Waiting for 'smart power'

Dear Dr. Lynch, you have identified the problem but you are not providing solutions. What should the public diplomacy in Afghanistan be? Your position is still not clear to me.

But after the speech... almost nothing followed. Few new programs, few new initiatives, few efforts to capitalize on that moment.

The problem is that Obama's got a new team, with most of the expertise coming from the Clinton era. They quite simply weren't ready to really do anything, and were under heavy pressure to "do something" lest the Arabs grow cynical (again).

First, America's capacity for public diplomacy, also foreign assistance, was badly weakened during the administration of the current Secretary of State's husband. Dana Priest documented in her book what this led to: an ever-increasing delegation of foreign policy functions to the Pentagon. Bush's administration accelerated this delegation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and promoted stagnation everywhere else.

Second, Barack Obama's formative political experience was not as the military commander of an alliance, as a veteran Senator, or as the governor of the nation's largest state. It was as a candidate. Brilliant speeches on the campaign trail do not need to be followed up (except by the fundraising people, who do their own thing in any campaign); Obama handled several campaign crises by giving one. Government is different, obviously -- obviously, that is, to people who do not owe their positions to the preoccupation with campaign mechanics that a Presidential candidacy requires to be successful.

Obama's Cairo speech last spring was a considerable success. He was much praised for its eloquence and courage. He didn't see far enough ahead to grasp that it would look hollow if Netanyahu called his bluff on settlements, and why should he have been expected to? Obama has never done this before. Neither has his Secretary of State, which is not a plus, but that's a secondary consideration.

Lynch here appears too focused on intentions as opposed to capabilities. The public diplomacy capability of the government will take time to rebuild, and Obama will need to learn that the Presidency requires leaving behind many of the lessons taught by the campaign. Both can be done. They just haven't been done yet.

Incidentally, and at the risk of piling on, the Obama administration missed a major opportunity after the Iranian government manipulated the elections there last June. Obama's people were so scared of being accused of interfering -- they were, of course, so accused anyway -- that they let themselves be spooked into silence while witnessing a situation in which most Iranians were way more irate at their own government than they were at us. Divisions within the Iranian clergy, a government increasingly dependent on the security services, a president who makes even his own supporters roll their eyes...and Obama's team is congratulating themselves on having avoided giving offense. Again, the administration can grow out of the inexperience and shallowness that produces this kind of mistake. I hope it will.

One heard of the term soft power for the first time, when Joseph Nye talked about it in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Therefore, in yours sincerely's mind, the term is associated with volatile political situations; even, Dr.Lynch's message on this folder, seems to confirm in my mind, that the term is associated with troubled areas.

However, I imagined that Prof.Nye actually meant an umbrella policy to all situations where the US has an outreach; in other words the whole world. Of course in its outreach, the US encounters stable political systems, quasi-stable political systems, and volatile political situations, and though each has it's own specificity to deal with, unfortunately, all those various situations have the same problems in common, when it comes to fomulating a smart power policy by Washington.

1) Formulating a smart power policy, will have to rely heavily on US actors on the ground; be that an embassy, interest section, military or what have you, in order to provide the best assessment and the best approach to take. This is interepreted usually by various sides; including the targetted societies as blunt American interference in local affairs. 2) Of course, the US government could work in assocaition with the political regimes in the targetted areas in order to formulate the various aspects of smart power policies, but more often than not, Washington encounters and will always encounter difficulties with those leaders because a- more often than not, those leaders do not want to appear in the eyes of their respective peoples, as lackeys of the USA, and b- some of the policies suggested by the USA, may be considered as undermining the political power of those leaders. 3) The US government could work with non-state actors where they exist, or create and build NGOs to work with. But unfortunately, even here the record at best indicates mixed results. Often those local NGOs working with the US government support, are usually accused of being agents of the American government, trying to undermine the values of society, or at times promoting Zionist policies in the "applicable zones", or simply throw the famous habitual accusation; CIA agents.

Humbly, and from past experience, the only smart power option which exists for the US, is the power of money, and aid, I am not saying it is the ideal approach, rather the only viable one, despite the fact that it has proved to have the same success rate, as playing in Las Vegas. Unless of course we can talk about US as a mature democratic political system, which can actually listen to what the people in the targetted areas chose as a political system to live under, and accept their choice even, if it is not what the US likes. What other smart approach to diplomacy?.

khairi janbek.paris/france

I FEEL YOUR PAIN

Every review of our failure to gain support for or at least understanding of our policies, especially in the Middle East, has inevitably admitted, but quickly skipped over, the issue of the policies themselves. The fact that in PD, as with traditional diplomacy, influence follows content, seems to be ignored in favor of a discussion of the tools and skills needed to influence publics.

Thoroughly left out of the discussion is the fact that rejection of our policies is most often based not on our failure to explain, but the fact that these publics reject the policies as inimical to their own interests. It is ironic that, while diplomacy is all about solving conflicts, public diplomacy seems to be tasked with overcoming “misunderstandings and disinformation.” In this, we have been deluding ourselves.

As for the broader goal of improving the U.S. image, Middle East audiences have spoken, in interviews as well as in polls: we judge you by your actions, not your words. They have also told us what they don’t like: our Arab-Israeli policy, military occupation of Muslim lands, and support for their repressive regimes. Oh, and please don’t try to change the subject. This does not imply that we should shape our policies to please this or that audience, but that we should take their perspective into account as we prepare our presentation of the U.S. position. ["We simply disagree."] It is also useful to have a clear and sober idea of what the reaction to a controversial action might be, if for no other reason than force protection.

Worse than ignoring substantive disagreement over concrete interests, are we now asking PD to carry out a strategy in the absence of a clear policy itself. No follow on to the Cairo speech, no address to the Israeli public, no Afghan communications strategy? It is the policy strategy that is missing here, not the ability to communicate it.

We also seem to forget that foreign publics are perfectly capable of understanding, and do understand, the various domestic and foreign issues that impact our policy-making, the role of the different branches of government, as well as information about what is happening on the ground. They, too, watch FOX and CNN via satellite and read out press on-line. If they are not bilingual, they are informed by those who do.

Combined with their own on-the-scene journalism they often know more about what is happening than do Americans and from a different perspective as well. [See Robert Kaplan’s recent suggestion that we watch Al Jazeera English to see how the rest of the world understands events. This should be obligatory for anyone attempting to communicate with other peoples rather than themselves.]

They’ve read about the leaked McCrystal strategy review document. There is also nothing we could have said about the recent Afghan elections [in any language] that would be credible, the elections spoke for themselves. In this environment, there are no simple one-liners or expressions of humanistic goals behind our actions that will satisfy our audiences. We should talk when we have something to important to say. Rtd