I gave a speech today at the Soref Symposium of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on “mutual interest and mutual respect,” a felicitous phrase that President Obama has used several times. Marc Lynch of George Washington University, Rob Satloff of the Washington Institute, and I each talked for about 15 minutes and then answered questions in a lively session with a distinguished audience, which included Joseph Nye of Harvard, whose work on soft power has had a huge influence on me and practically everyone else in public diplomacy. I was pleased and honored to meet him.

Some parts of my speech you have heard before (alas). But I draw your attention to a paragraph near the end. I want to develop the idea further:

“Let me close by adding another interest that ties in with the Grand Conversation and with mutual respect: It is to expand digital communication around the world, especially in the most vulernable places, like Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, and more. Such expansion should be the policy of the U.S. and its allies, and it should be a smart and efficient policy, implemented with inexpensive computers, like the One Laptop Per Child Program, and mobile phones, the cheapest digital infrastructure.”

The speech follows.

Interests and Respect in Public Diplomacy

Remarks, Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Washington, D.C.

May 7, 2009

James K. Glassman

It’s an honor to be here on a panel with Marc Lynch, a great public diplomacy thinker.  And, thank you, Rob Satloff. A little over a year ago, after I was nominated as Under Secretary, Rob was one of the first people I called for advice. In July, I gave my first speech in that post at the Washington Institute. At the time, I said this:

“The views that I will express today are my own, of course. I take full responsibility. But, on the war of ideas, I would not have arrived where I have arrived without the wisdom and insights expressed by Rob and his colleagues.”

Today, in his typically smart and careful way, Rob asks us to talk about two critical issues: interests and respect. Let me take them one at a time as they relate to foreign policy, and more specifically public diplomacy, in the Obama administration.

The great lesson I learned in government was the importance of strategic thinking. For all of us in the national security business, the first step is answering the question, what do we want to achieve? In the Bush administration, the goals today were to diminish the threat to Americans and the rest of the world posed by violent extremism and weapons of mass destruction and to help people around the world achieve freedom.

I am going to assume that those goals survive in the Obama administration, though I am not altogether sure. Reading the White House website and the president’s speeches, I can’t find a clear national security strategy. There’s engagement and negotiation, but, as John Bolton put it during the election campaign, “Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. Saying that one favors negotiation with, say, Iran, has no more intellectual content than saying one favors using a spoon. For what?”

Public diplomacy – which I would define as the use of words, images, and non-violent deeds in order to understand, inform, engage, and (most of all) influence foreign publics, as opposed to foreign officials — is not a policy either. We do educational exchanges for a purpose.

I hope that anyone looking at my brief tenure would conclude that we were strategic. We pursued America’s interests.

Specifically, we pursued the goals of reducing threats and promoting freedom by emphasizing a war of ideas against violent extremists. It was a dual effort: undermine the violent extremist ideology and divert young people from the path that led them to terrorism.

In both of these efforts, the United States is rarely the most credible actor. Nor should the U.S. be center stage. The battle is within Islam, but it deeply affects us, as we learned on 9/11. We have an important stake in its outcome.

We have real interests, in other words, and, as it turns out, they are mutual interests with other nations, including those like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan – to name a few – whose citizens have a strong animus toward the United States. If they liked us better, it would be marginally easier to succeed. But concentrating on getting them to like us is not a particularly efficient approach. There are many things we can do in concert with Muslims to defeat an enemy that threatens them more than it threatens us.

As I said in my July Washington Institute speech: “In the war of ideas, our core task is not how to fix foreigners’ perceptions of the United States.”

Instead, we pursue mutual interests with foreigners. But what I want to leave you with is this: to pursue mutual interests you must first define your interests. Once interests are defined, you need a structure and a strategy to carry out the government-wide public diplomacy and strategic communication effort, and you need to assign roles within that structure. Here is what State does; here is what DoD does; and so on.

It’s hard to act with other countries when you don’t have the leadership, the strategy, and the structure to bring U.S. agencies together. We had that at the end of the Bush Administration. We don’t have it now. Maybe we will have it soon. I hope so. The clock is ticking.

—

Now, let me turn to the second half of Rob’s formulation: mutual respect.

Here, I want to talk about the way we communicate. It has to change.

We spend much of our time and resources pushing out press releases, giving speeches, making TV appearances, extolling our own virtues, explaining our policies, trying to improve the American image. This approach, which I call the big megaphone, is not working in the current environment – and it is unlikely ever to work.

First, very simply, the rest of the world does not want to hear from us about us. Our friends see such an approach as condescension, our enemies as incitement to more anger.

Consider a speech that President Obama gave to Turkish students at a town meeting on April 7. He is our best public diplomat. (Hillary Clinton is excellent too.) Obama said he wanted to make three points in his opening statement. But for point one he said: “I know that the stereotypes of the United States are out there…. Sometimes it suggests that America has become selfish and crass, or that we don’t care about the world beyond us. And I’m here to tell you that that’s not the country that I know and it’s not the country that I love…. We are still a place where anybody has a chance to make it if they try. If that wasn’t true, then somebody named Barack Hussein Obama would not be elected President.”

