There’s been a whole and interesting discussion on public diplomacy going on at the “smaht kid” blogs, Abu Aardvark, Mountain Runner, et al.
Note that I think that public diplomacy – meaning stepping up and engaging in the war of ideas and the stories and images that express those ideas – is one of the Bush Administration’s greatest failings (and I’m no johnny-come-lately to that bandwagon. Here’s what I wrote in March, 2003:
But Bush has failed to sell this war in three arenas.
He has failed to sell it (as well as it should have been) to the U.S. people. The reality of 9/11 has sold this war, and our atavistic desire for revenge is the engine that drives the support that Bush actually has.
He has failed to sell it diplomatically. Not that he could have ever gotten the support of France or Germany; as noted above, even with an AmEx receipt for the 9/11 plane tickets signed by Saddam himself, France would find a reason to defer this war. But he should never have let them get the moral high ground, which they have somehow managed to claim.
He has failed to sell it to our enemies, who do not believe today that we are serious about achieving our stated goals. This is, to me the most serious one, because the perception that we are not deadly serious is a perception that we are weak; and we will have to fight harder, not because we are too strong, but because we will be perceived as too weak.
I won’t try and summarize the discussion. Just start here, then go here, then go here, then go here,then go here, and finally, here.
Let me add my “dumb guy” spin to the discussion however.
Reading it, one interesting thought popped into my head, which was encapsulated well in this comment on AM’s first post:
McCain appears less interested in public diplomacy than in what we used to call advocacy and is now called strategic communication. His interest is in the “war of ideas” and advancing American objectives in the global information battle-space.
The author, it appears, was Donna Marie Oglesby, a counselor for USIA in the Clinton Administration. Here’s the dumb-guy question:
If the purpose of public diplomacy isn’t to ‘advance American objectives in the global information battle-space’ – what the hell is it?
Here’s the dilemma as I see it.
I’ve been arguing for a long time that modern Leftism (as opposed to, say pre-1968 “Old” Leftism) has roots in the Romantic, anti-Enlightenment “Bad Philosophy” movement. There has been a whole lot of discussion among we “decent” lefties about how much of the Left today – and much intellectual life today – is defined simply by blind opposition to America and Western society and values – which are seen as uniquely dangerous and evil.
Here’s the rub. To the extent that the above is even partially correct, we have this problem: The people who are supposed to be doing the fighting in the realm of ideas on our behalf may not believe much in what we stand for – and instead believe that we are uniquely evil, or that there is no substantive difference between Abu Ghreib as it was run by Saddam and – at an extreme – Guantanamo – are we really sending the right people into battle? And what do we expect to happen when that battle is joined?
In basic, I think we need to resolve some of the core values questions in order to engage in the battle. And since we need to win this battle in order to minimize the other, harder-to-clean-up kinds of battles we may have to fight otherwise (or, more accurately, that my son may have to fight), I think it’s important that we start dealing with these core issues of values right about now.
Update: I put the wrong quote from myself in; fixed it.
