A Man in Full

Posted on January 24, 2014 by James Thomas Snyder

U.S. Rep. George Miller (via McClatchy)

U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., announced this month he would not seek reelection this year after serving nearly 40 years in the House of Representatives. By any measure that is an extraordinary political career, but it is all the more so for what he accomplished during his tenure. And it’s all the more important to point out that in this strange gloaming moment when political success is measured by the strength of opposing polarity, George was — is — a man who insisted on getting things done. That is what politics is for. It is the art of the impossible. Or in the words of Ted Kennedy about his older brother, “I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘why not?'”

That is not necessarily a liberal precept. George was open to reforming the Endangered Species Act, worked with the teachers union over education reform, and empowered the Chemical Safety Board to investigate industrial accidents rather than litigate them. (A recent reminder of that legacy, and George’s fight for clean drinking water, came during the recent accident in West Virginia). And he always did it, whether in the minority or the majority, with Republican partners — even President George W. Bush.

George represented my home town until redistricting went into effect last year. He was my Congressman when I worked for him in the late 1990s. In the arc of his career my service wasn’t very long, but it felt like a compressed graduate education in American politics. Every day, every minute on the job was freighted with import and insight. I like to think I had the good sense to recognize the privileged position I had then, working for a senior Member of Congress, and one so good and dedicated to his job. (If I didn’t then, I sure as hell do now.)

He cultivated good people working for him as well, and they form an awesome alumni association: Ilir Zherka, a legislative counsel, most recently led the effort to get voting rights for the District of Columbia. Charles Barone, an education policy expert, continues his work for Democrats for Education Reform. John Laurence, long George’s chief of staff, became Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff during her Speakership. I’m amazed that I worked with them.

George demonstrated what could get done and that has informed my general optimism about politics. Working for him more than 15 years ago I saw him pass legislation to extend health care to poor children. Two administrations later, the Affordable Care Act extended those same benefits to most Americans. The impossible became possible. That’s what politics is for.

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How This Could End

Posted on December 27, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Old Kabul, 2006. Photo by John Moore/Getty Pictures (via NATO Review)

A Washington Post/ABC News poll of the American public released before Christmas may have been ignored for the negative tone typical of surveys of this type. Thirteen years into the war in Afghanistan and months away from a definitive withdrawal, the conflict is far from popular. But buried in the poll and the story, which also includes a recent AP/gfk poll reporting similar results, is an ominous trend of American public opinion that could slam the door on our political effort in that country, turn us away from the Afghan people, and irreparably rend the strategic relationship we have built in Central Asia. This only becomes clear when you understand the nature and history of public opinion and American entanglements overseas.

The Washington Post/ABC poll reported that a record high number of Americans believe the U.S. effort in Afghanistan “has not been worth it”. This characterization is different from saying they support the war or support the troops, the President or his foreign policy. This is a referendum on the entire effort.

The AP/gfk poll used similar language, with 57 percent of American suggesting that we “did the wrong thing” by invading the country in 2001-2002. The Washington Post poll demonstrates a majority of Americans have felt this way for some time, at least since early 2010.

The language is similar — but importantly not identical — to language that Gallup used to track American public opinion in Vietnam and Iraq, and this is why we should look very closely at the Post language and wait to see if Gallup might confirm it. Because the Gallup language is the absolute bellwether of political support for counterinsurgency efforts like those we are undertaking in Afghanistan.

Source: Gallup

Specifically, Gallup asks whether the effort (in Vietnam, in Iraq) was “a mistake”. And once U.S. public opinion tips definitively to a majority believing the effort was “a mistake,” political support for the war has been irreparably undermined. The geopolitical consequences are obvious. Americans believed the war in Vietnam was “a mistake” after the Tet Offensive in 1968 and material American support for the South Vietnamese government began to evaporate leading up to a full withdrawal in 1972. Saigon collapsed under North Vietnamese assault in 1975 and Americans effectively ignored the takeover by Khmer Rouge communist radicals of neighboring Cambodia the same year.

Americans similarly turned on the war in Iraq definitively in September 2006 — remember the “thumpin'” President Bush and Congressional Republicans received in November that year — and only a token military presence remains in the country today. Longstanding political-military efforts like these cannot last without broad-based political support at home. All major American engagements since World War II started with high public approval rates at the outbreak of hostilities.

