One of the most essential elements of any country’s statecraft abroad is public diplomacy, often described as people-to-people diplomacy or, as it was once termed, “the last three feet.”  Public diplomacy, essentially soft power, includes a broad spectrum of media and information work, cultural programs and exchanges, and educational programs and, especially, exchanges.  At one time, it included open-door American Centers that were physically separate from U.S. embassies, where the public could come in and learn about the United States.

The bright and shining moment of U.S. public diplomacy was the 1950s and 1960s.  It was actually a Cold War creation implemented by an independent U.S.-government organization known as the United States Information Agency (USIA) in coordination with the Voice of America (VOA) and other specialized broadcasting systems like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.  Essentially, USIA was created during the Cold War to “win hearts and minds,” as they said at that time, against the Soviet Union.  In fact, USIA had a separate rapid-response unit dedicated to refuting Soviet lies and disinformation as they appeared in print media and broadcasts around the world.

The current administration in Washington is well aware that Russia has revived its global disinformation campaign, especially in the now-independent former Soviet Socialist Republics that President Vladimir Putin claims is “Russia’s special sphere of influence.”  On January 20, 2022, the State Department Office of the Spokesperson released a fact sheet that included this paragraph: 

Russian military and intelligence entities are engaging … across Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem, to include malign social media operations, the use of overt and covert online proxy media outlets, the injection of disinformation into television and radio programming, the hosting of conferences designed to influence attendees into falsely believing that Ukraine, not Russia, is at fault for heightened tensions in the region, and the leveraging of cyber operations to deface media outlets and conduct hack and release operations.

The Biden administration clearly knows that it’s time for us to act.

WHAT HAPPENED?

USIA existed until 1998 when then-Secretary of State Madelyn Albright in the Clinton Administration traded its independence for Sen. Jesse Helms’ vote to pass the Chemical Weapons Convention.  The Soviet Union had fallen, and the United States, at that time, was perceived as the world’s one remaining superpower.  The deeply conservative Sen. Helms wanted USIA and other independent agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), done away with, or at least folded into the State Department where they could be more easily controlled, because he saw them as “liberal do-gooders.”  In that dust-up, USAID survived as an independent agency; USIA did not.

Why did USIA not survive?  USIA was, in fact, partially responsible for its own demise.  After the Church Commission of 1973 that investigated America’s role in the Vietnam War revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had used USIA positions for cover at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during that war, a cultural shift occurred within USIA.  The general sentiment emerged that the agency, if it were to maintain U.S. credibility, had to maintain a firm distance from the State Department that had readily provided cover positions to the CIA.  This ethos too often described the State Department as “dirty” and USIA as “clean.” 

When USIA was put out of business in 1998 and folded into the State Department, a whole generation of highly experienced senior USIA diplomats resigned rather than join the “dirty” State Department.  I had begun my diplomatic career in USIA and was, in fact, delighted with the merger, because I had always been intensely interested in policy and policy-making.  In my stary-eyed optimism, I believed that within a few years public diplomacy would become an integral part of U.S. foreign policy.  It didn’t work that way, though, because many of the USIA officers who joined the State Department brought with them their USIA corporate culture.

But it wasn’t just USIA diplomats who slowed down the integration.  State Department officers, especially political officers, sometimes looked down on public diplomacy officers.  USIA was known overseas as the U.S. Information Service (USIS).  I well remember a fairly senior State Department officer who liked to joke (he said) that public diplomacy officers were “useless.” You see, “useless” rhymes with USIS when it’s pronounced, as it frequently was, “you-sis.”  In fact, it took nearly a full generation for a reasonably effective merger to occur.

THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11

Further, a major set-back occurred as a result of the 9/11 attack on the United States.  As part of the massive ramp-up of security for U.S. embassies and diplomatic personnel around the world, almost all the formerly stand-alone – and locally popular – American Centers were closed down for good.  They had once been open and welcoming to the general public  with hard-copy libraries of books and U.S. magazines and other publications, internet access (once internet truly took hold), and regular cultural programs.  The American Centers were a breath of fresh air in many countries, and they were usually filled all day and into the evening with local citizens. 

When the American Centers were closed for security reasons after 9/11, the work they had done was supposed to move into the U.S. embassies.  But in the massive project of the early 2000s to build new, “more secure” U.S. embassies in many places around the world, they were often moved from easily accessible downtown locations to far suburbs behind high concrete walls topped with razor-wire with armed guards at the gate – not exactly welcoming for local citizens.  Yes, eventually the State Department tried to rectify the situation by creating American Corners that were small units, essentially stripped-down, bare-bone, mini-American Centers, often plugged into local universities but without American-citizen employees.  It just wasn’t the same thing.

If a fundamental element of diplomacy is to build effective, in-person working relationships to engage and win over foreign governments, it’s all the more true for public diplomacy.  Traditionally, a good public diplomacy officer worked primarily outside the embassy building effective relationships in the media, educational, and cultural worlds.  After a while, the “new public diplomacy” began to take hold within the State Department, and public diplomacy officers became ever more integrated with their political- and economic-specialist colleagues.  It almost began to seem as if the real integration I had hoped for at the demise of USIA in 1998 was finally and truly taking hold.

DOUBLE WHAMMY:  THE COVID PANDEMIC AND DOMINANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

But then the world changed once again when COVID-19 severely limited in-person meetings, exacerbating something that had been happening even before the COVID catastrophe, especially on the media and information side of public diplomacy.

That change was the tsunami wave of social media.  Every U.S. embassy in the world now has, at a minimum, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.  And it has simply become too easy for the information officers of the public diplomacy diplomats to do the daily website postings, read and summarize the local press for the ambassador and others in the embassy, and then feel that “the job is done.” 

No, it isn’t.  This kind of work, as worthy as it might seem, is just not the same thing as going out and building in-person relationships of trust with people of influence.  It’s not sitting down with a leading local journalist and carefully explaining in detail the U.S. view of what is going on behind the scenes in the bilateral relationship and, thus, effectively helping to shape the journalist’s story.  A Twitter post cannot replace the subtlety and effectiveness of communication, the give-and-take, that occurs in a face-to-face meeting.  Posting a policy point, a soundbite, or photo of an event is not enough.

COUNTER PUTIN’S VERSION

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long described the independent nations of the former Soviet Union as Russia’s “special sphere of influence.”  Recent U.S.-Russia negotiations over the long crisis in Ukraine have brought Putin ever more out into the open that he wants an “exclusive sphere of influence.”  Essentially, while it’s unlikely he can reconstitute the former Soviet Union, his goal quite clearly is once again to draw shut the Iron Curtain, with the West on one side and Russia and its “sphere of influence” on the other. 

For that reason alone, Washington needs to dramatically ramp up its soft power with a more effective and, especially, more visible public diplomacy.   It’s time to dig the new American trenches in the current Russian disinformation war and get our U.S. information-officer troops into them.  It’s time not only for Congress to act but also to fund properly a new U.S. public diplomacy.