Public Diplomacy

Last week I pointed out an article authored by a British academic, addressing the British public about the errs of voting for John McCain, if Britons were to take to the American polls.

Also last week a French academic authored an article about the US Presidential candidates, this time addressing the American public on which candidate Europeans want to see in the Oval Office.

The author is Dominique Moisi, founder and senior adviser at the French Institute for International Relationsand currently a professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw.

Moisi has great things to say about all three candidates:

“The human and intellectual qualities of the three remaining candidates are even viewed with some envy on this side of the Atlantic, where you can hear statements such as: “Could we borrow just one of your candidates?” Many Europeans feel all three candidates are superb, and that, contrast to previous elections, America is suffering from an embarrassment of riches.”

He briefly explains how Europeans’ support for the candidates breaks down: ”For these Europeans [who believe in the American ‘model,’]  Barack Obama campaigning under the banner of “hope,” is the ideal choice to restore, as if by magic, America’s soft power. After all, he himself incarnates the American dream.

But some Europeans prefer Hillary Clinton or even John McCain, because they are apprehensive about the consequences for America’s European partners of a more restrained and less experienced president. They worry about not only competence, but also the old trans-Atlantic issue of “burden sharing.” The implicit question behind some European reservations about Obama may be formulated in one question: “Will we have to do more in Afghanistan and beyond?”

In his conclusion Moisi comes back to Obama: “The best America for Europe and the world is a confident America, one that sheds its culture of fear and rediscovers the roots of its culture of hope. This is Obama’s America.”

Moisi has been an Obama-bakcer from the beginning; back in January he authored an article titled “Vote Barack Obama a global candidate for a global age.”

Moisi also seems quite comfortable describing France and the United States to each other. In 1998 he authoredan interesting article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Trouble with France.” Here’s the summary:

“The French always seem to be opposing the United States on some issue or other. They coddle Saddam Hussein and denounce American “cultural imperialism.” Why is France so difficult to deal with? It is, quite simply, in a bad mood, unsure of its place and status in a new world. The French are jealous of America, which seems to run the world; afraid of globalization, which threatens to erode their culture; and ambivalent about European unification, which might drown out their voice. France must meet these challenges while struggling with a cumbersome statist economy and a rising extreme right. To do it all, France must transcend itself.”

For an update on how Moisi views France’s progress transcending itself, read this article he authored for the Guardian.

In this article, Moisi comments on the significance of the relatively new French President’s election for French foreign policy: “Sarkozy’s victory will not make a huge difference for the world beyond Europe. While [former French President] Chirac took a keen interest in world affairs, Sarkozy, by both inclination and political calculus, will concentrate, at least initially - and in the absence of a major international crisis - on internal matters. Even in transatlantic relations, change will be more a matter of style than content.”

Compared to the article Moisi’s authored last week, he has much higher expectations for the American than the French President. After declaring that the US is “Obama’s nation,” he emphasizes:  ”Of course the greater your expectations are, the greater the risk of disappointment. But, after eight years of America’s self-imposed isolation under Bush, it is a risk worth taking.”

Foreign Policy In Focus, a progressive think tank based in Washington DC, published a useful article synthesizing the three US Presidential candidates positions on key foreign policy issues.

The author is himself an advocate for a Presidential candidate that is engaged in foreign relations. Howard Salter is the Director of External Relations at Citizens for Global Solutions, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington with a corresponding Political Action Committee (PAC)  that lobbies the government for greater international cooperation. The PAC specifically works to elect federal candidates who support “building effective democratic global institutions that will apply the rule of law while respecting the diversity and autonomy of national and local communities.”

So these days, I would imagine they are quite busy.

A handy resource the PAC publishes is the results of a Congressional Candidate Questionnaire they circulate around Capitol Hill each election year. The questionnaire asks those running for office to state their position on a variety of international issues: global health, climate change, peacekeeping, etc.

In the 2008 the PAC sent the survey to the three presidential candidates. Two have responded, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama; Senator McCain has yet to complete the survey.

I highly recommend reading Salter’s analysis. It covers the three candidates’ positions on an array of key foreign polcy issues: diplomacy vs. unilateralism, the conflict in Darfur, torture and Guantanamo Bay, US-UN relations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and nuclear proliferation.

