New Book Review: “Through a Screen Darkly”

Posted on November 28, 2014 by James Thomas Snyder

I’m happy to post my review of Martha Bayles’ recent book on public diplomacy, Through a Screen Darkly, published this month in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy by Clingendael in The Netherlands. The article is behind a pay wall but should be available in most libraries.

I take issue with Bayles’ central argument about the liability of American culture abroad. But I found much of her reportage and proposals to share commonality with arguments and observations I made in my own book. Moreover, Bayles’ book is an exhaustive overview of public diplomacy in the second decade after September 11, 2001.

I send my thanks to The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Clingendael and especially editor Jan Melissen for agreeing to publish my review.

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America Is It

Posted on February 3, 2014 by James Thomas Snyder

State Department and Customs and Border Protection, take note. Leave it to Coca-Cola, the preeminent American brand, to get so much right in 60 seconds during the Super Bowl. The short spot is the song “America the Beautiful” cut between a variety of scenes of family and friends from different cultural backgrounds enjoying themselves in the natural beauty of this country, in cities and at home. With slight edits (to remove the product placement) this could easily be played at every port of entry in the country.

What really sets this spot apart is the seamless weaving of our emotional national ode sung in several different languages — Spanish, Hindi, Tagalog, Hebrew, Arabic, to name a few. (If you visit the Youtube page with the videos you can learn about the “making of” with the many people who helped sing this multi-linguistic version of the classic hymn.)

It’s hard not to be moved by the music and the subtle message of the change in language (although there are the haters) which speaks more clearly than any argument I’ve ever made that America the beautiful is made up not so much of people ticking those ridiculously confining ethnic or racial boxes but people who speak different languages. And somehow, for the most part, we make it work better than any other country on the planet. That’s something to celebrate and to emulate, not to disparage and denounce.

I’ve also written before about the effectiveness of advertisements and what we can learn from them for effective public diplomacy. Coke once taught the world to sing and I think this spot is even more effective than that famous advertisement. It’s more than enough to make the whole world smile.

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The Corrections

Posted on December 31, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Graphic of hand-corrected manuscript of 1984 by George Orwell, via GeorgeOrwellNovels.com.

I found an error in Table 7.2 on page 124 relating to languages spoken in the United States. All of the numbers are from the U.S. Census Bureau and are accurate. But French (including dialects) at 1,358,816 inexplicably appears as the sixth-most spoken language in the United States after English. It should be fourth after Tagalog. (Jan. 1, 2014)

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From a friend working for an independent observer mission in Tblisi, Georgia, come the first corrections to my book The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy.

She notes on page 147 that during the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia Russia sent forces into South Ossetia, not North Ossetia, and Carl Bildt is the Foreign Minister of Sweden, not Finland (apologies to Mr. Bildt!).

I am very happy to make factual corrections such as these as well as engage in debate about the more subjective policy proposals in the book and on this site. Feel free to contact me here. (Dec. 31, 2013)

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“We have met the enemy and he is us”

Posted on November 21, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

(Walt Kelly, via Language Log, University of Pennsylvania)

Attending a conference of public diplomacy professionals and academics last week at the U.S. State Department, a particular comment made by a participant during one of the main sessions struck me. He described the positive outcome of a recent YES Program exchange from Indonesia (if memory serves) with the students describing to him their delight in learning that Americans are not as violent, profane and promiscuous as they have been led to believe from U.S. television and movie exports to their country. Given the small scale of the YES Program (hundreds of secondary students each year) competing with the Hollywood juggernaut, he came to the unavoidable, pessimistic conclusion cribbed from Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The most depressing aspect of this observation was not that he was necessarily right but that it passed without comment or rebuttal from the audience made up of diplomats, academics, policy-makers and students of public diplomacy. That is, his opinion — that American culture is a political weakness and strategic liability — has become the fixed, conventional wisdom of the governing class.

