Religion, politics, and public diplomacy

Today my interview with the Public Diplomacy Council — the association of retired US Information Agency and Foreign Service Officers involved in public diplomacy activities — was published online. I talked to Donald Bishop about my recent book and some other subjects of recent import in the arena of public diplomacy. I was especially pleased to be able to talk about religion and faith.

Once again I am happy to extend my sincere and great thanks to Don Bishop and the Public Diplomacy Council for publishing this interview.

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How This Could End

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

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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The Last Three Feet

Hear my interview with The Public Diplomat’s PDCast, courtesy of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications and its Master’s Program in Public Diplomacy. I talk about working at NATO, my new book, and effective public diplomacy. Many thanks to Michael Ardaiolo for conducting the interview!

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

SnyderFinalToday 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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9 Things I Learned Crossing the Last Three Feet

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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Along the 30th Parallel: What NPR Gets Wrong about Public Opinion and Foreign Aid

NPR’s new headquarters (NPR)

A recent blog post by Greg Myre on NPR’s web site (“Which Nations Hate the U.S.? Often Those Receiving the Most Aid,” July 23) is a typical example of reporting on international public opinion. Myre attempts to correlate a Pew Research Center report on foreign opinion of the United States and a U.S. government site listing our foreign assistance contributions. It’s amisleading piece of work, although not immediately clear on its face, inclined to do more harm than good, more obscuring than illuminating. Myre is an established reporter with Middle East bona fides and should know better.

To give an example of why Myre’s argument is so farcical, I’ll demonstrate how an analogous argument has a higher rate of correlation yet proves exactly nothing – which is only slightly better than I can say for Myre. Myre correlates the “high” U.S. foreign assistance rates for a series of countries, in particular Egypt and Pakistan, with our abysmal public approval ratings in those countries (in the case of the Pew report contrasting to China). So far, so good – we gave Egypt about $1.5 billion mostly in military aid and have a 15 percent approval rating to show for it. Similarly, our public approval ratings in contrast to China don’t show so well for foreign assistance above $1 billion in countries like Pakistan. The only country that has a high approval rating of the United States, and received $3 billion, is Israel.

But my equally arbitrary measure has a higher rate of correlation: every country that receives more than $1 billion in U.S. assistance – and includes Myre’s Jordan and Palestine, which receive around a half-billion dollars – falls along the 30thparallel, including Israel. Clearly, the United States has some sort of vital interest along this region of the world and is willing to spend whatever it takes to secure it. In the politics of international aid, the 30th parallel could be called the One Billion Dollar Parallel.

My correlation is absurd, of course. But so is Myre’s. Because correlating real dollars against public opinion percentages is ridiculous when we are measuring 1) vastly different economies and populations as well as 2) greatly different political contexts. For example, Israel and the United States are close allies. Public opinion of the United States is strong in Israel. In the case of Pakistan and the United States, China is considered by Pakistan as a bulwark against the latter’s primary enemy, India. Myre cited aid to and abysmal approval ratings in Egypt, the Palestinian territories and Jordan, all of which have very specific histories with our ally Israel which must surely outweigh a few billion dollars – never mind the fact that when the Egyptian army arrested President Muhammad Morsi, American-built M-1 tanks and M-113 APCs rolled through city streets to assert control. Egyptians know very well what $1.5 billion in U.S. aid buys them.

And these numbers look very different in Africa, where the United States is popular. Former President George W. Bush poured billions of dollars into AIDS/HIV relief on the continent, and the public opinion in those countries reflect that. Look at South Africa, Ghana and Uganda in the Pew poll. Both Uganda and South Africa received more than $400 million from the United States, but they don’t quite fit Myre’s thesis.

At the same time, Myre doesn’t even try to examine what China gives to any of these countries – probably because China gives hardly anything. China is exploiting many of the countries in Africa for raw materials, and delivering shoddy infrastructure in return.

It is beyond my mathematics ability, as well as my patience, to put together a complete matrix that would more accurately capture what you could expect to get in public opinion for every American aid dollar. That is clearly the implication of Myre’s article. You would have to zero out each economy and population, as well as aid and public approval rating, and compare those numbers as a common denominator or baseline measure.