In his conclusion, Salter surprisingly doesn’t endorse any specific candidate, rather he appears hopeful about each of the candidates’ potential impact on the US’ role in the world:

(more…)

The war in Iraq has grown increasingly unpopular at home, and it continues to be unpopular abroad. [The BBC World Service broadcast a fantastic documentary about how the US-lead war in Iraq changed the world’s mind on the US].

So what do the US Presidential candidates propose to do about it? Spencer Ackerman investigated this question with a coterie of Obama’s foreign policy advisors for an in-depth article published this week in The American Prospect magazine. Here’s the line-up of Obama foreign policy advisors:

“[They] come from diverse backgrounds. They are former aides to Democratic mandarins like Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton (Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, respectively); veterans of the Clinton administration’s left flank ([Anthony] Tony Lake and Susan Rice); a human-rights advocate who helped write the Army’s and Marine Corps’ much-lauded counterinsurgency field manual (Sarah Sewall); a retired general who helped run the air war during the invasion of Iraq (Scott Gration); and a former journalist who revolutionized the study of U.S. foreign policy (Samantha Power). Yet they form a committed, intellectually coherent, and surprisingly united foreign-affairs team. (Shortly before this piece went to press, Power resigned from the campaign after making an intemperate remark to a reporter.)”

And here’s Ackerman’s executive summary on his interviews with these advisors: “They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.”

I highly recommend reading the full article. As Ackerman reminds us, it’s important to pay attention to who the Presidential candidate choose as his/her foreign policy advisors: “When considering any presidential hopeful’s foreign-policy promises, it’s important to remember that what candidates say is, at best, an imperfect guide to their actions in office. What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate’s roster of advisers.”

If you’ve ever heard a State Department briefing, or briefing by any other foreign ministry, you probably don’t think of foreign policy as an exercise in “straight talk.” Yet there was John McCain in Los Angeles the other day, driving his “Straight Talk Express” right down the middle of the road. The word “Bush” was not uttered, neither was “conservative” nor “Reagan.” Those words might have given the speech a more aggressive or ideological tone. In fact, there were no sharp right turns at all, except when discussing expelling Russia from the G8, which the Republican candidate said would be just punishment for “Russia’s nuclear blackmail and cyber attacks.” In short, McCain said he was an idealist, but a realistic one. James Baker, the savvy ex Secretary of State, used a slightly different formulation in describing the man he now advises on foreign policy: “John is what I think I am, a principled pragmatist…He prefers to get things done rather than to insist on ideological purity.”

Accordingly, McCain’s Los Angeles speech was meant to position him as a foreign affairs leader, but not a unilateralist. He wants to support democracy and promises, quoting the Declaration of Independence, to show “a decent respect for the opinion of Mankind.” He supports a Western Hemispheric free trade zone. And, most of all, he says he believes that the U.S. has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq until the country is stable.

Fighting “radical Islamic extremism” remains for McCain “the transcendent challenge of our time,” but one that requires more consultation with U.S. allies.

And it is precisely McCain’s stated willingness to discuss with friends and allies and to listen to them that ably casts McCain as a proponent of U.S. public diplomacy:

Prevailing in this struggle will require far more than military force. It will require the use of all elements of our national power: public diplomacy; development assistance; law enforcement training; expansion of economic opportunity; and robust intelligence capabilities. I have called for major changes in how our government faces the challenge of radical Islamic extremism by much greater resources for and integration of civilian efforts to prevent conflict and to address post-conflict challenges. Our goal must be to win the “hearts and minds” of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who do not want their future controlled by a minority of violent extremists. In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.

All this straight talk and public diplomacy did not cover some of the most troubling questions, such as: How does a nation in recession continue to pay a $12 billion a month Iraq war bill that it handles by borrowing from countries that disagree with the war?

Postscripts:

In my Tuesday post, I commented on Bush’s forthcoming travel to Europe. The White House has announced since then that Bush will travel to Sochi at the end of the trip for a separate bilateral with Putin on the anti-missile radar dispute. Perhaps the trip could lead to a tangible breakthrough after all.

By the way, both the Obama and the McCain campaigns have hit upon a fund-raising device: give the campaign money and win the chance to have some face time with the candidate! The winner of the Obama raffle gets to attend a small dinner with Barack; the winner of the McCain contest gets to join the candidate on — you guessed it — the “Straight Talk Express.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an interesting summary of how the world’s regions seem to feel about Hillary, Obama and McCain. That Barack Obama would be popular in Africa, Indonesia and the Mideast is perhaps no surprise. But he also appears to be quite popular in Europe, where I’m writing from this week. On the other hand, in Italy, my informal sampling of opinion showed that Hillary had her supporters as well — including among men. One told me he preferred her over Obama because “she has more scars” — more experience.

