Public Diplomacy

A new documentary film, “The Chicago Ten,” which recounts the stormy days of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, brings to mind the chant of the anti-(Vietnam) war protesters who clashed with police near the convention hall: “The Whole World is Watching.” Many of my generation watched the gavel-to-gavel coverage of that divisive gathering, certain that the whole world must have been closely following this unflattering disturbance in our own backyard.

Not exactly so. As the film makes clear, most of the protest was not recorded contemporaneously and had to be reconstructed from various partial accounts. Nonetheless, “The Whole World is Watching” became the shout heard ’round the world, with or without pictures.

This year, minus street protests but against the background of another unpopular war, “The Whole World is Watching” is a simple statement of fact. Our most international of news media, CNN, today put it this way in one of their on-line reports:

With less than a year remaining of the Bush presidency, the new president will take office in January with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global campaign against terrorism and the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea already on the agenda.

Add to that the image of the United States around the world — now at an all-time low — and the rise of India and China as world powers, and the next president’s plate is already full before the nominees have been officially decided.

To say “the world is watching” the election would be an understatement. In fact, it has attracted an unprecedented level of interest overseas. Arab satellite networks are shelling out big bucks to send reporters to trail the candidates around the country.

Foreign diplomats have traveled to primaries such as Iowa and New Hampshire and confess their governments are far more interested in discussing the latest from the campaign trail than they are talking about the dry diplomatic issues of today.

So far, the transparency and the drama of the process (particularly on the Democratic side) have made for a rather hopeful lesson in democracy. But given some of the tactics of recent days, such as the Tennessee Republican Party’s Web press release, we might do well to keep in mind that the world is indeed watching and has every right to expect that we will uphold the standards that we call on other nations to observe.

Yesterday Senator Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama’s faced offover such foreign policy issues as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Iraq war at the MSNBC debate in Ohio last night.

The NAFTA discussion must have tickled Senator Clinton’s inner Latino, because on Monday her campaign released a “Hispanic campaign song.” I know you can’t wait to hear it, so click here to download the song to your Ipod so you can add it to your Campaign ‘08 playlist.

Obama had already released his Spanish-language campaign song, complete with a Mariachi band (And if you’re looking for somethinga little moe danceble, here’s the Reggeton remix). Now that Obama is getting flack for his use of the “Hold On I’m Comin’” theme song, he may need to switch over to the Spanish version altogether.

The Democratic candidates have inspired some other musical creations. Of course there’s Obama girl. But there are some more cultural hybrids. Here’s the white man’s version of the Hispanic campaign song. This Obama video and audio delight is set to an afro-cuban song with the lyrics “Fired up, ready to go.”

The release of the Spanish-language campaign songs were meant to motivate the Latino voters heavily populating a state whose primary is soon approaching, Texas. But let’s not forget that there’s a whole world of Spanish-speakers, albeit non-voting, out there. These songs, channelled virally through YouTube, could broadcast a jazzy message about the Democratic candidates throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Viva la ‘08!

When does the growing popularity of Barack Obama – at home and overseas – begin to impact the terrible polling numbers that the United States has been getting in foreign opinion surveys?

Lately we’ve been seeing more reports of negative foreign views of the U.S., such as yesterday’s NPR report from Berlin. But these reports are often based on polling data that are getting a bit stale. (The NPR story, which talks about German views toward the U.S., hangs on data from last Fall’s Pew survey of foreign opinion, embellished by misgivings concerning diminished U.S. official public diplomacy in that country.)

Now, with the Bush Administration in its final stretch, and intense American and foreign media interest in the U.S. election campaign, isn’t it time to – pardon the expression – turn the page?

In Germany, where local media routinely cites the Bush Administration as a kind of shorthand for every perceived ill of the United States, the advent of two Democratic contenders has the local commentariat in thrall.

For a sense of how this is playing, check out Der Spiegel’s English-language review of German-language commentary about Obama. “Obama-mania has spread well beyond the shores of North America and interest increases the longer his winning streak gets,” wrote Germany’s premier newsweekly. “The only thing German commentators wanted to talk about was the phenom from Illinois and the race for the Democratic nomination.”

Apparently, even the center-right German press is in the tank for Obama. Writes Die Welt, flagship daily for the conservative Springer Verlag, “Obama’s rise is more than just an American domestic phenomenon. He shows what is possible in a democracy that believes in itself.”

Perhaps the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William R. Timkin Jr., was right when he told NPR that the old forms of U.S. public diplomacy in Germany might no longer be needed. But was he expecting a new American Idol? Hang on to your Hüte, Deutschland, it’s Obamamania!