“Mistake” seems to be the all-important language defining the collective change of mind, and the other polls’ characterizations don’t quite capture its definitive connotation. But they come close, and that’s ominous. Insurgencies like the one we are fighting, and supporting the Afghan government in fighting in their country, on average last about 15 years. As the old expression goes, the insurgent has the time while we hold the watch. That is especially true for democracies. But that does not mean we and our Afghan friends cannot prevail.

That requires leadership. I have written before about how the President does not seem to carry his rhetorical talent over to matters of war and conflict. I have also written about how we may not have the language to articulate progress and contextualize setbacks in an insurgency. And this past year has certainly assailed the President on other issues. But he has also consistently demonstrated that when he has needed to rally the public to him, he can. Now is the time to do so, before it’s too late. Fortunately, the same Washington Post poll also reported that 55 percent of Americans also supported leaving some U.S. forces in Afghanistan to continue counterinsurgency operations, which suggests that we have not quite made our minds up about this endeavor.

Because too much is at stake. We have committed too much to our friends, taken the fight too hard to our enemies, and borne too much sacrifice, to walk away from the struggle. The struggle is not so much with al Qaeda, or the Taliban, or their kith, but for the desire to establish a decent society with commerce and institutions that promote and preserve the dignity of people in a region that has long lacked these things. It is that lack that our enemies have exploited.

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Now Available: The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy

Posted on October 24, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Today my latest book, The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy, is available from Palgrave Macmillan. It can be ordered from Amazon.com, the publisher, or from any book store in your neighborhood.

The Challenge of Public Diplomacy is based on my years working in the Public Diplomacy Division on NATO’s International Staff and brings the crucial experience of a public affairs practitioner crossing the last three feet every day to the important discussion of policy — a perspective I feel is all too often missing and is the primary reason why I wrote this book.

I relate my personal experience to illuminate the proposals I make in the book, which include deconflicting military public affairs and information operations, expanding our international arts portfolio, liberating U.S. international broadcasting, reforming language education, expanding our understanding of international public opinion, and taking a more aggressive approach with our political detractors.

As I’ve used this site to write about public diplomacy, I’ll continue to expand (and likely correct) my proposals, so please return often for updates. Feel free, too, to contact me by e-mail (in “About,” above) or through the comment forms, below. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Culture Shut Down

Posted on October 2, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

US National Park Police and National Park employees direct visitors away from the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial yesterday. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images via The Grio)

It was hard not to feel a sense of schadenfreude watching Republicans yesterday as they wriggled in a box of their own design, desperately proposing to re-fund those “non-essential” elements of government they were so keen last month to de-fund in order to spike the Affordable Care Act. No doubt reeling from the effects of seeing veterans barred from the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, or this morning’s Washington Post front showing cops barricading the Martin Luther King Memorial on the Tidal Basin (see above), or seeing millions crash the ACA online exchanges, Sen. Ted Cruz suggested a series of piecemeal continuing resolutions to re-open popular parts of government like the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution.

But this is a small and fleeting feeling. Something much larger and more ominous has happened as the doors have shut on our national museums and art galleries, and gates have gone up around our national monuments and public parks. The National Park System — which includes the monumental core of the nation’s capital — is the largest of its kind in the world, a vast archipelago of public lands. The Smithsonian is the most-visited museum complex in the world, no matter what the Louvre may claim.

So what the Republicans have wrought — and despite my usual nonpartisan tone I blame with animus this entirely avoidable and artificial crisis on the House Republican Caucus — is a shutdown of publicly accessible American culture. And for all the usual raving from the cultural right about the decrepitude of American culture and the stupidity of government funding of cultural projects such as NPR, PBS and the NEA, the finest examples of American and world culture and values are in fact collected, protected and curated by government mandate for anyone to enjoy. This obvious fact has now very suddenly occurred to the Republicans as they see thousands of tourists milling about the capital, deprived of their own national patrimony by Congressional cupidity.

From left to right: Jasmin Mujanovic, Azra Aksamija and Susan Pearce at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

My friends with the artistic collective CULTURESHUTDOWN could be forgiven for the prophetic irony we may feel for warning less than two weeks ago of just such a trend toward the official denigration of national culture. Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Prof. Susan Pearce of East Carolina University, Jasmin Mujanovic of York University, and Prof. Azra Aksamija of MIT spoke about the parliamentary paralysis that has suspended operations at six cultural institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina without official status and called for an end to the political crisis in that country.

