The role of public diplomacy in statecraft; professional ethics; organizational principles; arguments for using public diplomacy
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…
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…
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,…
Today’s Public Diplomacy practitioners work in a loud, visually saturated, media-intense age when “post-truth,” “many truths,” and “alternative facts” are themes of academic, social, and political debate. They work in many different cultures at a time when the claims of identity, rather than universality and common humanity, gain sway. Issue 47 (2017) of Foam:…
Article originally published by LNP. Copyright held by Steinmann Communication, 2018 In case you have wondered what happened to this correspondent in the past couple of months, let me put your anxiety aside. I have not been banned from publication, nor have I given up writing about this increasingly topsy-turvy world. Instead it seems I…
How might the West respond to the explosion of false information in social and traditional media? There have been many prescriptions for inoculating a curious world against that challenge, especially since Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, lately, several other pivotal leadership polls in Western Europe. Earlier, it was the ISIS mastery…
Last week I spoke to a Great Decisions discussion group in Arlington, Virginia. Great Decisions is a program sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association to encourage citizen awareness of foreign relations. The topic, “The Media and Foreign Policy,” gave me the chance to highlight the work of public diplomacy. As so much diplomacy is carried…
In a recent essay, a leading Taiwan academic saluted the work of the U.S. Information Service in Taiwan some decades ago. Recalling the American Literature Translation Series, sponsored by USIS, that made available American novels and stories in Chinese, the Director of the Institute of European and American Studies at the Academia Sinica, Shan Te-hsing,…
This link includes a 40-page guide – quotes and links to articles, essays, opinion pieces, and reports — on North Korea’s information environment. Intended for strategic communication and Public Diplomacy practitioners, it focuses on information, broadcasting, cyber, internet access, propaganda, the activities of defectors, policy debates, and related topics. This is a special number in…
A few years ago, Walter Russell Mead, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest, proposed a “strategy to counter democracy’s global retreat.” “Produce inexpensive, good translations of Burke, Locke and other thinkers, and spread the texts widely,” he urged. His call to action should be…