Coming in October: “The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy”

Posted on May 31, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

I’m pleased to announce that Palgrave Macmillan USA will publish my book, The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy in October 2013.

Based on my six years’ experience in public diplomacy at NATO and more than 15 years in strategic and political communications, Challenge explores the experience of public diplomacy and makes recommendations for improving American PD policy and practice.

Importantly, the book focuses on practice as the critical ground to cover — the “last three feet” in the words of Edward R. Murrow — in order for our public diplomacy to succeed. I look at not just the traditional modes of public diplomacy such as educational exchange, cultural engagement and international broadcasting but propose launching an arts restoration initiative, reforming military communications, expanding the definition of public opinion, reconsidering the Internet, and partnering with civil society.

I’ll launch the book with Palgrave Macmillan when it’s published but I hope you’ll look for it when it’s on book shelves and online after the summer.

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“Lithuanians Value Deeds”

Posted on May 24, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Old Vilnius, Lithuania (via National Geographic)

I’m happy to share an interview with a former NATO colleague published in the current journal of the UK Speechwriter’s Guild, The Speechwriter. Neringa Vaisbrode is Lithuanian and after she left the International Staff remained in Brussels to write for prominent personalities in her home country in English and Lithuanian (which are not the only languages she speaks!). Her perspective on writing and communicating in the complex cultural and linguistic environment of modern Europe is very interesting and her interview is worth reading.

As a language Lithuanian joins Hungarian and Albanian among Europe’s linguistic “black sheep” (written with affection for my Lithuanian, Albanian, and Hungarian friends!). Unlike the Romance or Slavic languages, Lithuanian shares little in common with its neighbors and can be traced back directly to its oldest Indo-European roots. No more than 3.5 million people speak Lithuanian, but it is in no danger of dying out. Lithuanians protect and preserve their language with great pride, particularly given their country’s long history.

Lithuania was once a dominant power in northeastern Europe. But following a series of wars, plague and famine, Lithuania came under the influence of Russia and was eventually occupied first by the Czars and then by the Soviet Union. The Russians suppressed education and publishing in Lithuanian to assert political control. But Lithuanians kept their language alive underground while also developing a healthy skepticism for official rhetoric during Communist rule, which lasted until independence was achieved in 1991. As a result of this foreign influence, Neringa notes, “if we spot good rhetoric, we suspect a hidden agenda.” Practically speaking, this places the modern politician, and the speechwriter, in a difficult spot. How do you communicate effectively and professionally if the public views those attributes as a fault?

Neringa also has good, simple counsel for writing for multilingual audiences — the typical audience in official Europe today — which tracks closely my advice for speaking to English as a Second Language learners. (Writing for them, she says, shouldn’t be a test of English vocabulary and grammar.) And her mark of good writing appears to apply in any language: it should stand on its own, self-evident, without elaboration or annotation.

Without summarizing all of Neringa’s interview here, I would add that it’s always a pleasure to discover my friends’ favorite books and guides that I’ve not yet read. Neringa lists among hers Jose Saramago, Susan Jones and Philip Collins.

Special bonus: don’t miss The Speechwriter‘s turgid outtakes from the Bank of England Governor’s recent speech following Neringa’s interview.

You can read all of The Speechwriters by visiting the UK Speechwriter’s Guild here and clicking on “blog”.

My thanks to Neringa for her permission to reprint (and promote) her interview here!

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12 Articles on Public Diplomacy Practice

Posted on May 22, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence I published a feature article on public diplomacy practice in the summer 2013 issue of USC’s Public Diplomacy Magazine. You can read the article online here or download the pdf version.

A previous interview with PD Magazine in the Summer 2009 edition is available here.

I extend my sincere thanks to the editors at Public Diplomacy Magazine for accepting and publishing my article.

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An Assault on Joseph Nye, Part Three: Keeping It Real

Posted on May 13, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

U.S. Air Force C-130 drops relief supplies over Kenya, June 2010 (U.S. Department of Defense)

In my previous two posts, I’ve argued how the hard power/soft power Hobson’s Dichotomy of Joseph Nye fails at the level of language and on the level of theory. Here I will contend that Nye’s very popular international relations theory also fails as a predictive, policy or practical theoretical standard. In short, it simply cannot anticipate, nor accurately reflect, actions taken by states in the real world. This is the quintessential yardstick of international relations theory, and it fails by any reasonable standard.