We warned that similar obstacles were cropping up in other countries like Hungary and Bulgaria. I even joked, unintentionally, about a world where the US Congress failed to agree — that’s when the laughs started — on whether the Smithsonian should continue as a federal institution, just as the Bosnian parliament has. In retrospect that was mere foreshadowing of the fiscal shutdown that followed Oct. 1 and shut down all of the Smithsonian museums and galleries in earnest.

Of course most of the rest of the government continues to be funded and to operate. Planes must be controlled in the sky, our borders must be defended, meat must be inspected, wars must be pursued. Our way of life must be protected. All of that is essential governmental activity.

But what remains “non-essential,” including the patrimony that we curate and cherish, represents that way of life and what it means to be an American — more specifically, how we are American. Just as narrow-minded chauvinists in Bosnia, who hate the idea of a Bosnian identity incorporating all its faiths as well as Bosnia’s pre-history, have strangled the institutions that present that plurality, so too now have the small-minded ideologues in Congress held American heritage hostage to advance their agenda.

If our representatives could now see the best of our history arrayed in the museums, and the land over which men like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt once trekked — they are closed now, but I’m sure exceptions could be made for Members of Congress — they’d learn about characters much bigger, and generous, and large-minded, than this runt litter of small and mean and petty men and women now assembled.

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The Image and the Message in Syria

Posted on September 11, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

President Barack Obama addresses the nation Tuesday night. Evan Vucci/Pool/AP Photo via ABC News

President Barack Obama, an able writer and orator, is substantially challenged when he must speak about armed conflict. His formal speeches about warfare – whether he is lecturing the Nobel Committee in Oslo about just war theory, or muddling his Afghanistan strategy before the Corps of Cadets at West Point – are among his worst. Whether that is because his foreign policy speechwriters are among his poorest, or he is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the subject, I don’t know. But his deficiency as a speaker on matters of war and peace is important and notable, since last night he had suddenly to lead his country into a fight rather than out of one.

I should note that writing and talking about war and its prospect clearly, lucidly and compellingly are very difficult. Despite the drumbeat of war the previous 12 years, American presidents in fact don’t speak about these matters very often. Most conflicts since the 1940s have been wars “of choice,” so the saying goes – but in reality most of them have required U.S. intervention and therefore an articulation of the reasons and means to the American people. That always requires the American president to speak to the public, to rally them, and explain why we fight. Unless we have been attacked – which has only happened three times in our history – this is always a difficult argument to make.

That’s what President Obama did last night to explain why American force is needed to punish the Syrian regime for its recent use of chemical weapons during its civil war. It’s strange to say for the President, who is normally so extraordinarily eloquent and poignant, who can find and distill the essence of even the most knotty and controversial political issues, that he still struggles with these issues. He’s in good company – not many of his predecessors did much better articulating why American military might must be brought to bear in distant countries. But it is important to examine why his remarks were so tepid.

First, the President has at least as much a fixation on the indelible image as his predecessor did. It seemed at times that for President Bush the only reality of the vicious civil war in Iraq was what he saw on television. And so the image constantly appeared in his rhetoric about the war: not the war itself, but what we saw of the war — a sort of collective, and secondary, visual experience. This both minimized and misrepresented the war, because by 2006 even television couldn’t contain the apocalyptic violence destroying the country: 600 attacks each day, two million refugees, thousands of Iraqi dead, hundreds of American casualties. The spectacular attacks that broke through the chaos and noise, such as the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, were only single pieces of a madness that threatened to overwhelm everything else – least of which, but importantly, was our understanding of the roots of the conflict.

Unfortunately, President Obama fell into the same rhetorical trope in his speech about Syria – as if the only proof that mattered were “the videos” of the recent chemical attack on Ghuta, an eastern suburb of Damascus. That is, the President issued the equivalent of a verbal hyperlink to the public. Click here, he said in essence, this is what you need to see. But instead of “seeing” these horrible crimes, why doesn’t the President simply assert them? He already mounted a pretty damning case. His rhetoric would be far more blunt, direct and true for it.

The President made no attempts to link this attack to prior suspected or alleged uses of chemical weapons. That is a reasonable omission, given the possibly tenuous intelligence regarding those attacks. But he also did not link the chemical weapons use to the larger, indiscriminate campaign against the Syrian people – the attacks by aircraft and helicopters, armored vehicles and tanks, and artillery – that have escalated, with grim logic, to the application of these unconventional weapons.