This is as dangerous and backwards as it is also plainly wrong. The obvious shame and embarrassment many of our diplomats, scholars and others share about our culture — which hundreds of millions of real people consume and enjoy around the world without coercion — demonstrate an elitism that blinds them to what is in fact a strategic asset. And it keeps them from recognizing and harnessing an extraordinary delivery vehicle for American culture, values and democracy, a mechanism feared and repressed by regimes we stand against.

A glance at the Pew Global Attitudes Project demonstrates, at the very least, profound diversity of opinion about the United States, Americans, American culture, and American values. These opinions do not always appear to jibe, but they are not uniformly low. The pleasure that people get from American film and television is remarkably high, and even in those countries that suggest fewer enjoy our movies and shows, they include a solid minority — suggesting a cultural debate is fermenting there.

These numbers are worth examining in detail. Like all public opinion, they are dynamic and subject to the particular socio-political environment in which they are taken. Pakistan, for example, is directly affected by the neighboring war in Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes, and American rapprochement with India. Opinion towards the United States in Turkey has taken a bad hit since the war with Iraq and is only slowly recovering. Israel feels strong cultural affinity for the United States as an ally. And so on.

But the larger frustration I felt, as I kept my arm aloft trying to rebut during the session last week, was the point that Hollywood is a platform and megaphone, arguably the largest and loudest in the world. Holding it at a contemptuous distance ignores the potential of working with the Dream Factory to tell stories we want to share with the world. As I have written in my book, when Hollywood authentically captures or broadcasts a foreign culture to international audiences, that faithfulness redounds to our benefit. Why shouldn’t we try to influence how that is done? The Pentagon does.

During the conference last week, participants of all stripes lauded the Jazz Ambassadors and jazz broadcasts via Voice of America during the Cold War over and over again. Did they think America jazz represented this promiscuous, profane, and violent culture? Of course not. But the countries to which those broadcasts and programs were aimed certainly did. Which is why they claimed then that jazz was as poisonous as chemical weapons. Or, more recently, that Disneyland was as radioactive as Chernobyl.

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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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What Propaganda Means and Why It Matters

Posted on August 13, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

U.S. Air Force EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft, designed for psychological and information operations. (Federation of American Scientists, original source unknown)

Let’s suppose that a large American newspaper ran an editorial deflecting accusations that its political opinions were too partisan. It deflected those who argued against the newspaper’s position and advanced the position that the newspaper’s opinion were correct and fair. Would any reasonable person accuse the newspaper of engaging in propaganda? Of course not.

Yet that’s essentially what Tom Vanden Brook engaged in through his column in USA Today this week. If you don’t believe me, just read the two definitions of propaganda he cites in his article arguing that the U.S. military engages in propaganda.

I’m not arguing that Vanden Brook or USA Today engage in propaganda. I am arguing that Vanden Brook is engaging in typically sloppy thinking about what constitutes propaganda, a word so broad and thick that it obscures, contrary to what he argues, far more than it illuminates. Vanden Brook quotes Webster’s Dictionary, which provides the fairly standard definition of propaganda, and compares it to the Government Accountability Office’s definition of Military Information Support Operations.

It’s a neat trick, except that Vanden Brook should know better: Military Information Support Operations (MISO, also known as psychological operations) is a subset of Information Operations (Infoops), about which Vanden Brook has written before. So he knows that he’s not giving the whole story by citing these two definitions. But then if you parse the dictionary’s sloppy and vague language, you could easily apply it to Vanden Brook’s article: propaganda is a “systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of a particular idea…to further one’s own cause or to damage and opposing one”. He’s making a concerted argument, in the third-largest newspaper in the country, supporting his contention and undermining opposing viewpoints. Is that propaganda? Of course not. It just demonstrates what unsound ground he’s writing on.

