American Quarterly

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.

Our strategy must be comprehensive, because the challenge we face is greater and more complex than the threat. The victory of freedom in the Cold War was won only when the West remembered that values and security cannot be separated. The values of freedom and democracy—as much, if not more, than economic power and military might—won the Cold War. And those same values will lead us to victory in the war on terror.

On October 14, 2001, President George W. Bush complained at a prime-time press conference, "I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I, like most Americans, I just can't believe it, because I know how good we are."³ The president's plaintive remark, made only a month after a global outpouring of sympathy for the United States but only a week since American bombs had started falling upon Afghanistan, captured a tension between values and security that is at the heart of the U.S. pursuit of the "war on terror." Strategic goals of "national security" might be achieved with military force, but would the goal of spreading "freedom, democracy, and free enterprise" be assured or jeopardized by the pursuit of military projects?⁴ This remains a crucial question for the United States as it seeks to extend the "unipolar moment" of global hegemony in which it has unprecedented power. It is also the defining question in the regeneration of public diplomacy as a strategic tool of U.S. national security.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ignited media discussions about the merits and failings of American public diplomacy and hastened a political review of its role in the planning and execution of foreign policy. U.S. Congressman Henry Hyde, chair of the House International Relations Committee, underlined this role in introducing the Freedom Promotion Act of 2002: [End Page 309] "Public diplomacy—which consists of systematic efforts to communicate not with foreign governments but with the people themselves—has a central role to play in the task of making the world safer for the just interests of the United States, its citizens, and its allies."⁵ In the last few years, U.S. public diplomacy has undergone intensive reorganization and retooling as it takes on a more prominent propaganda role in the efforts to win the "hearts and minds" of foreign publics.

This is not a new role, for the emergent ideas and activities of public diplomacy as the "soft power" wing of American foreign policy have notable historical prefigurations in U.S. international relations. In this essay we situate the history of the cold war paradigm of U.S. public diplomacy within the broader framework of "political warfare" that combines overt and covert forms of information management.⁶ However, there are distinctive features to the "new public diplomacy" within both domestic and international contexts of the contemporary American imperium. It operates in a conflicted space of power and value that is a crucial theater of strategic operations for the renewal of American hegemony within a transformed global order. We consider the relation of this new diplomacy to the broader pursuit of political warfare by the state in its efforts to transform material preponderance (in terms of financial, military, and information capital) into effective political outcomes across the globe. In a post-9/11 context, we argue, public diplomacy functions not simply as a tool of national security, but also as a component of U.S. efforts to manage the emerging formation of a neoliberal empire.

The term "public diplomacy" was coined by academics at Tufts University in the mid-1960s to "describe the whole...