(Richard Falk)

Yesterday Today’s Zaman News, a Turkish English-language daily newspaper, published an opinion piece by Richard Falk, an American professor of international law at Princeton University. Titled “What to expect from the next American president in the Middle East,” the piece gives a well-rounded, in-depth summary of the current status of the US presidential election. For the Turkish audience Falk forecasted which Presidential candidate would be best suited to relate positively with the Middle East, end the war in Iraq, and improve relations with Iran.

On the Republican candidates he wrote: “On policies toward the Middle East McCain and Huckabee speak with one voice, and its reliance on military solutions to outstanding conflicts is indistinguishable from what we have been hearing these past seven-plus years from Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.”

As a professor of international law it is not surprising that he came down firmly in that camp for Obama’s more multilateral approach to US foreign policy-making.

“Obama seems less likely to choose a military option when confronted with a hostile regime in the Muslim world. He has strongly endorsed a creative approach to diplomacy, offering to meet with hostile leaders in the Middle East, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Clinton sharply criticized him for this, seeming to want to do diplomacy in the old way by viewing a meeting of an American president with a foreign leader as of enormous benefit to the latter and a sign of American weakness — and Obama’s inexperience. Clinton propos[es] relying on power, status and threat rather than on the “soft power” options of discussion, mutuality and accommodation.”

Yet he stressed that “aside from Iraq there are no significant foreign policy differences between the approaches taken by the three candidates (McCain, Clinton and Obama) so far as the Middle East is concerned.”

This op-ed brings Falk’s writings full circle. In the past he has commented [and here] on the Turkish elections for the American media.

Yesterday brought Turkish audiences another Obama endorsement. Vural Cengiz, the president of the Turkish-American Businessmen’s Union, penned “Obama will be good for the Turks — and the world,” published by the Turkish Daily News, another English-language Turkish newspaper.

Last week the Heritage Foundation, the conservative, Washington-based think tank, held a discussion titled “Public Diplomacy: Reinvigorating America’s Strategic Communications Policy.” The panel included presentations by Colleen Graffy, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary (DAS) for Public Diplomacy (PD) for Europe and Eurasia, Michael Doran the Department of Defense’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy, Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Newt Gingrich and currently a Heritage Visiting Senior Fellow in National Security Communications, and Joseph Duffey, a former director of the now defunct US Information Agency. Helle Dale, Director of the Foreign Policy Studies department at the Heritage Foundation and a columnist for the Washington Times, moderated.

The event can be viewed by clicking here.

Heritage President Ed Fullner began the discussion by highlighting the significance of PD in fighting the war on terror. But he lamented that the US has not been doing a good enough job communicating itself. In fact, all panelists (except for the State Department official) underlined that past PD efforts have been hampered by a lack of leadership, strategic thinking and resources. Indeed the event’s goal was to lay the groundwork for a new way forward; design a PD strategy that could be offered to the incoming Presidential administration. Dalle mentioned that this aim is part of a year-long effort at Heritage, which she will spearhead. (To view a policy proposal she published two days before the event, click here).

In contrast to the many gloomy assessment of State’s PD efforts presented at the event, Deputy Assistant Secretary Graffy (pictured at left) aimed to brighten the picture by offering the group some examples of the Department’s recent successes. Graffy countered, “Today, we are actually not doing so badly. But the title of this event–”RE-invigorating America’s public diplomacy” is a good reminder that most people don’t know what we have already done to invigorate public diplomacy. In addition to doing public diplomacy, we also need to communicate what we are doing on public diplomacy. We need to do more PD on our PD!”

Graffy said that a central success was the fusion of PD with the policy-making side of the equation. That is, the State Department has been restructured to include a DAS to oversee PD functions over the entire bureau, side by side with the designated policy-maker. As well, PD desk officers are embedded into the staff of each of geographic regional policy team. Rather than “being at the receiving end of information,” Graffy said, “they are now a part of the policy team, doing PD right there from the ‘take off’”.

Other PD success of the recent past included the creation of a new media hubs—offices where PD officers liaise with foreign journalists—in Brussels, London and Dubai. She announced a new Senior Adviser on Muslim Engagement position whose deals with issues relating to integration, assimilation, Democracy and Islam. Additionally, she reported that translating “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown” into Ukrainian was a big hit.

But Graffy’s talk wasn’t all sunshine and smiles. She did weigh in on an ongoing debate about whether the now defunct US Information Agency (USIA) should be resurrected to house a revamped PD bureaucracy. Such calls have been heard ever since President Bill Clinton decided to fold USIA into the State Department in 1999. More recently, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested that a new, USIA-esque “21st century agency for global communications” be created.