Vanden Brook would like propaganda to cover a lot of common ground. He wants it to describe all of what the military communicates in theater operations to be described as propaganda. But here the differences are important. Like too many policymakers, practitioners and journalists before him, Vanden Brook confuses MISO and Information Operations. MISO is primarily concerned with “foreign audiences” – that is, the civilian population. Infoops, when not also including all the other tools of information warfare (including network warfare, electronic jamming, military deception and the like), is specifically targeted against enemy forces. So: is a MISO campaign to warn civilians of unexploded ordinance propaganda? Is an infoops leaflet urging enemy insurgents to join the government militia propaganda? Is a public affairs radio broadcast encouraging voter turnout propaganda?

It should be noted that beyond the doctrinal confusion – the Joint Manual insists that MISO must work with Public Affairs, whose entire credibility relies on truth, but can also engage in military deception, like Infoops – this gets hopelessly tangled in the complex environment of modern operations, particularly in counterinsurgency. In peacekeeping, stability operations, and counterinsurgency, there is simply no neat division between civilian and combatant, so there is no functional difference between MISO and Infoops. The unfortunate fact that MISO and Infoops sound so much alike in name just adds to the confusion.

But throwing it all into a box and slapping on the propaganda label doesn’t help. I am sympathetic to the journalist and editor who need a simple, demotic vocabulary to describe these confusing, even subtle, distinctions to the public in readily accessible prose. But in this case, propaganda is more inflaming and obscuring than clarifying. It doesn’t explain what the military is doing in these difficult, often treacherous, environments. “Propaganda” doesn’t describe anything. It characterizes.

The solution is better reporting and better writing. By showing what soldiers, Marines and Airmen do on these operations, and their intended effect, good journalism could even help clarify the confusion about the fundamental difference between Infoops and MISO. I’ve read about some activities that look like public diplomacy, and I’m not entirely clear on how public affairs fits into complex counterinsurgency or stability operations environments, either. None of this fits neatly under the rubric “propaganda,” nor should it. And to try to do so entirely misses the point.

Because if Vanden Brook had read his theory, he’d know that the stakes couldn’t be higher: David Petraeus wrote in his seminal counterinsurgency manual that the information operations “[logical line of operations] LLO may often be the decisive LLO.” Theorists from Clausewitz to David Galula wrote about the importance of the strategic struggle for information, public opinion and perception. Wars have been fought and lost over this ground for centuries. Many have argued it is at least as important as the combat itself.

I have written extensively and in depth about the doctrinal, operational and theoretical problems of propaganda and the operational communications community in my forthcoming book on public diplomacy. I hope this short article and my book provide the opportunity to untangle and redevelop the tools necessary to communicate in the complex and dangerous tactical environments we will no doubt face in the years ahead.

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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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Twitter in a Teapot?

Posted on August 7, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

An article last month in Foreign Policy brought to light a “full-blown Twitter war” between the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team (DOT) and a “prominent” jihadi named Mu’awiya al-Qahtani using the feed service under the handle @Al_Bttaar. Written by Will McCants, who helped set up the DOT operation, the tempest in a teakettle is easy to miss for his transparently self-aggrandizing story about how “there’s one thing [the DOT] is doing successfully: making the right enemies”. That is, McCants asserts, DOT has diminished @al_Bttaar and his confederates so aggressively that the virtual jihadi has had no alternative but to attack the DOT online. What more proof do we need of the State Department’s effectiveness?

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that McCants has the equation exactly backwards: @Al_Bttaar in fact needs the State Department as an enemy far more than the State Department needs him. And beneath that are hidden the depressingly low stakes involved. While it is true a single individual or a small group can be inspired to attack the United States or Western targets by online invective, in the case of the battle between the State Department and @Al_Bttaar, the numbers involved are literally the high hundreds.

