies. 

What we seek is a world in which the use of violence to achieve political, religious or social objectives is no longer considered acceptable, efforts to radicalize and recruit new members are no longer successful, and the perpetrators of violent extremism are condemned and isolated.

Military success is necessary, but it is not sufficient – for the simple reason that we face as an enemy not a single nation, or even a coalition, but a stateless global movement. Without a vigorous war of ideas, as we kill such adversaries others will take their place.

The words are one thing, but in what Defense calls the “say-do” gap, what we do must match what we say.  I’m sure Defense is fully onboard with Jim’s position.  Hopefully the White House, Congress, and State jump on as well and the Under Secretary gets a seat at the take-offs and not just the landings.

Briefly, for the last several years, most definitely since 9/11 but arguably before, American Public Diplomacy has been rooted primarily in the “showcase” model that highlights only certain aspects of our “who we are.”  Falling on deaf ears as the pictures and words had little resonance with target audiences, it was a steep departure from our tried and tested model of a “mirror” that reflected who we are, warts and all (with some filtering of course) to foster understanding and build trust. 

Kim Andrew Elliott draws our attention to an example of returning to the mirror model.  From the “fact sheet” Sharing the U.S. Elections with the World: Public Diplomacy At Work:

On November 4, 2008, U.S. embassies and consulates will host thousands of guests and journalists to watch the election results on live television feeds from America. The U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Centers in Washington, D.C. and New York will hold similar gatherings for resident foreign media in the United States. These election night galas will cap months of intensive effort by the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs to provide foreign journalists and audiences worldwide with an understanding of the complexity and significance of the 2008 American Elections.

More than 83 U.S. embassies
and consulates conducted
320 election-related programs
by June 2008.

Since the summer of 2007, the Bureaus of Public Affairs, Educational and Cultural Affairs, International Information Programs, as well as U.S. embassies worldwide, have worked in a variety of ways to illuminate the election process, including:

• Foreign Journalist Reporting Trips to primary states, caucuses, debates, and conventions
• Expert Briefings and Interviews for foreign journalists
• Comprehensive assistance to foreign television crews
• Election Study Tours in the United States for over 4,000 foreign government officials, academics, students and journalists
• Speakers, over 200 to date, from academia, the media, think tanks and polling organizations have traveled abroad or done Digital Video Conferences, Telepress conferences, and Webchats
• Articles, analyses, videos, podcasts, blogs, and interactive maps on expanded State Department international Website
• Electronic Journals in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic

Um, Digital Video Conferences?  Is that compared to an analog video conference?  Was “digital” necessary?  And, what is a “telepress conferences”?  Who talks like that?  I’ll just assume these are key phrases for the target audience.