Try to imagine for a moment that you lapsed into a coma in 2019 and were just awakening in 2021 as scores of new terms centered on COVID-19 had infected our vocabulary in just two years. Here’s my list of such terms for such a hypothetical patient: Omicron — a new, possibly more infectious variant…
Virtual programming is a key tool in cultivating your public diplomacy garden. This article is based on the white paper Creating a Virtual Programming Ecosystem. To learn more, download the white paper here. By Loren Hurst If there is one lesson to be drawn from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that online interaction as a…
By Alan Heil Who would have thought two years ago that this East African country of 128 million residents would be the scene of a deadly civil war in 2021? Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. His country had ended a decades-long war with its neighbor to the north…
1. POTUS AND CODELS — THEY’RE BACK!: Both President (POTUS) Biden and Vice President Harris have taken their first foreign trips since assuming office to demonstrate that the United States is once again showing leadership and consulting with its friends. The President’s destination was Europe for the G7 summit in the UK, the NATO and U.S.-EU summit…
A wide angle Agence France Presse photo of President Biden, on his first overseas trip as chief executive, displays a crowd sitting behind him. Of a hundred spectators in the stands, all except two are wearing black masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The President was speaking to U.S. Air Force staff in Suffolk,…
by Alan Heil When I led VOA during a couple of years in the mid-1990s, we debated what might lie ahead on for the world and the U.S. as we deployed more than a score of correspondents around a post-Cold War planet. Who then, or for more than two decades since, could have foreseen the…
1. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY VETERAN RETURNS TO EL SALVADOR: It is always good to see when the services of an experienced PD professional are appreciated. The best recent example of this is Secretary of State Blinken’s May 26, 2021 designation of Ambassador Jean Manes as Charge’ d’ affaires ad interim to the Republic of El Salvador. She…
1. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN AN UPENDED, POST-PANDEMIC WORLD: This seems to be the season for one study after another of how to improve diplomacy or use PD to address one problem or another in this changing, uncertain world. But one new report — a research collaboration between the USC Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) and a…
In a World Press Freedom Day message yesterday May 3, President Biden warned that “the truth is under attack” and that “authoritarians” are trying to undermine the media globally. In a statement on the White House website, the president praised objective journalists around the world and urged them “to continue holding those in power to…
1. THE STRUGGLE TO REFORM PUBLIC DIPLOMACY STAFFING: As any PD officer knows, the effort to inform and influence foreign publics relies heavily on support from approximately 2,600 loyal PD Locally Employed Staff (LES) who do PD work in 189 U.S. missions around the world. Any attempt to reform their functions, structures, and position descriptions is…