McCants assertion that the DOT is “making the right enemies” is a textbook example of a bureaucracy perpetuating a problem it was created to solve, like force protection for a forward-deployed combat unit. Becoming a target is not per se a measure of success. DOT should be drying up support for @al_Bttaar, eliminating it, or diverting its attention. It’s true, McCants writes, that @Al_Bttaar’s attempt to attack DOT’s Twitter account failed (as have similar, follow-on attacks against other Twitter users). Here his failure does not point to the State Department’s success but to @Al_Bttaar’s inherent weakness and to the paltry stakes involved: fewer than 150 people were involved in the attack on DOT’s Twitter account.

In fact, McCants buried near the end of the article the critical fact that @Al_Bttaar registers a little more than 1,500 Twitter followers. That 150 of them were willing to storm the State Department’s virtual Bastille demonstrates what I suspect about them: in terms of pure numbers, they are much less likely “followers” in the traditional sense of the word than those who registered with the account simply to keep tabs on this virtual jihadi. (To give you another sense of scale, the DOT had logged 7,000 “engagements” by 2012, according to the State Department. The DOT has been online since 2006.)

A few simple numbers can put this into perspective. Of 22 countries in the Arab League, assume that at least 10 intelligence and law enforcement agencies and foreign embassies will sign on as “followers” to monitor @Al_Bttaar. That’s a low estimate and we’re already at 220, or nearly 15 percent of followers. Apply the same formula to the roughly 50 Muslim-majority countries, and you have nearly a third at 500. Expand that number in any number of reasonable ways – accounting for headquarters, redundancies, international organizations, academia, contractors – and now you can begin to imagine that the only true followers of @Al_Bttaar are the 150 people who attacked the State Department’s Twitter account.

And for this the State Department coordinates 50 civil servants, spending how much money, through the interagency, to fight?

Despite my incredulous tone I’m not entirely skeptical of the DOT endeavor. McCants simply doesn’t make a very persuasive case. It’s easy, when hunting bad guys, to obsess over what you’re seeing at the end of your scope. But when you’re that narrowly focused, you can miss the larger picture and the bigger questions: In the end, what is DOT and the State Department trying to accomplish? How influential are Twitter jihadis like @Al_Bttaar? Should we shut them down at their source or attack their message in front of much larger audiences (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya), which we can command?

A 2012 study published by the Middle East Journal suggested that DOT’s endeavors – reaching out in online fora – did very little to change minds. But I’d argue that very little is still a place to start. This survey indicated that 4.8 percent expressed positive views of U.S. foreign policy or the DOT, but the study was a single snapshot (2009) of a very specific place (Egypt). A survey like this is only useful if it is duplicated and controlled. Egypt, for its part, is a very unique political environment. Moreover, those “poor” responses to DOT’s outreach in fact mirror overall public opinion in Egyptian polls about US foreign policy as recorded in 2008. So while seeming discouraging on its face, in reality this article actually tells us that we don’t really know how effective the DOT is – or could be.

That’s because changing public opinion takes concrete, specific actions and its success can only be measured fairly (and accurately) over time. I’m not yet convinced that Twits like @Al_Bttaar are worth all that effort. But that’s because we haven’t figured out a way to measure our effectiveness yet. Social media has given us the illusion of hard data, analytics, and control when what it’s really done is flooded us with more raw, decontextualized numbers. Now it’s up to us to find the meaning in all that madness.

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The How and the What of Public Diplomacy

Posted on September 5, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Not your usual European ministerial (Radio Praha)

My not-last post about the U.S. State Department’s public diplomacy snowballed some additional thinking about the tradecraft. There really is no better way to illustrate good public diplomacy than through comparison and case studies; that is, examining what other people and countries are doing to reach the public. I don’t think we do enough of that.

My concern since leaving NATO has been the gulf between the how and what of public diplomacy. The what is strategic communications – the big think determinations about audiences and resources and message — 50,000-foot decisions that of course have to be made, but I’ve long been concerned that much can be lost between the high-altitude determinations and the ground-level PD where real people actually live.