The first message point should not be about us, but about you! About Turkey, about students, about Muslims, about the war within Islam. It is time for us to stop putting so much emphasis on extolling and explaining ourselves.

In his blog the other day, Matt Armstrong made this point powerfully. “The question to be asked was not ‘why do they hate us?’ but ‘why do they support extremism?’ For those who think this song is about you, it’s not.”

Yes, “You’re So Vain,” as Carly Simon put it. We’re so vain!

Here is the way David Kenning, a psychologist and strategist with Bell Pottinger, the London-based consulting firm, put it in “Influence and Hostility,” a paper delivered at Wilton House (2008) – “even the best rational arguments will not be effective against strong negative emotions – or even simmering resentment. Indeed, in a hostile atmosphere, the more reasonable the arguments are, the more they may cause a negative and hysterical reaction formation. At best, they will be dismissed with a shrug.”

The second reason the big megaphone doesn’t work is that audiences have become far too sophisticated. This is not the Cold War, where Poles and Hungarians hung on the every word of Radio Free Europe to get the truth they were denied. These are audiences bombarded with images and opinions and, because of their experience dealing with government media, they are extremely skeptical about what they hear from us.

So what is the answer? It is what I have called Public Diplomacy 2.0, or Strategic Communication 2.0. Or, more broadly, the Grand Conversation.

The Grand Conversation, or PD 2.0, is a strategy. It begins with the strategic goals I mentioned earlier.

Let me definie it: “Instead of a US Government actor directly engaging foreign publics, the USG facilities, convenes, or otherwise generates broader engagement (often without specific direction) in which the USG’s interests are expressed (often by non-USG actors). PD 2.0 exploits three sets of tools: 1) social-networking technology, 2) public-private partnerships, in which the USG is often merely a catalyst, and 3) interagency coordination.”

This is a big idea. It is a what Paul Romer, the Stanford economist, calls a “meta-idea,” which it is an idea that spawns other ideas.

Some examples….

Last year, with such private-sector organizations as NBC Universal, the Directors Guild of America, and the Tisch School at NYU, my office launched what’s called the Democracy Video Challenge. Entrants made their own three-minute videos, posted to a site on YouTube, with the topic, “Democracy Is…” Winners are determined by a vote of the public over the Internet. While we did set a few rules – no pro-terrorist or pornographic videos – it is certainly possible that the winner of the contest will espouse views not completely shared by the U.S. Government.

My former office’s Education and Cultural Affairs Bureau launched what we believe to be the first social-networking site in the U.S. Government – a dot.gov site called ExchangesConnect, whose theme is educational exchanges, of all sorts.

A partnership that we catalyzed set to work on the modern  analogue to “Problems of Communism,” a Cold War publication of the USIA from 1952 to 1992. The difference is that the new “Problems of Extremism” won’t be run by a U.S. Government organization but by a foundation supported with both public and private funds and directed by European think tank scholars.

All of these ventures involve a risk. Bureaucrats can’t control the space they create. But the risk is necessary. It is the only way to get our ideas across.

For those who ask how PD 2.0 relates to image burnishing, my answer is that we want to portray the image of a society that grapples with tough issues, lets millions of voices be heard, and believes that, in the end, the best ideas win. And, by the way, this image comports with American reality. As Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message. The Grand Conversation, not what is said within it, is the message.

Probably our best-known Grand Conversation was the one that began in December, when, after a trip to Bogota, we brought young representatives of two dozen online organizations, along with technologists from companies like Google, Facebook, Howcast, and AT&T, to Columbia University in New York to share best practices in an attempt to find ways to build global youth anti-violence movements.

Our model was the Colombian group that organized using Facebook and stood up to the murderous FARC, putting 12 million people into the streets worldwide a little over a year ago. The march had a real-life effect on the FARC, demoralizing the organization and leading to significant defections.
The New York conference led to the formation of a non-profit group called the Alliance of Youth Movements, which the State Department is planning to help fund and then back away and let it take its own course.

So the best way to show mutual respect is to promote and engage in a mutual conversation. I don’t like the term “listening,” as in “listening tour.” It’s condescending, and it connotes a dialogue: You say something. I listen. Maybe I respond. A broad and deep conversation, with hundreds, thousands, or millions of participants is something far more powerful.

Such a conversation, which we facilitate, shows respect for its participants, and shows confidence in our own values, ideas, and policies — which we believe will gain purchase in this agora, this marketplace of ideas.

And violent extremists, remember, blow up marketplaces. They hate public diplomacy 2.0. Their ideas can’t stand the challenge of criticism and exposure.

Let me close by adding another interest that ties in with the Grand Conversation and with mutual respect: It is to expand digital communication around the world, especially in the most vulernable places, like Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, and more. Such expansion should be the policy of the U.S. and its allies, and it should be a smart and efficient policy, implemented with inexpensive computers, like the One Laptop Per Child Program, and mobile phones, the cheapest digital infrastructure.

Again, this is an approach easily encompassed by the Obama zeitgeist. It makes sense for this administration. My main admonition is: We don’t have the luxury of time. People want to destroy us and our way of life. Get on with it!

Tags: Grand Conversation, Joseph Nye, Marc Lynch, One Laptop Per Child, Rob Satloff, Washington Institute of Near East Policy