By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America Correspondent
Published September 18, 2005
MIAMI - The Bush administration and others before it have relied too heavily on the notion that if you state your intentions clearly enough - and loudly enough - you'll get your message across to the world. Now comes a ray of hope, from an unlikely source: Karen Hughes, President Bush's longtime Texas confidante and the State Department's new undersecretary for public diplomacy.
Hughes is a former TV journalist with little foreign experience. Her background is in public affairs, delivering a message to domestic audiences. Hughes' new job focuses much-needed attention on one of the most underestimated areas of American foreign policy. Public diplomacy is less about message and much more about achieving foreign policy goals that further U.S. national interests. In diplomacy, your strength is measured not by domestic popularity, but in adopting a strategy suitable to surmounting foreign cultural barriers and winning over foreign governments.
Diplomats are taught to think on their feet, use their initiative and be alert to the political and cultural idiosyncracies of the countries where they are posted. Too often they never get the chance, throttled by a bureaucracy that is too scared to let them do their job.
During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, one of the unsung heroes was U.S. Embassy spokesman Terry Kneebone, who took a number of reporters into his trust and gave us the facts - good and bad - as he knew them. This helped defuse many false rumors and negative stories we might otherwise have been tempted to write.
Kneebone was later posted to Bogota, Colombia, as public information officer. I remember calling him and looking forward to one of his briefings, only to be told he wasn't allowed to talk to the press in his new post. The situation in the drug war was considered so sensitive that the ambassador didn't want anyone talking besides himself. So the embassy ended up with a mute spokesman.
Gene Bigler, a retired foreign service officer now teaching at Pacific University in California, says the State Department needs to pay more attention to public opinion abroad.
Bigler served in Iraq, conducting public opinion research for the U.S. Embassy. He says he was impressed by Hughes when she spoke at her confirmation hearing before Congress in July. "It showed me she's been in touch with some veteran public diplomacy people," he said. "There was a tone of understanding and listening to foreign publics."
Hughes will take over a bureaucracy in disarray. This dates back to a 1999 decision to fold the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department. Professional diplomats trained in communicating policy to journalists came more and more under the control of political appointees with no such experience.
The diplomats did their best, but too often their hands were tied. Information that could have gotten out sat in their heads, or on their desks.
The Bush administration originally put so little store in public diplomacy that the new undersecretariat was given no significant budget and little authority. The first undersecretaries didn't last long. Charlotte Beers, an advertising executive, left after 17 months. Her successor, former State Department spokesman Margaret Tutwiler, quit after six months. The post was left vacant.
Skeptics note that Hughes' close relationship with the president may not be enough to pry more money from Congress for key programs such as cultural exchanges and promotion of American values. Tutwiler's failure is instructive. Despite her own longstanding loyalty to Republican administrations, she ran when she realized she could not get blood from a stone.
Hughes is a brave woman to take on the task of repairing the United States' poor image. In a poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries, conducted late last year, 58 percent viewed President Bush's re-election as negative for world peace and security. Only 26 per cent saw it as a positive. Some of the most negative responses came from several countries considered U.S. allies, such as Germany (77 percent), Canada (67 percent) and Britain (64 percent).
The latest scenes from New Orleans will not help her cause. After being told for so long that the United States is the greatest country in the world, foreigners have seen plenty to challenge that assertion.
Hughes faces another, bigger problem. There are some U.S. foreign policies the rest of the world is never going to accept, no matter how good her diplomatic skills.
As a recent RAND Corporation paper on public diplomacy put it, "Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism." The study concludes that "some U.S. policies have been, are and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism."
That is most often applied to the Middle East, where U.S. support for Israel is a tough sell in the Arab world. But it applies almost equally to Latin America.
"The weight of this history, compounded by what are widely seen as U.S. violations of international norms and standards in Iraq and prison camps in Guantanamo Bay, has effectively depleted Washington's credibility throughout the Americas," Latin America analyst Michael Shifter, wrote in a recent Washington Post column.
Shifter, vice president of Inter-American Dialogue, a respected Washington think tank, points to the recent statement by TV evangelist Pat Robertson calling for the U.S. government to assassinate Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez.
"The idea that the U.S. would contemplate "taking out' (Robertson's words) someone such as Chavez has a ring of plausibility in the region," Shifter wrote.
The Bush administration's response only made matters worse. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack failed to condemn Robertson's words, calling them only "inappropriate."
McCormack, a career diplomat and public affairs specialist (he was personal assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she was at the National Security Council), was perhaps more concerned with the reaction of a domestic audience - conservative evangelical Republicans - if he attacked Robertson directly.
But it sent a damaging message - just the kind that Hughes seems determined to avoid.