The how is actually talking to the rest of the world, the last three feet, public diplomacy’s most strategic real estate. It’s the how that we should be focusing on, and I’m concerned that both the academy and the State Department do very little toward teaching the mechanics of the how, which is where public diplomacy is made or broken every single day. We make strong strategic judgments – in fact, strategic communications and public diplomacy policy are the rare arenas of conciliation and agreement in Washington – but those decisions are often fumbled in the execution.

I have always been a practitioner, so I like to look at the examples of others’ practice. Here, I’d like to look at the 2009 Czech Presidency of the European Union. Every Presidency – held by a nation in the European Council for six months, a blink of the eye in American political life – is a unique opportunity for each country holding the office to promote itself and the European Union. It is, then, a moment for the country to put its stamp not only on the Union but on Europe itself, to sell the idea of Europe to Europeans, and Europe to the world.

I lived in Luxembourg during that country’s presidency in 2005, which was marked (in my memory) by the epic exhaustion of what seemed to be the entire government of that very small country. Nonetheless, as this welcoming site makes clear, the country’s motto is not “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” (“We want to remain what we are”) for nothing. European presidencies tend to be fairly bland affairs.

Not so for the Czechs, who branded their presidency “Europa to osladime,” which observers were slow to note was a wry double-entendre. It means, literally, “We will sweeten Europe,” but loosely translated it means “We will stir things up.”

The Czechs applied this double-entendre masterfully in this video produced to introduce the presidency. It is perhaps the most playful political production I’ve ever seen, and it moves so fast and is over so quickly you might miss all the jokes. (You can watch an annotated version here.) All of the characters are well-known Czech personalities, arrayed around a table as if bored government functionaries at one of the thousands of interminable European ministers meetings (a subtle comment, no doubt from the euroskeptic Czech president Vaclav Klaus). There’s a famous hockey player, a goalkeeper, an obsessive architect, a chemist, a ballerina, a fashion model, and an orchestra conductor. And they’re all playing around with sugar cubes.

Why all these sugar cubes? You need to be Czech to get the joke, and here the double-entendre slides into triple-entendre: the sugar cube was invented in Dacice in Czechoslovakia in 1843. Did you get all that? It only took 30 seconds. Short and (dare I write it) sweet.

“We Will Sweeten Europe” (Czech Tourism)

The Czech presidency used the cubes as a branding theme for the entire Presidency, although it didn’t go much beyond the videos and these posters. (I loved the Central European design and I still have some of their swag.)

That’s what the Czechs got right. It’s almost incredible to me that a government approved something so clever, playful and even a little snarky. (This site claims the initiative was dreamt up by the Czechs’ European affairs ministry, though I’m sure the story is much more complicated than that.) But a government did, so something had to go wrong (Vaclav Klaus would no doubt agree with me). So what did they get wrong? Enough.

The Czech government commissioned David Cerny to complete a major art installation for the Presidency. European public art projects are fairly common and usually forgotten (sometimes, in the case of the Euro, even torn out), but not this one. Cerny built an enormous series of allegorical sculptures of the European countries. Some were clever – Sweden bundled flat in an IKEA box. Some were incomprehensible – Luxembourg obscured by a “For Sale” sign. And some were simply and horribly offensive: Bulgaria, which was depicted as a squat toilet (in the waning days of communist rule, Bulgaria forcibly expelled more than 100,000 Turks).

“Entropa” (David Cerny)

Gone mostly unremarked was Cerny’s cleverest touch: all the countries were laid out in a huge plastic model mold, as if Europe just needed some glue to assemble yourself. Of course the installation caused an outcry. It turned out, too, that Cerny had committed outright fraud: to win the commission he had claimed that artists from the entire Union had participated in creating it (as part of the competition’s rules), when just he and three assistants built it.

I found the whole episode entirely bizarre but mostly because I, along with most of Europe, couldn’t even see the “Entropa” in person. It was hung in the European Council Justus Lipsius building at Place Schuman in Brussels. This building is normally closed to the public. You would think that something paid for with public funds could be viewed by the people who paid for it. The furor over the installation, then, ironically brought the artwork more visibility than it would have ever otherwise had.