But this omission also explains the awkward position that the President, and our country, are in. Weary of war and reluctant to fight, it is difficult to parse the difference between these weapons of mass destruction. Both have killed thousands and forced millions of refugees to flee. The red line the President has drawn therefore may seem arbitrary. Why suddenly worry about chemical weapons that have killed 1,400, when the Syrian army and air force have without recourse to unconventional weapons killed ten times as many? The red line is the only thing suddenly implicating us.

Of course we know the difference and why the line must be drawn, for the sake of the region and international security, as the President plainly put it last night. But that leads to second peculiar trope the President returned to again and again during his address: the need to “send a message” to Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, either through the threat of force or the application of force itself. But force is not a message. Force is a tool of policy, a means to conform your adversary’s behavior to your will. To see it otherwise is to kill people over a telegram. The President should stop talking about “message” and simply deliver it: Assad must surrender his chemical weapons or face the consequences. But that means the President must be willing to deliver those consequences and take the risks to do so.

Perhaps the President wasn’t so clear about all this because he recognized that to do so would return him to the political-ontological quandary that faced the United States and the international community in Iraq after 1991. Iraq resisted verifiable disarmament, even after its chemical weapons stocks were destroyed during Operation Desert Fox in 1998. The CIA took such resistance as proof the stocks existed. The resistance was a bluff because, as Assad has amply demonstrated, those stocks were on hand not to attack the West or defend the nation from invasion but to protect the regime from an internal uprising.

But once international law and inspections were invoked by Russia, the question of whether Syria will disarm becomes political, not technical. And that question could drag out for years. In the meantime, there is nothing keeping Assad from using all the other means available to him to crush out the opposition while we watch.

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9 Things I Learned Crossing the Last Three Feet

Posted on August 11, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

From the cover image of the most recent Small Wars Journal. Malian Army Col. Youssouf Traore, left, practices the use of a ring cutter on U.S. Army Sgt. La Tonia R. Luna, with the 807th Medical Detachment Support Command during a medical equipment demonstration in Mopti, Mali, Feb. 7, 2012. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Kimberly Trumbull.

My latest article, “9 Things I Learned Crossing the Last Three Feet,” was published today in Small Wars Journal, which published an earlier article I wrote about the Arab Spring and the repercussions around the Benghazi incident.

My sincere gratitude goes to the editors of Small Wars Journal for agreeing to publish my article. I greatly admire the breadth and creativity of the work they publish and it is a distinct honor to appear under their banner.

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NATO Wins, Again

Posted on June 18, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (right) during the transition cermony, June 18 2013. (NATO)

Today NATO handed off operational security responsibility for all of Afghanistan to the Afghan government, a dramatic turning point in the war that began in the days following September 11, 2001. But as a former member of the NATO International Staff and informal scholar of the organization, I can predict what will happen next: a series of box-kit essays by academics on the make about how NATO has outlived its original purpose and, of course, an entirely contradictory set of kippered set pieces about how NATO has utterly failed to bring about a stable, secure and prosperous Afghanistan. More Ph.D.’s have been converted to fellowships and tenure-track positions on NATO’s back than I have patience to count.

It’s considered gauche to issue bald declamations like the one I’m about to state, but I’m going to do it anyway in order to illuminate my point: NATO wins again. There will be the usual NATO naysaying nabobs out there who insist on believing that 28 Western democracies can’t find consensus to order lunch, much less how to rout a remorseless 14^th-century insurgency. And lest some believe the war is lost – the transfer ceremony itself was marred by a bomb attack – remind yourself who’s running the government, security services, borders, businesses, NGOs, mosques, universities, schools, hospitals and clinics. And then remind yourself who, exactly, requested peace and reconciliation talks with the Americans from their office in Qatar.

The Cold War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan. Never in history has one organization, over so long a period, prevailed over such a diverse array of adversaries. No one should doubt the ability, creativity, and tenacity of a group of like-minded democracies bound by an oath of common defense. That such defense could extend as far as the Hindu Kush is testament to all the NATO Member countries – and nearly two dozen partner countries – committed to supporting Afghanistan in the years ahead.

Because NATO is an alliance of values, rather than of interest or convenience, the organization has endured longer than the leagues and ententes of generations past. And because its founders recognized NATO’s political significance foremost, its strength has always been political first and last. These are the two most important attributes the organization’s detractors consistently miss. Yet they are what set NATO apart and guarantee its success – and our security – for the future.

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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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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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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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