The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy

In the summer of 2005, after my brother returned from Iraq, after Pope John Paul II had died and a massacring tide washed across Indonesia, and after angry young men killed dozens with explosives in London and Madrid, before Katrina and Rita, before the Surge and the financial crisis and the bailout and before Haiti and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and the second Surge, the Ground Zero Mosque, the Tea Party the Great Recession and health care reform, I stood outside a bar in Luxembourg City late one night and argued with a Norwegian about America.

When the American president speaks, he talks to the world. On September 18, 2001, the president told the world what had just then happened that changed everything and who had done it and why. And he said what we would do.

Holes gaped black through smashed concrete of the vacant Interior Ministry building on Kneza Miloša in Belgrade, Serbia, just blocks from the US Embassy. My Bradt guidebook aptly described this delimited destruction as the seeming result of a targeted earthquake. It was just some of the more recent history in evidence and a physical calamity in dark contrast with the rest of the city, bright and teeming with life.

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s best Republican Guard unit, the al-Nida Division, dismantled itself. An armored division of 13,000 men, fully equipped with 500 tanks and vehicles, the unit was deployed to defend the eastern approaches of Baghdad against the coalition and to crush the expected Shiite rising in its wake. Under Saddam Hussein’s paranoid and sclerotic leadership, units like this were in fact rare and treated cynically. Most regular units were equipped and manned only on paper, and those few elite formations like al-Nida that were professionally manned, outfitted, and trained, Saddam considered a prime threat to the regime. As a consequence he deployed them far from the capital, cut off from command and communications to discourage plots and conspiracies against him.

She was dressed in black casual chic and her PowerPoint presentation didn’t have a single bullet point. She spoke with a posh English accent and she was young and we flew her to Brussels from Los Angeles to talk to us about how the Internet was changing our world.

My first encounter with the Voice of America was by visiting rather than hearing it. I was staffing my boss, Jean-François Bureau, the NATO assistant secretary general for public diplomacy, on an official visit to Washington, DC. Bureau was a former spokesman for the French Ministry of Defense and had worked for the famously energetic Michèle Aliot-Marie (“She threw herself out of airplanes,” he told me dryly over breakfast one morning in Washington. “She was difficult to keep up with.”). He was interested in the American way of doing things so I was along to facilitate his visit to the Pentagon, the State Department, think tanks, and other organizations as we talked to our counterparts across the Atlantic.

Brussels is a giant language factory. Hundreds of interpreters who process the spoken word and thousands of translators who process the written word transform the raw material of language into comprehensible material for professionals and the public, lawyers and technocrats, doctors and journalists. All official meetings at NATO headquarters and the European Union are simultaneously interpreted in English and French, meaning they are relayed live and direct, not sequentially. Virtually all public documents are translated into more than two dozen languages running from Arabic to Azeri. NATO’s operations in Afghanistan have required expanding capacity into previously untutored languages like Dari and Pashto. Institutions cannot reach people unless they communicate with them in their own language. Language is an essential element of public diplomacy that above all requires people.

Public diplomats obsess over public opinion. We can never have too much data, from too many countries, over too broad a time period. Occasionally we will sponsor a survey, although this happens rarely: public opinion surveys are expensive, complicated, subject to bureaucratic vicissitudes and historical changes and hence need to be done again and again to be valuable. Moreover, the idea of the government (or worse, a multinational organization) polling citizens makes officials and the public very nervous.

While at NATO I had a modest budget to help promote the organization in North America and Europe. I coordinated conferences, seminars, and visits with universities, civic organizations, service academies, nonprofit groups, sometimes the equivalent of well-intentioned knitting circles. I had the Danish Seaman’s Church visit once, several religious universities, and many European political parties and their youth wings. Most impressive in my memory was the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts—chartered to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1681 and a veteran unit of the Revolutionary War—all men, who filed into the largest room that could accommodate them at NATO, resplendent in red uniforms and epaulets. Each uniform was identical but displayed devices of their individual military service: US Marine Corps staff sergeant, US Air Force captain, US Army colonel, and so on. The company has an explicit public diplomacy mandate for “represent[ing] the Commonwealth and Nation on numerous overseas trips all over this world… contribut[ing] to the efforts of the Departments of State and Defense to further developing new friendships.” I sponsored publications with the US Military Academy, National Defense University, and the University of Copenhagen. Although we rarely worked with corporations, we did that, too: Microsoft, the BBC, and Lloyd’s of London all sponsored public events with NATO.

On the flight leaving Brussels I realized I was the only American in the NATO delegation bound for a week-long conference in Dallas. Suddenly I felt responsible for my colleagues’ well-being and good time. For many this was their first trip to the United States and for all of them it was their first visit to Texas. Some had preconceptions about the United States and most had stereotypes about Texas, but they were all excited. America as a place, an idea, and an ideal still stands tall in the foreign imagination and few pass on an opportunity to visit. Texas, however, is place apart.