Nye works especially well in the academic world, where his bifurcated nomenclature provides two big classification buckets to throw theory into. So we see dozens of papers and conference presentations that categorize what does or does not constitute hard or soft power solutions to all the world’s problems. But those who actually work to solve those problems never use these terms. “Soft power”per se doesn’t help the U.N. in Congo, or get power to Kabul, or end the war in Syria, or set up a government in South Sudan, or reduce CO2 emissions, or end AIDS, or eliminate piracy.

But Brazilian peacekeepers can, and so can plugging into the Uzbekistan power grid, or threatening a no-fly zone, or issuing USAID good governance contracts, or implementing Europe-wide carbon-trading, or spending on a massive scale to bring down drug prices, and deploying naval vessels to escort commercial vessels. In other words, States use modalities – means, tools, usually people and things – to exercise power over other states and non-state actors. And good theory will more accurately predict which of these modalities will be employed to solve these various problems. Nye’s theory, while primarily prescriptive, simply can’t do this job.

Nye places enormous and undue faith in “soft” implements that cajole and convince adversaries and reluctant allies alike. But he conflates the individual elements of national power – aid, diplomacy, national forces or strategic communications – while fetishizing the rather mundane modalities of international politics with a kind of sorcerer’s magic.

In a normal diplomatic parley, for example, all of these tools would be either arranged or arrayed for maximum advantage over the interlocutor. The most powerful negotiator is the one with the most tools in play, the one who can give the most away for the maximum national interest in exchange. An excellent example of this was the perpetual sticking point over the reduction or elimination of strategic nuclear forces between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States kept missile defense off the table and the Soviets, who were convinced this would lead to a consumptive new arms race, refused to enter into an agreement. In other words, the U.S. had something the Soviet Union wanted, so the long-term advantage went to the United States which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, kept missile defense and negotiated START with Russia and the post-Soviet successor states anyway.

From a strictly theoretical standpoint, it’s not even entirely clear whether this would be an execution of hard or soft power. Missile defense as articulated in the 1980s was merely an idea. But it was an idea that cut to the heart of the problem in the Soviet Union, which was an economy that spent an estimated 25 percent of its GDP (perhaps higher) on defense; in effect the Soviet economy was building tanks to feed itself. Gorbachev knew he could never drive perestroika toward a consumer economy unless he could reduce defense spending and the military’s control over resources. Missile defense guaranteed an indefinite arms race and virtually unlimited control over the Soviet economy by the military. There was nothing soft about the American threat at all, or its effect on 200 million Soviet subjects, for as abstract as missile defense seemed at the time.

Most middle-power states – which defines virtually all of America’s allies along with the BRICs – view diplomacy not as a “soft” means to influence other countries but as a deadly serious business, a zero-sum gambit where the national interest reigns paramount. There is nothing to give away; no effort is sacrificed to advance or protect sovereign needs or rights. This is effectively war by other means because, with the national interest so thinly protected, there is very little else worth fighting for. It is a very hard business with high risks and very little margin for error.

Under these circumstances, only a very rich and powerful country like the United States can afford to be “soft” – that is, giving, charitable and big. Our allies enjoy American generosity and, quite contrary to their public portrayal, work hard to match it in their own ways. But our adversaries, at least at the government level, are not influenced by our generosity or charity. They do not understand it because they simply cannot, under any circumstances, afford to give something away without an equally valuable quid pro quo. At worst, they see our generosity as a weakness or a threat; more usually it is viewed with incomprehension or just drunk up like free booze at the company Christmas party: the only people dumber than those giving it away are those not drinking. In any event, this “soft” aspect of our national power is not nearly as influential with governments – and may in fact be far more detrimental – than Nye maintains.

I’ll admit that this discussion does not address the real locus of power, which is public opinion, and I am strongly inclined to believe that the moral aspects of generosity, charity, bigness and support do go far to help sway the public. (Indeed, one of the most frustrating points I had to argue when I worked overseas was that contrary to public misperception, Americans are the most generous people in the world in real and per capita terms. That people think the opposite is the result of perhaps the most successful whisper campaign ever mounted.) That will always help us in the long run, particularly in repressive states like Russia, China and Iran that lie to its people about us to maintain control. But Nye’s theory functions in the existing state system, more or less, and that is where we must leave it. That is also where it fails.

