Group Urges New Direction for Public Diplomacy

Djerejian, director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, has served as ambassador to Syria and Israel and as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. He presented the report Changing Minds, Winning Peace to the House Appropriations Committee and the Bush administration last October. The report recommends new approaches in structure, resources, and programs to meet the challenge to national security interests in Arab and Muslim countries.

The group says a new White House office should be created to promote U.S. interests by informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world. “Public diplomacy requires a seriousness and commitment that matches the gravity of our approach to national defense and traditional state-to-state diplomacy,” says Djerejian, who was asked by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Assistant Secretary Patricia Harrison to chair the group.

The 13-member bipartisan group was formed in June after Congress became concerned about growing animosity toward the U.S., especially among Arabs and Muslims abroad. They traveled to Egypt, Syria, Senegal, Morocco, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom and held video conferences in Indonesia and Pakistan to investigate the U.S. public diplomacy programs toward the Arab and Muslim world.

The group was told during its trip that if America does not define itself, the extremists will. Surveys show that Arabs and Muslims oppose U.S. policies, particularly those related to the Arab–Israeli conflict and Iraq. But the group’s mandate was strictly limited to public diplomacy, which, the group argued, could help reduce the increasing hostility that “makes achieving our policy goals far more difficult.”

Although the group praised the Department of State for its dedicated work with available resources, the group notes “a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans which has left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety.”

The report states, “In this time of peril, public diplomacy is absurdly and dangerously underfunded, and simply restoring it to its Cold War status is not enough.” The group advocated a “dramatic increase in funding” after finding last year’s funding for all public diplomacy programs was $600 million, with only $25 million left for outreach programs in the Arab and Muslim world.

The group proposed a new White House special counselor with cabinet rank, backed by an advisory board of experts, to provide strategic direction and coordination of public diplomacy government-wide. A high-level dormant interagency policy coordinating group within the National Security Council would be reactivated and revitalized.
The Department of State would remain the lead agency for enacting policy and, along with other parts of government that participate in public diplomacy—including the Department of Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and government-sponsored international broadcasting—it would be brought under the new strategic policy umbrella.

The report criticized the lack of testing and measuring of public diplomacy programs and called for a “new culture of measurement” in the State Department and elsewhere. A similar finding is contained in a recent report on public diplomacy issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

The report also raised serious concerns about the deficiency in personnel who can speak the languages of the region. The group found the State Department has only 54 Arabic speakers with a reasonable level of fluency, and only a handful of those are able and willing to participate in media discussions on Arab television and radio. The report calls for 300 fluent Arabic speakers within two years and another 300 by 2008.

The report also asked for an independent review of the planned government-sponsored Middle East Television Network, and it urged the Broadcasting Board of Governors to adopt a “clearer objective than building a large audience” with its new music-oriented radio network in Arab countries, Radio Sawa.

The full report is available at http://bakerinstitute.org.