Graffy, on the other hand, was alarmed by calls for revival of USIA, as she felt USIA kept PD activities “too separate from the policy community.” Graffy felt that even the hybrid model of a new quasi-independent entity responsible for PD activities, such as that recommended by the CSIS Commission on Smart Power’s recent report, “would pull public diplomacy away from the power base of US foreign policy and diminish its influence.”

However Tony Blankley’s presentation made a key point about the potential rearrangement of the PD infrastructure. He remarked: “We must be honest with ourselves. To face the kind of danger we’re facing and to marshal the resources that we [need], we feel so constrained by current mentalities that all we can do—with the best of our intentions—is to shift one little category of our bureaucracy form point A to point B on the chart. That’s not going to solve the problem.” He suggested that rather than incrementally changing the bureaucracies that encapsulate the US’ PD activities: “We need to think much more radically.” (If you agree with Blankley’s point, perhaps you’d like to join the Tony Blankly fan club).

We’ll look forward to future discussions on the future of PD as the year-long Heritage project unfolds.

Today brought the news that Barack Obama had won the vote among registered overseas Democrats, beating Hillary Clinton 65% to 32%.  Some 22,000 overseas Americans in 164 countries took part in the week-long vote.

However, following the Democrats’ usual rules that award convention delegates proportionately, Obama was awarded only 2.5 delegates to Clinton’s 2.0.

Another 2.5 delegate votes will be determined at a Democrats Abroad convention, and yet another 4 delegates are superdelegates, presumably undeclared.

With every single delegate on the Democratic side strongly contested by the Clinton and Obama camps, these relatively small totals will get attention in the coming weeks.

But the reason for noting this here, on this blog, is the spin that Democrats Abroad gives to the vote:

“With the U.S. image so badly damaged by the present Administration, American Democrats living overseas were eager to have their voices heard,” said Christine Schon Marques, International Chair of Democrats Abroad in Geneva.  “Across the board we saw an enormous diversity in participation, including many first-time voters.”

Whether the frayed image of the United States is added motivation for overseas Americans to vote is, as yet, unproven.  The Republican Party awards no delegates to its members overseas; they vote by mail in individual state primaries.

Still, one might at least hope that the sight of so many Americans taking part in the political process will give foreigners a more positive view of American democracy.

Over 300 Academics and policy-makers from all over the world gathered to attend the Brookings Institution-sponsored US-Islamic World Forum  in Doha, Qatar on Monday.

(Karen Hughes at the 2006 US-Islamic World Forum)

Agence France Presse reported that many of the Muslim delegates in attendance said they hoped to see Obama win the Democratic nomination and become the next US President.

“‘I would like to see Obama become president of America because he champions ‘change and hope’, which we Muslims need as much as the Americans do,’ Islamic television preacher Amr Khaled told AFP.

‘The Indonesian people would love to see a (US) president who has studied at an elementary school in Jakarta,’ Din Syamsuddin, chairman of Muhammadiyah, one of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisations, told AFP in a reference to Obama.

But Dhiya Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on terrorist groups, warned that US policy under the next president would be ‘a continuation of current policies, though in a less extreme way than the conservative Republican administration’. The Bush administration has ‘planted landmines everywhere’ for its successor, making it impossible for the next president to suddenly reverse course, Rashwan said…The Bush administration has also ‘imposed phobia’ on the Americans, something US politicians will find difficult to change, Rashwan added.

‘If the Democrats win, they will be very sensitive to the American image… The American image has to improve because it can’t get worse,’ said Mehran Kamrava, a political science professor at the Qatar branch of Georgetown University.

‘But I don’t think they (future administration) will work hard for a rapprochement with the Islamic world because Muslims are not a strong voice,’ he added.”

For more on the forum, hereis Amb. Marc Ginsberg’s journal of his experiences there. The Gulf Times of Qatar published this piece of reporting.

We know a few things already about how foreign audiences regard the U.S. election race. In Ireland and Kenya, we know that there’s newfound pride in the fact that Obama has roots that can be traced to these two countries. McCain and Hillary Clinton and even Mike Huckabee have their foreign admirers, but not generally based on their ancestry.

What makes Obama different to American voters also makes him different when it comes to those watching the U.S. campaign from afar. That quality may be charisma, which the New York Times ruminated on at length yesterday. Or it may be race. After all, the world is used to female heads of state and government — from India to Israel, Ukraine to Chile, Germany to Liberia.  But where else have we seen such a racial threshold being crossed?