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An Assault on Joseph Nye, Part Two: “Power and Violence are Opposites”

Posted on May 9, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

“Down with Milosevic!”, Belgrade, 1999 (via BBC)

In a previous discussion, I attacked Joseph Nye’s “soft power/hard power” theory at the level of language, effectively calling his terms unclear and mealy-mouthed substitutes for clearer, more precise terms we can use like force and coercion, sanctions or diplomacy. Nye has made international relations theory less clear and transparent for the application of his two terms and I tried to reverse that trend with my own replacements.

At the same time, Nye’s ideas don’t work as theory, either. Nye has offered a Hobson’s Dichotomy, a false choice that doesn’t exist in the real world. A Hobson’s Dichotomy poses us with two falsely opposed choices that may not offer a solution to the problem set. That is what soft and hard power effectively presents us. It is a trick of language that also gives us an untrue sense of mastering reality. The reality of international politics is far too complex for that. To put this simply: as a Hobson’s Dichotomy, Nye’s idea is a narrows that squeezes out rather than includes alternative or opposing means to achieve political change.

In political reality, decision-makers don’t choose from one quiver labeled “soft power” and another labeled “hard power” when taking action. If their judgment is keen, they look for the best tools available to them to achieve the most desirable outcome. If they are lucky, and their country is truly powerful (like ours), they will have a wide variety of means available to apply to what will be a unique, complicated, and dynamically evolving situation and environment.

Nye’s theoretical failure goes beyond the toolkit available to decision-makers. “Soft power” fails to take into account civil society, international movements, and faith groups. For Nye, there is nothing like the Roman Catholic Church, Islam, or Buddhism. For Nye, there is nothing like the Freeze, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the Color Revolutions, or the Arab Spring. Each of these has had profound international political effects – in other words, by his own definition they are powerful — but they simply can’t be accounted for by Nye’s political theory.

What makes these movements all the more interesting – and possible – is the flow of information, inspiration and support across borders. There would have been no revolution against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia without Solidarity, and there would have been no uprising in Tunisia without Serbia, and no Cairo without Tunisia. To Nye, this does not account for soft power, or any kind of power for that matter, because it is not enabled by a state — even though these movements peacefully changed the means of government and the norms for governing in more than a dozen countries.

Boston, April 15 (via The Telegraph)

Nye’s theory also fails to account for terrorism. He dispenses with terrorism as “depending on soft power” (my emphasis) without defining terrorism per se as either hard (force) or soft (as I have defined it before, power qua power). Reading between the lines, then, Nye’s theory cannot really accommodate terrorism: it simply does not belong in Nye’s universe.

If we take most observers’ understanding that terrorism is a tool of the weak – a meansof the un-powerful – even if they are state-sponsored — then terrorism falls away from this discussion entirely. Nye may get partial credit for recognizing terrorism requires other tools to succeed, but it is not a tool of power or the powerful in and of itself. Nye’s theory of two “buckets” does not have enough room for either political movements or terrorism — which pretty much defines the political dynamism of the previous decade.

An effective theory of power will take into account terrorism and the power wielded by ordinary people through collective action, whether in faith groups, civil society, or international movements. Power, in the end, is mass, and mass can really be found in the minds of millions or billions of individual human beings. Only military theorists really understand the importance of this collective mind in political affairs, and even then the American military tradition has been slow or loath to understand the relationship of the public to the political.

Clausewitz for example wrote about the “moral forces” in war affecting public opinion as “among the most important”. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote about “the crowd in action,” dating the phenomenon back to ancient Greek warfare. David Galula, writing about insurgency, noted that the guerrilla could “still win” with “no positive policy” but “good propaganda” — that is, directly influencing the population. David Petraeus, drawing off all these shrewd observations, argued that military communications could be the “decisive logical line of operation” by communicating directly with the public in counterinsurgency operations.

We still struggle to understand the motivations and goals of terrorism. The attack on the Boston Marathon is the most recent expression of this ambivalence, but almost daily bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan should remind us of the continuing struggle as well. Theoretically we wrestle to understand whether terrorism is an effective political weapon.