This matter of visibility is a common error, I should remark, of many institutions that commission public works like this. I remember at NATO when we had about a dozen large multimedia boxes, very clever units, built for the Bucharest Summit in 2008. They went on display first at the locked-down Summit location in Bucharest and then were left at our Headquarters behind two or three layers of security. At both locations, after enormous expense building them, they had very little foot traffic. I suggested at the time that we buy some space at Brussels Zaventem airport, but nothing came of it. I don’t know what happened to the boxes.

The larger point to be made here is that you must shoulder both the risk and reward in public diplomacy, but by concentrating on the how you do these things you’re more likely to get the reward when you take the risk. The Czechs were clearly very capable of getting the how very right but they also got it very wrong. (That, appropriately to my mind, demonstrated everything that is both right and wrong with the European experiment: spirited and smart and clever but also deeply cynical and occasionally deaf to the public if not outright corrupt.)

The presidency, by the way, was a political fiasco. The Czechs were true to their motto: they really stirred things up, but it was pretty sweet, too. Looking back, I can’t help thinking, isn’t that what public diplomacy is all about?

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Podcast Blues

Posted on August 25, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

NOTE Sept. 12: Amb. Chris Stevens, who is mentioned in this post, was killed alongside three other American diplomats during an assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Stevens becomes the first American ambassador killed in service since 1988. At least as many ambassadors, if not more, have been killed in service as flag officers in combat in the history of the U.S. diplomatic corps. In deference to and as a small record of Amb. Stevens’ long service, and in spite of the mild critique he is subject to here, I am leaving the rest of this post in the original.

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Buried on YouTube is an intriguing and expanding experiment in Internet-enabled public diplomacy. Beginning a few years ago, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) started short video profiles of American ambassadors bound for exotic posts abroad. This is a way to introduce themselves to the countries where they will be serving, the bilateral agenda they’ll be promoting, and maybe get some of that social media mojo everybody’s been talking about. IIP stood up a video production capability in 2008 and is producing by its count an astonishing 300 video products a year.

Typically for a federal agency, these introductory videos – 16 are live, which setting aside consulates and other missions represents about a tenth of our diplomatic representation abroad – are produced with gusto but manifestly uneven style and quality. So this is a friendly critique with suggestions for how these videos can get better and find the audience they are clearly intended to reach.

DON’T KILL A GOOD IDEA TO SPITE THE BAD

The first thing to say – before the bureaucracy goes defensive and crushes a creative, progressive idea out of instinctive reflex to criticism, like Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men – is this is good and should continue. All American ambassadors should do this. The initiative uses a new and evolving technology, it trains our top diplomats in front of the camera and develops the State Department’s production capacity – all capabilities the department needs and should expand. Please, Hillary, don’t kill this for budgetary reasons or for any stupid or malicious comments somebody logs on your YouTube site!

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IS ALSO THE SMALLEST

Unfortunately there are some systematic problems this initiative will face. And the biggest problem is this: most of the countries profiled by these videos have very low Internet penetration. This is, frankly, the entire problem with Internet-based public diplomacy platforms: it has been seduced by the gossamer Web dreams of high-yield outreach on the cheap, the Digital Diplomats’ snake oil pitch. In reality the world is divided between the wired-up haves – those uncensored, connected and mobile, mostly in the advanced democratic West – and the delinked have-nots, which is most of the rest of the world. Even to reach most of the Internet haves, a major “push” using Internet-based tools usually involves an expensive, labor-intensive, multi-modal campaign that soundly pounds the dream of inexpensive Web riches to gold dust.