So far, despite his travels, John McCain doesn’t seem to have captured the popular imagination abroad. With the Republican contest now ended, McCain gets less coverage in the United States and, correspondingly, less coverage abroad. In Southeast Europe, Clinton’s admission that she exaggerated the danger she faced when she visited Bosnia in 1996, provoked unflattering news stories. The occasional story about John McCain’s shortcomings does not resonate much overseas. Perhaps this is because the U.S. media’s coverage is generally positive (see Neal Gabler’s piece in the NYT). For whatever reason, John McCain is more a cipher to the public — at least here in Europe.

The Financial Times published an op-ed by Anatol Lieven, a British academic (who sidelines as an American think-tank-er), titled “Why we should fear a McCain presidency.” In the piece, Lieven schools his British compatriots on the danger that “a natural incendiary” like Republican Presidential candidate John McCain poses to trans-Atlantic relations.

Leiven explains: “The problem that Mr McCain poses stems from his ideology, his policies and above all his personality. His ideology, like that of his chief advisers, isneo-conservative. In the past, Mr McCain was considered to be an old-style conservative realist. Today, the role of the realists on his team is merely decorative.”

Leiven aims for straight for his fellow Briton’s sensibilities when targeting McCain’s temper as an especially damaging element of his persona. “Mr McCain’s policies would not be so worrying were it not for his notorious quickness to fury in the face of perceived insults to himself or his country. Even Thad Cochran, a fellow Republican senator, has said: “I certainly know no other president since I’ve been here who’s had a temperament like that.”

In his conclusion he rallies his compatriots to get scared… get very scared over the next nine months: “Not just US voters, but European governments, should use the next nine months to ponder the consequences if Mr McCain is elected and how they could either prevent a McCain administration from pursuing pyromaniac policies or, if necessary, protect Europe from the ensuing conflagrations.”

If the the British public buys into Leivin’s argument, they must now be thinking: “If President Bush turned Tony Blair into his “lap dog,” just imagine what McCain could to do Gordon Brown…”

ZAGREB — President Bush leaves for Europe in a few days. Likely one of the last foreign trips of his Presidency, Bush’s five-day visit to Kiev, Bucharest, and Zagreb offers him a chance to work on his image and his legacy — each in bad repair. The timing is both good and bad.

First the good: The NATO Summit in Bucharest, centerpiece of his trip, is the largest meeting ever of NATO heads of state and government, and comes with the kind of “visuals” that White House media relations staffers love: “group photos” of international statesmen with the U.S. President at the center, handshakes across conference tables, impressive dinners, exotic backdrops, and plenty of symbols of U.S. authority and prestige. He also visits Ukraine, a possible future member of the alliance, and Croatia, scheduled to receive a formal invitation to join NATO during the summit. Both of these countries have fresh memories of threats to their security (Ukraine in relation to Russia, Croatia in relation to Serbia), and therefore a broadly welcoming attitude toward NATO and the United States.

So far, so good. The less than favorable aspect to the trip’s timing lies in the still-rancorous dispute between Greece and Macedonia — that is, between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (its official name at the UN). Macedonia is another would-be NATO member and is expecting a formal invitation to join. But Greece adamantly opposes allowing the tiny Balkan state to have the same name as Greece’s northernmost province. Inexplicably, this long-standing objection has been allowed to fester during the lengthy process of Macedonia’s preparation for admission to NATO. Barring a last minute breakthrough, this unresolved dispute over nomenclature makes the alliance seem inept or careless in its Summit preparations.

Another awkward but much more substantive issue is Afghanistan. The open-ended deployment of US and NATO forces to Afghanistan is the alliance’s first real “out of area” challenge and it is far from clear that it is going well. Germany, for example, has opposed sending its troops from the relatively secure areas of northern Afghanistan to the dangerous areas of the south, where US, British and Canadian forces are in daily and deadly contact with Taliban fighters.

This conflict tends to get relatively little coverage in the US press but it is, in fact, the closest thing to a front line in the fight with armed Islamic terrorists. Now, because of the disagreement within NATO over burden sharing, this is a troubling portent for the alliance’s future.