Nonetheless as a theoretical matter it should be clear terrorism is violence, not force, and as a practical measure it should be clear that terrorism is a tool of the weak, that it leverages political entities that are not as powerful when measured against the mass movements outlined above. Hannah Arendt has written precisely that “power and violence are opposites”. This is probably the most mordant indictment of Nye’s theory, since it quite simply excludes terrorism from any consideration by Nye. It fully supports my contention that Nye’s theory constitutes not an expansive analysis of power but an exclusive narrows.

The real pain extracted from bombings or mass attacks can mitigate that inherent weakness. Violence can, on a macabre balance sheet, equate to political power but only if state authorities or the public mind are willing to allow it. Still, as violence, terrorism is only relegated to simply another tool – like economic sanctions, or diplomacy – which states or non-state actors use to affect international affairs. This by no means justifies terrorism, but it does account for the practice. So far, that is more than what Joseph Nye can do.

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Misreading International Public Opinion…Again

Posted on May 7, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

(Korean Beacon)

Public opinion is like screen resolution: the more data points you have, the more accurate your picture is likely to be. This came to mind reading Washington Post foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher’s latest post about South Korean public opinion on the eve of a visit by South Korean President Park Geun-hye to Washington. Fisher notes that South Korean approval of President Barack Obama, as measured by the Pew Research Center’s recent poll, has never been higher – at 77 percent, enviously nearly double his current 45 percent approval rating domestically.

While the President’s approval ratings are a decent barometer – a thumb’s-up endorsement of an individual at a particular point in time – they shouldn’t be substituted for a comprehensive understanding of public opinion. Our relationship with other countries is simply too complex and dynamic for the political equivalent of a movie review blurb. Fisher alludes to this at the top of his blog, but then sidesteps the obvious points – such as the dramatic change in South Korea’s approval of the American president came with a dramatic change in presidents in 2008. That occurred almost everywhere in the world at the same time. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s a fact of public opinion and political science: the world swooned for Barack Obama. Huge number spikes – dozens of points in many cases between Bush and Obama – were not strictly or even partially explained by a prospective overnight change in U.S. foreign policy.

Reading The Obamas by Jodi Kantor recently one got the sense of an almost alternative reality for the First Family during the President’s first term – berated and despised at home, adored and celebrated abroad. The German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends put his approval rating among Germans at messianic levels – 92 percent in 2009, merely supermenschen at 79 percent in 2012. His approval numbers remain above 65 percent on average for the European Union and Western Europe even today.

That said, when people around the world think about the United States, they think about a lot more than just the President. The Pew polls, whose depth Fisher unfortunately ignores in his post (possibly because Pew is doling out their 2013 data set incrementally), take this complexity into account. People think about Americans, American culture, the American way of doing business, American science and technology, American ideas and customs, American democracy, and other considerations about America and Americans. Pew has polled on these questions across more than three dozen countries for more than a decade.

So South Koreans like our President, and they like us, and our technological prowess. They like our way of doing business, too, and our democracy (and at rates that would make our Congress envious). But importantly, they are considerably less enthusiastic about our culture, ideas and customs. It’s an interesting contradiction: how can you like Americans without liking who we are and what we do as a people? But that’s the way it is.

Such contradictions are rife in polls like these, but they are what make them interesting and worth learning more through other sources (Gallup, for example, and the Transatlantic Trends). They should also give us pause about making categorical judgments about how people around the world view us, because that view is decidedly mixed, fluid and contradictory. Depending on differing values and histories, people can enjoy or disdain our culture, like or dislike us, admire or reject our democracy. Every region and country is different, and people within those regions and countries are different and contradict one another.

Those are the data points that help make the whole picture. It’s a complicated, changing picture to be sure and it’s what makes international politics so volatile — but also enjoyable and hopeful.

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An Intellectual Assault on Joseph Nye: Part One

Posted on May 1, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Joseph Nye’s theory and advocacy of “soft power,” articulated in the early 1990s and developed during the last 15 years, have been a touchstone for virtually anyone studying or writing about international relations. It’s been impossible, particularly, to write about public diplomacy without having to throw it obligatorily into the custom-made “soft power” box that Nye built. In summary, Nye believes the fundamental aspects of effective power are changing; that this has become more “soft” in recent decades; and for the United States to remain dominant in global affairs it must adapt to wielding this “soft power” more effectively.