This is almost immediately clear when looking at the traffic numbers for the videos, which in one case (Mongolia) is in the low double digits. Kosovo has the highest traffic, but that’s because Kosovo is the most pro-American country in Europe. Still, Internet penetration in Kosovo is only about 20 percent (by contrast, the U.S. has an Internet penetration of 78.3 percent; in Japan it’s 80%; Iceland tops the list at 97.8 percent). The rest of the view rates for these videos span the mid-hundreds.

But the plain obstacle is the countries themselves: Bangladesh, Vietnam, Equador, Nicaragua, Uganda, Mongolia and Libya have some of the lowest rates of Internet penetration in the world. (Among these countries, Bangladesh ranks lowest; North Korea is at the bottom.) Of course, with the Internet in the “rest of the world,” you’re producing for a self-selecting minority, which is fine. But IIP clearly needs the resources to do a much better job of promotion to get these videos to their intended audience.

Continuing to produce these introductory videos makes sense but they need to be promoted properly and in the right technological context. Can these be pushed out to mobile phones, screened in schools or for civic organizations, or in other public diplomacy venues? They shouldn’t sit on a server never to see an audience in countries that have dramatically less Internet access than we are used to in the developed world.

LESS IS MORE

Many of these videos feel both overproduced and as if they are trying to do and say more than the video can bear. The videos are professionally shot and edited, and benefit from a surfeit of imagery captured from our traveled Secretary of State and President while abroad. Nonetheless, it seems like the producer or editors is worried the viewer will lose interest unless he or she is bombarded with multiple camera angles, smash cuts, sliding transitions, music, and the rest. There is no uniformity of style or format among the videos. I’m inclined to suggest that less is more.

I wonder if the scriptwriters were able to settle on a single theme in each video – instead of the usual smorgasbord of official priorities – around which to build a coherent narrative or tell personal stories. Then they could build both audience interest in the individual ambassador and learn about one subject in depth rather than skate over a half-dozen or so issues that the official “relationship” will concern itself with. I’ll get into more specific ideas about how this can be done in a minute.

THE POWER OF BABEL

Language is impossible to avoid when viewing all of these introductions. Some ambassadors speak the native language, some don’t. Some are clearly very good at speaking foreign languages, and some are not. Some should speak foreign languages but don’t. Why?

It’s important to assert first that speaking English is fine. When I was at NATO, the interpreters specifically advised us to speak the language we were most comfortable with, which is usually our mother tongue. Writing from experience, that’s especially important for speaking on camera. Most of the world speaks or is learning English and doesn’t mind the opportunity to practice, especially if what they’re hearing is subtitled. In the case of the U.S. Ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, speaking an Indian language would be impractical and impolitic (there are simply too many languages and topolects spoken in India), and her obvious grasp of location names based on a prior tour demonstrates her respect for the country and its cultures.

Several ambassadors speak Spanish of varying degrees of proficiency. Truly impressive, however, are Ambassador Tracey Jacobsen, who learned Albanian to go to Kosovo, and Ambassador Dan Mozena, who learned Bengali to serve in Bangladesh. Mozena’s commitment to Bengali is particularly poignant, and he and wife demonstrate a sincere, effusive warmth that is obvious on camera. This combination of attributes on the part of all three of them clearly endeared them to their audiences based on the positive responses I read on the YouTube site. (I would only note, although this is certainly not Jacobsen’s fault, that her Albanian is subtitled in Serbian for the contentious Serb minority in Kosovo, but in Latin script. Serbian is normally written in Cyrillic.)

But for Ambassador Michael McFaul and Ambassador Chris Stevens, our representatives to Russia and Libya, respectively, they both speak at length about working in the former Soviet Union and North Africa but record their videos in English. Stevens was the official U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. McFaul generated the recent “reset” on relations with Moscow. Both, to my knowledge, speak the local language, but neither did so for these videos. It’s a difficult argument to balance, I admit, but viewers will wonder why the American ambassador to Kosovo speaks Albanian but the ambassador to Libya, with two decades of experience in the Arab world doesn’t speak Arabic on camera. The same could be said for McFaul.