As Nicholas Burns, the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and former US Ambassador to NATO, put it last month:

NATO has now had to face an existential crisis of sorts. We are fighting in Kandahar, Oruzgan, in Helmand and Paktia provinces, United States military forces, with the Dutch and the Canadians and the British and the Estonians and the Romanians. But most of the other NATO allies are deployed to the west and to the north. When we have a firefight, as we did, a major firefight with the Taliban in September, and need tactical reinforcements, it’s incumbent upon the NATO allies to come to the support of those NATO allies engaged in the combat. That did not happen in September. And too many of our allies have said that they’re quite willing to be garrison troops in the northern and western parts of the country that are relatively quiet and peaceful, but not willing to come down to where the Taliban is crossing the border in great numbers and where al Qaeda is also taking on the American, Afghan, and those NATO allied forces that I named.

This is fairly ominous language and signals that, within NATO, consensus on Afghanistan is at risk.
Of course, having a fixed date well in advance of a Summit can serve the useful purpose of being a deadline by which solutions to knotty problems must be achieved. So we may find that the seemingly esoteric problem of Macedonia’s name and the existential problem of NATO’s deployments in Afghanistan will be solved, after all, before the 26 leaders meet in Bucharest late next week. (more…)

As many of your know, Senator Obama gave a major campaign speech last week on the subject of race in the U.S.

Public Radio International’s The World program hosted a panel of international journalists based in Washington to discuss how their publics’ view race in America.

It is an interesting segment: listen. 

The journalists include Ewen MacAskill with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Constance Ikokwu with the Nigerian newspaper ThisDay, and Hisham Melhem of the Arabic satellite news channel, al-Arabiya.

Melhem said that because, unfortunately, racism is alive and well in the Arab world, this issue is of great interest. Therefore, he reported that Obama’s speech was widely-covered in the Middle East. He said Obama’s “bold” speech had the effect of ”elevate[ing] the discussion to a higher plane.”

Ikokwu hoped that Americans learn something from Obama’s life and that the discussion of race would become more open in the U.S. from now on.

McAskill spoke about a stereotype in the UK that Americans are more prejudiced than they are–which he felt not to be true. While he felt Obama’s speech was strong, and “grown-up” speech, he questioned whether it would resonate with Americans across the U.S.

Last year 22-year old Harvard graduate Amar Bakshi embarked on a world tour that was a bit different than the usual post-college international tour d’hostel. His globe trekking had a specific mission: Find out what the world thinks about the United States.

(Bakshi’s Itinerary)

Armed with a digit camera, a microphone and a laptop, Bakshi travelled extensively through four different continents talking with regular folks on the street, recording his encounters and then blogging about them on the Washington Post/Newsweek’s global blog Post Global.

Bakshi recently returned to the US and spoke about his experiences with NPR’s Bob Garfield. He started the interview by sharing some critiques of current US’ public diplomacy efforts.

“One problem that the United States has in terms of its public diplomacy efforts is it tries very hard to sell ideals that I think are already fairly popular – freedom, democracy, etc. – but have been corrupted by actions, for example, supporting Saudi Arabia or the kind of debacle going on in Iraq. So more salesmanship I don’t think is what the United States needs… I think we need to reconceive how we’re doing public diplomacy so it’s more about dialog and less about branding and salesmanship”

Next he describes four basic categories into which he can place most of his interviewees’ anti-American attitudes. While Bakshi’s encounters shouldn’t be considered representative of all residents in each country he visited, since his polls were informal and not scientifically conducted, he did forge some general patterns of public opinion cutting across all the countries he visited.

(Amar Bakshi, as pictured on his My Space page)

He calls these four patterns, or categories of Anti-American attitudes among foreign audiences fit into four general categories: “liberal,” “social”, “sovereign” and “radical.” During the interview Bakshi explains:

• “Liberal is Americans don’t live up to their own values. We support torture even though we say we don’t. You hear this a lot in England.
  
• Social is Americans don’t take care of their poor. They’re too hyper-capitalist. And people will turn to Scandinavian democracies rather than American ones, because they say there’s a better social safety net.
  
• Sovereign is, you know, America’s impinging upon our right to self-governance. You hear this from Zimbabwe to Venezuela as populist leaders try to drum up a foreign enemy to justify their strong rule.
  
