public diplomacy

For years, public diplomacy — and its uniformed cousin, ’strategic communications’ — has been discussed in Washington like a mantra: just find the most authentic ways of telling the “story” of the United States or of particularly unpopular U.S. actions, and suddenly people will realize that they just misunderstood America and problem solved. Critics countered [...]

Via Abu Muqawama, NATO is holding a contest for the best viral video answering the question of Why Afghanistan Matters. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it kind of makes you wonder whether this means NATO governments aren’t able to compellingly answer the question themselves, which is a dangerous [...]

The New York Times identifies the State Department official who urged Twitter to reschedule a site maintenance — and risk disrupting the communications of thousands of Iranian dissidents using the #IranElection hashtag — as a 27-year old guy in the Policy Planning shop named Jared Cohen. Although he’s in the planning shop, this isn’t Cohen’s [...]

In February, I did some reporting about how it was far from clear whether the Obama administration embraced the proposition that public diplomacy is a national security mission. Some observers wondered whether Judith McHale — now confirmed as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, who came from the Discovery Channel — would revert to [...]

Allow me to revise and extend a remark I made yesterday when I noted that Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale made some “gestures to treating public diplomacy as a national security issue” in her confirmation hearing testimony last month. Though a lot of people have been skeptical of McHale’s framing her new [...]

As the number of displaced people rises due to the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to up the totals for U.S. relief aid, according to this just-released statement:
“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which is why it’s so critical that [...]

President Obama has arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first leg of of his outreach to what-we-maybe-shouldn’t-call-the Muslim world and, unsurprisingly, Osama bin Laden has released his latest mixtape screed against Obama and the United States more broadly. This time, to blunt the message of reconciliation and respect that Obama intends to send in his [...]

Via Matt Yglesias, al-Qaeda’s leadership continues to sweat the non-demonic nature of President Obama:
Al Qaeda’s second-in-command told Muslims not to be fooled by U.S. President Barack Obama’s policies which, he said on an Islamist website on Monday, are no different to those of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
“America came to us with a new face, [...]

No alarms and no surprises here — I reported that she was a sure thing in February — but after long long long delay, the State Department finally has Judith McHale, former Discovery Channel honcho, as its undersecretary-designate for public diplomacy, according to a fresh White House announcement. Now the hard questions can begin at [...]

Last week I reported that Doug Wilson, a veteran of public diplomacy efforts at the defunct U.S. Information Agency and the Pentagon, was passed over for the job of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy by the Obama administration. One interesting thing about Wilson: even though he won’t get the position, he helped bring a [...]