Public Diplomacy

The former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV penned an endorsement for Hillary Clinton in today’s Baltimore Sun.  He officially came out in favor of the New York Senator in July of 2007. But the column is likely a byproduct of Clinton’s need for a boost in the very close primary races, and Wilson’s penchant writing controversial op-eds.

As you may recall, the op-ed he authored for the New York Times, titled, ”What I Didn’t Find in Africa”, published in four months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq concluded that: “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

The week after the article’s publication, veteran journalist Robert Novak disclosed Wilson’s wife’s, classified covert CIA identity as “Valerie Plame” in his syndicated Washington Post column. Wilson and others alleged that the disclosurewas part of the Bush administration’s attempts to discredit his report on his trip to Africa and the NYT op-ed describing his findings because they did not support the government’s rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Based on his confrontation with the Bush administration it does not come as a surprise that he is deciding between the two Democratic candidates (in fact, he endorsed Democratic Candidate John Kerry in the last Presidential election). In the Sun op-ed he throws his support behind Senator Clinton: ”Sen. Hillary Clinton is one of the few who fully understood the stakes in that battle. Time and again, she reached out to my wife - outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson - and me to remind us that as painful as the attacks were, we simply could not allow ourselves to be driven from the public square by bullying. Mrs. Clinton knew from experience, having spent the better part of the past 20 years fighting the Republican attack machine. She is a fighter.”

In regards to Senator Obama Wilson remarks: “Barack Obama claims to represent the future, but it should be increasingly evident that he is not the man for this moment, especially with Mr. McCain’s arrival. We’ve seen a preview of that contest already. It was a TKO.”

David Ignatius, columnist for the Washington Post, offered an interesting perspective on foreign attitudes in the wake of Super Tuesday.   As he put it:

As I travel, I sense that the world has a big stake in what’s going to happen [in the U.S. elections].  I’ve never seen people as angry at the United States as they are now.  In a sense, this is our biggest national security problem…

You can listen here to his remarks, in their entirety, before the San Francisco World Affairs Council.

The U.S. State Department regularly brings groups of foreign journalists to the United States on study tours. At any time of year, in any year, there’s a lot to study in the U.S., and these visits are among the State Department’s more successful public diplomacy activities. But this year, bringing a group of journalists to the U.S. on Super Tuesday is a can’t miss enterprise.

Last week, I met in San Francisco with one such group of 21 foreign journalists — all first-time visitors to the U.S. They came from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. We talked about the primaries that had just taken place and I remarked on Senator Obama’s failure to gain support among Latino voters. It appeared that there was a new ethnic divide. White Americans easily voted for an African-American on Super Tuesday, but Latino Americans did not.

This observation had an interesting resonance with the Latin American journalists in the group. (Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico were among the countries represented.) “The same thing happens in our countries,” one of the journalists noted. Could it be that the U.S. experience this year could help blacks break barriers throughout the hemisphere?

Later that day, four of the journalists spoke to a gathering hosted by the Institute of International Education, moderated by former Clinton Ambassador to Luxembourg James Hormel. You can hear the program and judge the impact yourself. I might mention that the hundred or so Americans in the audience were fascinated by the foreign journalists’ observations — an indication of the influence that such visits have on the host country as well.

Click here to listen to the event

Last Thursday, Public Radio International broadcast (or click here) a very interesting discussion of the overseas reaction to the Super Tuesday primaries.

National Public Radio’s Tom Reagan also gathered some reporting on the US election in foreign countries on NPR’s blog.

Here are a few others to build on it. A London Times analysis calls super Tuesday’s results “not super decisive.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gathered its viewers opinions on the Super Tuesday results.

Agence France Presse reported from Jakarta, Indonesia–Barak Obama’s childhood home–on the ex-patriot community’s absentee voting habits.

And finally, for a look at the inverse relationship, take a look at this New York Times article on US domestic ethnic media’s portrayal of the super Tuesday primaries.

Super Tuesday brought a wave a foreign commentary, most of it positive, on the U.S. campaign and candidates.  One of the most interesting was Timothy Garton Ash’s piece in The Guardian.  For Garton Ash, the remarkable degree of world-wide attention to the U.S. electoral showdown pointed out a lack of such attention to U.N. and other international institutions.

During the run-up to a U.S. Presidential election, millions of Americans become deeply involved in the political process, and millions more follow the campaign in the U.S. mass media.

So complete is the U.S. focus on its election that it is easy to overlook the impact that this major event has on world opinion.

In this blog, we collect and analyze statements by U.S. Presidential candidates on world opinion, and world opinion on the U.S. elections. We are interested in how the candidates and their policies are viewed by the world’s publics and how the candidates are communicating — or planning to — with the world.

“U.S. Elections and the World” will identify and collect in one place Web-based commentary and analysis of the public diplomacy dimension of the U.S. Presidential elections. Included here will also be statements by the candidates and their advisors concerning U.S. public diplomacy, statements by them directed at foreign audiences, as well as foreign opinion on the U.S. elections and candidates. Comments and observations from prominent international non-governmental organizations will also be included here.

Naturally, we welcome your comments.

Those following these topics – even casually – know that one of the challenges facing the next U.S. President is to improve foreign public opinion of the United States and the U.S. Administration. This concerns both the policies themselves and how they are presented. In the course of the long U.S. election campaign, the candidates have many opportunities to articulate their views of how they would respond both in terms of policy formulation and presentation. Our bloggers will be following these statements and how the world responds.

As I write this, the 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy is getting underway in Germany. John McCain, the all-but-certain Republican nominee, had planned to attend, but cancelled in order to campaign here in the United States. Had he attended, his remarks would have been specifically directed at world opinion as well as an audience back home. Non-U.S. media would have given considerable attention to remarks.

Not to worry — there will be many more opportunities for interaction between the candidates, their campaigns, and world audiences. And we look forward to highlighting them for you here.