Let’s try this admittedly crude measure…

(Real dollar aid / GDP ) x (population x public approval rating %) = baseline

…and compare Egypt and Israel for the sake of illustration. Just inputting the numbers into my equation demonstrates the absurdity of correlating aid spending to public opinion:

Egypt: ($1,559,300,000 / $548,800,000,000) x (85,294,388 x 16 %) = 27,294

Israel: ($3,100,000,000 / $252,800,000,000) x (7,707,042 x 83 %) = 76,762

(Population and GDP figures are taken from the CIA World Factbook. Aid figures and public opinion drawn from the sites listed above.)

In other words, using these baselines, for slightly less than double the real dollar investment in aid to Egypt, we get nearly triple the “return” per dollar in aid to Israel. But putting this into such a stark numeric contrast further heightens the outlandishness of trying to make these kinds of comparisons and correlations. We don’t really expect a “return” on aid. Assistance for disease eradication doesn’t get a “return” – it cures people. Economic aid to an emerging former communist country is entirely different from aid given to a country recovering from a natural disaster, or aid to a war-ravaged Central Asian nation. And so on.

Moreover, even with a baseline, it is ridiculous to compare these countries. Egypt is not Israel. Nigeria is not Pakistan. South Africa is not Afghanistan. We give more or less aid to some countries because the challenges or politics they present are unique or particular to them. Aid is political – what we think we should be doing – and doesn’t necessarily follow the laws of economy or business. That’s why it’s aid.

In short, we give aid to achieve specific political objectives in a specific political context. And more often than people might think, we give aid simply to do the right thing. If a billion and a half dollars buys us influence with the Egyptian army, and with that we can constrain their action and keep the country from becoming Syria, who is to say that isn’t worth the cost?

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

9780230390706I’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

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

(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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What The Washington Post gets wrong about The Daily Show in China

The April 9 Washington Post ran this blog post by Max Fisher about the unprecedented  number of video viewings in China of a recent Daily Show segment on North Korea. (You can watch the original clip Daily Show clip here. I’m having trouble embedding.)

The Chinese web portal Sina reposted the segment, importantly with subtitles, racking up more than three million views (and counting) – more than any other Daily Show segment short of a 2008 bit about Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately Fisher draws exactly the wrong conclusion about Chinese public opinion and viewing habits based on this single data point. He suggests that the surge in popularity indicates the average Chinese citizen’s frustration with the country’s belligerent ally, and insinuates a popular divergence from official foreign policy supporting North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong-Un.

This is far too much to draw from this incident. Fisher is first of all comparing China’s viewership to the Daily Show’s normal audience, which is mostly American and at 300 million its fullest potential is almost a quarter the size of China’s population. Also, a cursory glance at the Sina site shows that the most popular segment on the site has views of nearly twice The Daily Show’s segment at around six million views. (I would nonetheless discount some comments in Fisher’s thread that three million views is a tiny slice of China’s population because that is not a statistically relevant or sound measure of the Chinese population in any event. It can only be measured against other views.)

But most important, Fisher provides no context or public opinion data for his assertion that this viewership represents a particular rancor about a specific policy. In a country where corruption, pollution, economic inequality, poverty, censorship, arbitrary seizures and state surveillance are pervasive, China’s policy toward its small, pugilistic neighbor cannot rank very high in public concern.  It is not even clear from the Sina site that the Chinese people are even particularly well-informed on this issue. (If China’s English propaganda mouthpiece, China Daily, is any measure, the government has not spoken often or very directly about the mounting crisis in North Korea recently.)

So why is The Daily Show segment suddenly so popular? The important context to understand this phenomenon is the Sina site itself, China’s great Firewall, and the government’s total control of all media, including the Internet, inside the country. This segment was not posted freely – that is, it was posted for a reason – but that doesn’t make its existence in China any less interesting or exciting. Another cursory glance at the Sina site makes The Daily Show stand out even more: this is satire – cutting, anti-authoritarian satire – in a country that brooks no political dissent.

Given that context, Jon Stewart practically explodes off the Chinese web. Against the drab greys of state propaganda, The Daily Show contrasts in psychedelic Technicolor. This is the Web-TV equivalent of stumbling across jazz in 1960s Moscow or rock’n’roll in 1970s Prague. The Daily Show perfectly captures what’s missing in a society where the government dominates all creative and political expression.

That is why this segment is so popular: it is so unusual in a country that normally does not tolerate questioning of authority, much less mocking it. Fisher gets this very wrong, and it is important that we don’t draw the wrong conclusions about what the Chinese people think and know and feel.

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