re: "How to Regain the Public Diplomacy Initiative"

Patricia Lee Sharpe at WhirledView ("A Look at World Politics & Most Everything Else") has some great ideas about how to put public diplomacy back on track.

Money quote(s):

"The underfunded State Department, which absorbed the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, has misused to the point of destruction the professional resources it inherited. Nor, since 9/11, have the generously-funded Department of Defense and its over-compensated sub-contractors—hundreds of millions of dollars annually!—done any better. Together, the Pentagon and the State Department have not even been able to gain appreciation for President Bush’s laudable anti-AIDS initiative in Africa."

"For nearly fifty years the U.S. image and its influence were bolstered by an extraordinary and amazingly cost effective public diplomacy program executed by the U.S. Information Agency, whose activities and personnel were—I never ceased to wonder at this!—admired and trusted around the globe. U.S.I.A., an independent agency working in close cooperation with the State Department, told America’s story, explained America’s policy and presented America’s intellectual and cultural accomplishments in a thoroughly au courant, well-coordinated and cannily influential way. Attuned to local sensibilities and speaking local languages, U.S.IA. professionals called upon traditional as well as newly-invented media of communication to promote an understanding of America and Americans and to generate sympathy and support for U.S. policy. Above all, by insisting on impeccable intellectual honesty—the famed warts-and-all approach, U.S.I.A won the often grudging trust of critics and preserved the good will of carefully nurtured friends."

"Day in, day out, picking and choosing among an extraordinary array of wholly out-in–the-open intellectual and cultural tools, U.S.I.A. professionals laid the foundation on which global support for the entire range of U.S. policy initiatives could be—and was—built. Through press releases, lectures by distinguished professors, dancers, dramatists, pianists, libraries, English language institutes, scholarships or fellowships for promising students as well as established academics—and more, U.S.I.A officers presented the world with an engaging but accurate picture of the U.S., all the while feeding their uniquely intimate understanding of countries and cultures into the American foreign policy process."

"U.S.I.A. was not axed because its officers were incompetent or because its programs were ineffective. U.S.I.A. was a victim of success. When the Berlin Wall fell, the world loved America. During that crazy interlude of euphoria at the end of the Cold War, however, there were those who argued that full scale public diplomacy wouldn’t be needed any more. Tax dollars would be saved and nothing would be lost, they insisted, if U.S.I.A were merged into the State Department. Unfortunately, by the time it was all too clear that history was by no means over, U.S.I.A had been dismantled."

&

"It’s time to rectify that naive post Cold War mistake and reconstitute an independent public diplomacy agency to serve as the voice of an open society and a democratic people. Only a single official public diplomacy agency can do the whole job, do it continuously, do it persuasively, do it cost-effectively."