In China, a Public Diplomacy officer is at dinner with officials. The host remarks, “we’re always amazed how sex can gum up American politics.” His tablemates chuckle. “And tax returns!” They chuckle some more. A Foreign Service officer attending a festival in Nigeria sits next to a member of the National Assembly. The parliamentarian asks,…
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You may not think this column relates directly to public diplomacy but, in fact, it is all about public diplomacy. Certainly when President Obama was award the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, it was considered a public diplomacy coup. Just being considered for the prize these days is a public diplomacy victory. Indeed even in…
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Next Thursday, May 3rd, the world will celebrate Press Freedom Day. For America’s publicly-funded international broadcasters, the challenges have never been more formidable. Both Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House recently issued annual reports citing steady overall declines in press freedom globally in the past dozen years, with the Middle East and Eurasia registering the…
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I am increasingly persuaded that the effectiveness of U.S. official Public Diplomacy depends not just on messages, programs, or technology, but also on the strength and health of the Foreign Service. This article is more about the Foreign Service than about Public Diplomacy per se, but these factors need to be part of the whole…
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The name of the American poet and short story writer Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) should be known to all Public Diplomacy practitioners. When war came, he tirelessly applied his gifts to the American cause, so ardently that he died from overwork in 1943. A giant in American letters in the late 1920s and the…
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Dr. Michael Schneider, the director of Syracuse University’s D.C. Public Diplomacy program, calls our attention to an update on the topic of China’s “sharp power” thrust. The Journal of Democracy carries a set of eight articles on “China in Xi’s new era” examining the country’s internal changes in the wake of the 19th Party Congress, its expanding global ambitions, and its…
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In his State of the Union Address of January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for authority to provide Lend-Lease assistance to the United Kingdom. To strengthen his appeal, FDR traced a vision of “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” “The Four Freedoms” eventually became shorthand for the war aims of…
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Occasionally I co-lead a strategy workshop for State Department practitioners of public diplomacy. Each participant brings a topic and develops it into a public diplomacy campaign over five days; it’s learning by doing. The hardest thing for our students – both Foreign Service Officers and locally-hired staffers – is to define a clear objective and…
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Edward G. Lansdale (1908-1987) – whose career included service in the Philippines during the Huk Rebellion and in Vietnam during that war – was a major thinker and practitioner in counterinsurgency. When William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick wrote their influential 1958 novel, The Ugly American, “Colonel Hillendale” was modeled on Lansdale. He is the…
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Living and working in other countries, Public Diplomacy practitioners hear a mix of many ideas – political, economic, social, and religious. Among them are patriotism and nationalism. A recent video – and the controversies it sparked – presents a case study that can give viewers some perspective on today’s currents of Russian nationalism. Last year,…
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