I’ve long found Nye’s theory troublesome but it took me some time to understand why. I don’t think he understands power, force and coercion and the nuance of their employment in foreign affairs. The strange dichotomy of “soft power” versus “hard power” long bothered me because it seemed to try to articulate something very complex by using mutually complementary contrasts, like trying to describe a Picasso using only “light blue” and “dark blue”.

What follows is the first in a series of assaults on Nye’s theory. By assault I mean I intend to take territory and to replace what I hope to destroy in the process.

I’ll start from a position of strength: Nye’s theory fails at the level of language. Briefly put, the “soft power/hard power” paradigm clutters more than it clarifies. In an attempt to provide a simple differentiating factor between aspects of national power, Nye has only blurred important distinctions beyond measure.

The absurdity of Nye’s apparent dichotomy is inherent in the words he applies, which pairs opposing modifiers to the same underlying object; specifically, he discusses power which may be “hard” or “soft”. To give a sense of what I mean, we may as well be using “More Power” and “Not-Power” or “Less Power” for all the additional clarity his distinction brings. There is a whiff of Orwellian Newspeak to this. Orwell’s 1984 philologist Syme would have liked “soft power”: Why try to articulate or describe this in more precise language when “power” and a modifier (“smart” comes to mind) serve the purpose just as well? The result, as Orwell has argued elsewhere, defeats complex thought.

This is no post-modern critique. It demonstrates at a practical level the problem of the language involved. What should bring more clarity makes this subject more obscure because it begs the question of what, exactly, power is (a specific point I hope to bring up in a later post). And in this case – which damns Nye the most in my eyes – he is willing to acknowledge that “hard power” is the equivalent of force but then won’t simply use the term, which is much more precise and accurate. But also inconvenient. When is hard power not force? When it’s paired with soft power. Which in turn is what, exactly?

In short, Nye’s language obfuscates. It refuses to name what we are really talking about, which is power and force. When we use language like this, it is far more clear what we are discussing. True power is not attractive, as Nye posits, it is conductive, and can for example include a wide array of (painful) economic and diplomatic tools. The full array of national power includes the organized, destructive and denying tools of military and paramilitary violence. Force can be coercive, punitive and destructive – aspects Nye strangely ignores in his description of power.

And that explains the false comfort we find in “soft power,” which as we will see here is not very soft at all. Nye makes quite a case for attracting and convincing countries, but that is simply another way of talking about diplomacy. Nations talking to one another can come to agreements based on mutual interests or previously unknown commonalities. In addition to forgetting this plain fact of international political history, Nye ignores the nuanced realities of foreign relations, which can also resemble parliamentary “horse-trading” — the barter in trade of deals that have been the staple of international diplomacy for centuries. (Most countries today see America’s ability to give away something for nothing as idiocy, not benevolence. The rest of the world simply can’t afford that kind of charity without an explicit quid pro quo.)

But beyond that we are talking about coercive if nominally peaceful means, non-violent tools that are powerful nonetheless. Coercion short of force can be almost as destructive as warfare and certainly as disruptive. We need look no further than the collapsing economies of the European Union and the power of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (for some) and the stronger economies (Germany foremost) have to wield over them to reform. This is simple power and there is nothing soft about it for the people living under it.

Nye has carved out an advantage for himself, of course, by wrapping up virtually every non-military aspect of national power in the non-threatening mien of “soft power”. But enlarging the basket and giving it an anodyne label should make us all the more suspicious. Because it is the difference among the tools in the various baskets, and the consequences of using them – or not using them – that has real effects for real people. And perhaps Nye, as well as his defenders and detractors, have forgotten that those real people are the ultimate source of power in political life.

I would replace Nye’s soft power language with this: there is only power – the full combined measure of a nation to act on the world — and force is a subset of national power; we have alternative tools of national power that are no less coercive but less destructive such as trade barriers, economic countermeasures, and sanctions. These are rightly labeled power because some countries have greater power (and more tools) than others. We have means to induce, cajole and convince without coercion and these are called diplomacy, public diplomacy, communications and (sometimes) propaganda.

There is nothing to be gainsaid from simplifying to the point of simple-mindedness. That is what, in part, Nye has done. We can use language to describe, accurately and with precision, exactly what power and force are and can do among nations.

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