18 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” Ironically, McNamara’s “whiz kids” never accounted for the cognitive dissonance their policies would produce. They promoted body counts as the primary measure of success, a metric that not only dehumanized the conflict but also arguably deepened public skepticism. By 1970 most Americans already believed Vietnam was a mistake, and within a year, nearly three-quarters supported a full withdrawal. The official tally—58,000 U.S. dead versus as many as 3 million Vietnamese—only underscored the imbalance and further alienated audiences on every side of the debate. From that point forward, public trust in government entered the long decline that defined the post-Vietnam era. Day-to-day public diplomacy may not rival the gravity of Vietnam-era decisions, but it is no less essential to measure, analyze, and address inconsistencies between our messaging and our stated values in this work. Cognitive dissonance is inevitable— but ignoring it, as we often do, alienates audiences and undermines foreign policy goals. We damage our credibility when we fail to present nuanced arguments, dodge accusations of hypocrisy, or dismiss those who challenge us. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in Changing Minds (2004), notes that “making sense is a deep human motivator” but cautions that coherence isn’t the same as truth. People will go to great lengths to reconcile conflicting information with their core beliefs. Consider Preemptive Analysis In public diplomacy, we often address uncomfortable truths at odds with our message only when our interlocutors bring them up—but by then, the damage is done. Audiences have already noticed the gap between our rhetoric and actions and formed their judgments. This erosion of trust undermines our core goals: to inform, engage, and influence. When we do respond, it’s often with generic lines: “There are trade-offs in international relations” or “We work with countries where we can.” While technically valid, such statements rarely reverse the narrative, much less the gradual increase in dissonance. By that point, many have tuned out or hardened themselves to believe that the United States says one thing and does another. Preemptive analysis could help. By anticipating where our messages might trigger dissonance, and proactively messaging on the disconnects between stated values and actions, we stand a better chance of keeping skeptical audiences open to our explanations. Gardner also describes the “equity principle”—a deep-seated human expectation that fairness should be evenly distributed. When reality violates this instinct, as it often does in geopolitics, dissonance spikes. This isn’t a partisan problem; it’s structural and recurring. The key is to confront it early. Rather than reactively patching over contradictions, we should assess and address them in advance to limit long-term reputational cost. Case Study: Climate Change With today’s analytical tools, we can—and should—anticipate cognitive dissonance before, during, and after messaging to foreign audiences. Take, for instance, the issue of climate change. We could measure variables like public belief, drawing from opinion surveys; we could also quantify policy action by tracking major policy actions. Because conversations pervade the media space, it should be our role to measure the impact of competing narratives on foreign audiences. For example, when we signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, how did the following articles (one a “fact check” by The Washington Post, and the other a rebuttal by AEI, the American Enterprise Institute) move the needle of public opinion? Each article claims to debunk the other, offering little space for nuance or the audience’s cognitive reconciliation. What if audiences were convinced, for example, by AEI’s argument that gross polluters like China and India had ostensibly agreed to nothing in the Paris Climate Accords? What if they believed The Washington Post’s accusations that President Trump did not tell the truth? The point isn’t whether climate change is real—it’s whether we’ve done enough to manage the dissonance that impedes policy traction. For PD officers in any administration, knowing how U.S. government messaging is landing and being processed should be one of our primary responsibilities. Beyond climate messaging, issues like human rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and the perception of selective application also foment significant dissonance. These topics have limited elasticity in shaping belief—once trust erodes, it’s difficult to recover. If we fail to monitor and mitigate the dissonance we generate, we risk losing entire audience segments permanently. By applying the skills of quantitative professionals, we could achieve more substantive and effective analysis. We might, for instance, examine the “levels of information entropy,” Claude Shannon’s famous measure of uncertainty in communications.
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