• And then radical is the toughest one to define, but it’s basically everything about America is antithetical to who you are and what you want to be. Islam is a cohesive way of life. America’s too afraid of it. Therefore it wages a war against Islam.”

His point: The shift from the first three categories towards that final one are what we should be worried about.

Bakshi’s first characterization of anti-American attitudes echoes those found by global public opinion researcher Steven Kull, who reported on the issue to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last year. During his testimony Kull noted: “In focus groups that I have conducted throughout the world, the most common complaint I hear is not about American values but that the US is being hypocritical; that it is not living up to its values…” Kull uses polling date to demonstrate that “of late there has been a growing perception that the US is not living up to its principles.”

Sadly, the “radical” category of Anti-Americanism is also supported by scientifically conducted public opinion polls as well. A study conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org last April found that among the four Muslim publics polled, Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia, on average 79% believe that it is a goal of the US to “weaken and divide Islam.”

For a much longer list of reasons to be critical of America, I highly, highly recommend listening to this listen presentation by Lord Maurice Saatchi at the London School of Economics this past January. Titled “Sleeping Beauty: Awakening the American Dream,“ Saatchi’s lecture investigates why accusations against the US have “spread into a global phenomenon, crossing boarders, classes, religions, and generations.” I lost track after his 12^th accusation, but all are eloquently stated, points well taken and worthy of our—the PD watchers as well as US policy-makers’ attention.

Middle East Online (and Al Jazeera magazine subsequently) published an intriguing article by Rima Merhi, a Lebanese human rights activist and research fellow at the Middle East Institute working on Arab media outreach to American public opinion. Based on the readership of the two publications, it is safe to assume that Mehri is speaking to primarily an Arab audience. But in her article she offers the Arab, Israeli and American publics important advice about turning a new leaf in their relations upon the election of a new US President.

She leads off:

“Most Arab understanding of American foreign policy begins and ends with one statement: “Republican or Democrat, this election or past elections, what difference does it make? The Arab vote will end up in the garbage, and American foreign policy will always be “pro-Israeli”…  

…American and Israeli ignorance of diverse Arab cultures, history, politics, allows them to deal with Arabs or “people of the Middle East” as one package and one that carries “terrorist” connotations if not an explicit “terrorist” label.”

Merhi turns the tables on her readers, and asks them to consider the consequences of lumping a diverse Jewish global community into one category:

“…Many Arabs do not even know the difference between a “Jew”, “Israeli”, and “Extremist”. Whereas Jews can hold any nationality, Israelis hold Israeli citizenship and include some Palestinians, and extremists may be Jews or Israelis and many times represent the voice of the Likud party in Israel as opposed to the more moderate Labor party….Arabs need to move beyond an agenda that highlights the failures of Israel as they perceive them, towards an agenda that promotes human rights, empowers Arab youth, and builds more democratic institutions. These goals ought to form the foundations of any Arab dialogue that will unify Arab countries in the region.”

Mehri notes that the US Presidential elections have been closely followed in Israel, but not in the Arab world. She explains:

“Many Arabs would be surprised to learn that a US presidential candidate with promising potential for winning the US elections is both non white and son of a Muslim who used to live in Indonesia: Barack Hussein Obama is perceived by many as the best candidate for leading change in foreign policy in the Middle East.”

Side note: Some Americans might agree that this is one of the few occasions in which it is advantageous to mention Senator Obama’s middle name in a public forum.

Most importantly, Merhi gives sound advice to both her Arab readers and the voting American public:

“Arabs need to know that according to recent polls (Gallup), 80% of Americans want to see a change in American foreign policy. In general, Arabs fail to differentiate between the American people and the American administration…

..By the same token, if the Americans do not take the time to think beyond their borders and accept to elect officials who are not clear about a foreign policy agenda for the Middle East, they have themselves to partially blame for tragic events like September 11. The American public needs to pressure US presidential candidates to bring fresh ideas to the table.”

Her final message gives advice for all three publics:

“Arabs, Israelis, and Americans need to start listening and talking in a language that overcomes biases and stereotypes. The “Arab voice” and the “Jewish voice” represent two sides of the same coin, and one that must ultimately bridge social and economic divides and inequalities, protect human dignity and life, give hope to the youth, and build more stable democratic institutions in the Middle East. The US administration doesn’t have to an honest or impartial broker, but it needs to be an effective intermediary between Arabs and Israelis.”