CRINGE LESS

This leads me to the only really bad video of the batch, Ambassador David Shear, our representative to Vietnam. This was hard to watch because it was so transparently staged and because it stood in such poor contrast to the others. Here, Shear is seen taking language lessons in Vietnamese and eating at a Vietnamese restaurant. This is poor form, especially given the extraordinary effort Jacobsen and Mozena made to learn very difficult and obscure languages like Albanian and Bengali. The Vietnamese may be forgiven for wondering why out of the 1.2 million speakers of Vietnamese in the United States (the third-most spoken Asian language here), one couldn’t be appointed Ambassador.

The Vietnamese are also no doubt aware of both our obesity epidemic and the immigrant-entrepreneurs – most of whom are refugees from the war – who own those restaurants. Shear, probably trying to cast himself as a humble naïf learning the language and culture of a country he is about to serve in, instead communicates an embarrassing ignorance of the country in which he will soon be head of mission. He should be the expert on Vietnam. The worst evidence of this deafness to tone is when he vows to consult the “many people with experience working in Vietnam”: at last count, there were 2.59 million U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, not including diplomats, journalists and aid workers.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU LIKE BUT WHAT YOU’RE LIKE THAT MATTERS

But in the end, I didn’t feel like I got to know these men and women. Most of them are clearly charismatic and intelligent, which as mediated through video is no small achievement. I learned a few things about them. McFaul is from Montana. Shear likes to eat. Powell is a photographer. Stevens enjoys the outdoors. Ambassador Piper Campbell likes horses. But to borrow a phrase from Nick Hornsby, it’s not what you like but what you’re like that really matters and I didn’t learn much about what they’re like beyond how they were conveyed through the four-inch portal on my computer.

In order for viewers to like, trust and sympathize with your subjects, they have to reveal something about themselves. I recognize this is not the usual approach for career diplomats, who are not reality television stars. And writing as someone who has done work like this, it is simply not easy to do (and doesn’t always “work” when you do it).

The videos are intended to do three things: introduce the ambassador, describe the bilateral relationship, and pitch American foreign policy priorities. It’s a big ask. But it can be done. And it can be done well.

By way of an example, watch this, a video featuring the Japanese Consul-General in Memphis, Tennessee, produced by the local Chamber of Commerce. (Full disclosure: a good friend was part of the team that produced this series, but he no longer works for the Chamber.) You can tell right away that you’re watching something completely different. The CG plays in a band, in public, in Memphis. He loves music and talks about how important Memphis is both to Japan for trade and to the small Japanese community in the city. He appears on camera, of course, but the audio track was taped in a studio, in a more relaxed setting, probably based on a structured interview. As a result, the video feels intimate and subtle, like you’re part of a conversation. And despite the higher production values, it was probably easier to put this video together because the voice track was taped and edited later with the camera footage shot on location.

The important thing to remember is that this was produced by the Chamber to sell Memphis. There are several other videos like this one profiling small business owners, some of which are quite compelling and moving. But that doesn’t seem to detract from getting to know the individuals and learning what motivates them in their work. IIP could learn from videos like these – maybe even collaborate with the National Symphony Orchestra the way the Chamber partnered with the Memphis Symphony, which commissioned original work to score the videos as part of the promotional campaign.

What strikes me most about the Chamber campaign videos is they tell a story not just about the individuals but about the city. As my friend told me, Memphis is not all blues and barbecue: It’s a place that people love, where the subjects of the videos have decided to settle and to start their families and businesses.

To understand how effective these ambassadorial videos could be, start by substituting Mongolia for Memphis. What is the American community like there? What are some of the experiences the ambassadors have had that explain who we are, what we’re like, and what we have in common with the countries where they’re posted? Only when we talk about that do we really begin to reach people. And when we start doing that, we begin to cross those last three feet, in Edward R. Murrow’s famous formulation. Even over the Internet, that remains public diplomacy’s most important territory.

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