The U.S. Needs More Effort on P.R.
By James K. Glassman

Over the past year, “the bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United States,” the director of the Pew Research Center said recently.

 

In Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world and a reputation for embracing a moderate Islam, only 15 percent view the U.S. favorably, compared with 61 percent in early 2002. Similarly, in Turkey, a secular Muslim democracy that is a stalwart member of NATO and a longtime supporter of America, favorable opinion toward the U.S. has dropped from 52 percent three years ago to 15 percent today. Shortly before the war against Saddam Hussein, by a greater than two-to-one margin,Muslims surveyed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan said that “the United States was a more serious threat than Iraq.”

 

It is attitudes like these that prompted Congress to set up an advisory board, headed by former U.S. ambassador Edward Djerejian, to find out what’s wrong with U.S. public diplomacy and how to fix it. I was a member of that board. After three intensive months we released a report on October 1 that called for dramatic changes.

 

Public diplomacy is the promotion of the national interest by informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world. Nearly everyone agrees that public diplomacy--through such instruments as Radio Free Europe, which beamed news and comment behind the Iron Curtain--helped win the Cold War. But over the past decade, a process of unilateral disarmament, mainly during the Clinton administration, has stripped the United States of its weapons of advocacy.

 

To some, this development is not particularly upsetting. “We’re not in the business of trying to get people to like us,” said one colleague recently. It’s true that American interests must be protected even if those policies annoy others. But it’s also true that if we did a better job of explaining our interests--and the values that lie behind them--it would be less costly, in money and lives, to achieve them. Public diplomacy can be as important to national security as military action, and just as tough. It can be. But right now it isn’t.

 

As we began our briefings, travels, and deliberations last summer, it was immediately clear that America’s public diplomacy not only lacks resources (e.g., the State Department has only five Arabic speakers capable of carrying the U.S. message in TV and radio debates in the Middle East), but also lacks management.

 

We proposed a reorganization that would move strategic direction to the White House, where it belongs. While our group was asked to look at the Arab and Muslim world specifically, the inadequacy of U.S. public diplomacy is international. A poll in Spain, an ally in the war in Iraq, found that only 3 percent had a very favorable view of the United States while 39 percent had a very unfavorable view. (Even in Saudi Arabia, the very favorables amount to 7 percent!)

 

But skepticism toward the U.S. is most profound among Muslims. Only 2 percent of Muslims in the U.K., for instance, agreed with the statement that “the United States supports democracy around the world.” Surveys also found that large numbers of Muslims abroad think that Americans actively discriminate against their co-religionists here in the United States.

 

Such misconceptions are a target of opportunity for American public diplomacy, but it is difficult to attack them under the current structure and with current funding. In all, only $600 million is spent by the State Department on public diplomacy throughout the world — nearly half of that on educational exchanges like Fulbright and Humphrey fellowships. About $150 million goes to the Arab and Muslim world, where the crisis is the greatest, and just $25 million, we calculated, is free for actual outreach programs in the region. In our report we called these scant amounts “absurd and dangerous.”

 

In fact, that may be a good characterization of the state of public diplomacy in general right now. Fixing it would take relatively little additional money and bureaucratic restructuring, and the rewards would likely be enormous.