This novelty was clearly highlighted today during President George Bush’s visit to Africa — after Bill Clinton, the second American president to visit sub-Saharan Africa while in office. As CNN and others reported, Bush is receiving a very warm welcome throughout his tour, and has gotten deserved praise for the Administration’s HIV assistance. Still, today in Tanzania, as elsewhere, thoughts were never very far from Obama’s remarkable campaign.  See CNN’s photo below.

You might say it’s the luck of the Kenyan Irish.

Last week Anthony Barnett, the British social entrepreneur and political comentarist, recently authored an article on the webzine he founded, Open Democracy.net, exploring Senator Barak Obama’s campaign.

If you are not familiar with OpenDemocracy, I highly reccomend browsing through its pages. It is a London-based webzine/opinion forum that offers “stimulating, critical analysis, promoting dialogue and debate on issues of global importance and linking citizens from around the world.” Some of the leading Euoprean thinkers publish their opinion here.
In “Taking Obama Seriously” Barnett does, in fact, take the US Senator very seriously. The 7,000-word essay explores just about every aspect of his campaign from its inception to the present, document throughout with links to other expert commentaries.

The article offers a window into how the US presidential primary is seen through a “free-thinking” British academic’s eyes. It is not surprsing that Obama’s vote against the war in Iraq in 2003 wins him a large amount of respect from Barnett, as much of the British intellectual community was also against the war.

Open Democracy.net also hosts a few other articles about the US Presidential candidates.  This article, writen by a black American living in France, uses a discussion about Obama’s race as an entry into a critique about race relations in  France. Here is an interesting interpretation of the US primaries through the eyes of Godfrey Hodgson, a British-born America-phile.

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain authored an article in the November/December 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs titled “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom” that reveals his campaign’s foreign policy platform.

Here is a quick summary of his article:

“America needs a president who can revitalize the country’s purpose and standing in the world and defeat terrorist adversaries who threaten liberty at home and abroad. There is an enormous amount to do. The next U.S. president must be ready to show America and the world that this country’s best days are yet to come and be ready to establish an enduring peace based on freedom.”

McCain has been on the Senate Armed Forces Committee for the last 21 years, so his views on foreign affairs are by no means undefined. Yet the article reveals a solid and more contemporary plan for how the US would orient itself to the world if he were in charge. Here is an excerpt from that article that particularly demonstrates how he sees America’s relationship with the world during his potential presidency:

“As president, I will seek the widest possible circle of allies through the League of Democracies, NATO, the UN, and the Organization of American States. During President Ronald Reagan’s deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and President George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War, the United States was joined by vast coalitions despite considerable opposition to American policies among foreign publics. These alliances came about because America had carefully cultivated relationships and shared values with its friends abroad. Working multilaterally can be a frustrating experience, but approaching problems with allies works far better than facing problems alone.”

A statement like sends an important signal to foreign governments that America might turn a more multilateral cheek under his potential administration.

His final paragraph is also revealing of his worldview:

“…The protection and promotion of the democratic ideal, at home and abroad, will be the surest source of security and peace for the century that lies before us. The next U.S. president must be ready to lead, ready to show America and the world that this country’s best days are yet to come, and ready to establish an enduring peace based on freedom that can safeguard American security for the rest of the twenty-first century. I am ready.”

McCain discussed this article in an on-camera interview with Roger Simon on Pajamas Media. A few highlights from that interview are worth mentioning. I regards to hunting down Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan–action the Bush administration has not ruled out–McCain said “the worst thing you can do is announce that you are going to invade Pakistan to rid it of Al Qaeda… Too often we threaten people. Let’s get quiet, let’s figure out the most effective ways of addressing what is the most significant threat to our troops and those of our allies.”

It is also interesting to note that in the interview McCain characterized his international outlook as idealistic: “I would admit to being an idealist… tempered by a practical view of things, too.” In the language of international relations theory, idealism is often juxtaposed with realism, a doctrine more akin to a cold war mentality where no nation should be trusted and international cooperation is not seen to be desirable. McCain feels he must “admit” to being an idealist because a common criticism of political idealists is that they tend to be naive about security threats–hence his qualification that practical views must be incorporated into his outlook as well.

McCain continued on his idealistic note when he spoke in the interview of setting up what he calls a “league of democracies,” an informal body of like minded democratic nations that would act together internationally.  On the United Nations McCain remarked: “I respect the UN, but we need to respect the limitations of the UN. The are good at peace keeping, not a peace making.”

We shall see how his foreign policy platform continues to develop as the debates and primaries continue. In the meantime, one reporter from the Ledger DC Journal reviews McCain’s policy statement published in Foreign Affairs, and queries whether his internationalist colors will shine through his upcoming vote on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea up for ratification in the US Senate.