The Foreign Service Journal, February 2008

have given him ample opportunity to redress matters? Ultimately, though, even the clearly reluctant Horne gives the single-market, capitalist Carib- bean Community credit for keeping the dream of federation alive there. In any case, read Cold War in a Hot Zone more for its many archival gems than its sweeping ideological conclusions. Gerald Loftus, a retired FSO living in Brussels, served his first tour in Barbados from 1979 to 1980, and experienced a bit of the Cold War in Grenada, then a Cuban satellite. His Web site, http://avuncularamerican. typepad.com/blog , comments on the world as seen by an expatriate in Europe. The Conversation Continues America’s Dialogue with the World William P. Kiehl, editor, Public Diplomacy Council, 2007 (2nd edition), $19.95, paperback, 208 pages. R EVIEWED BY S TEVEN A LAN H ONLEY Originally published in 2006, America’s Dialogue with the World was reissued in a second edition last June. Although we inadvertently omitted the title from our most recent annual compilation of books by Foreign Service-affiliated authors, “In Their Own Write” (November 2007), we did review the book last February. Here is a condensed version of that original write-up; the full text is avail- able at: www.afsa.org/fsj/feb07/books. pdf. (For more information about the Public Diplomacy Council, or to order the book, go to: www.public diplomacycouncil.org. ) As reviewer Kay Webb Mayfield noted, the book compiles papers pre- sented at an October 2005 forum at The George Washington Univer- sity. The essays by 12 current and for- mer practitioners of public diplomacy are divided into “The Substance of the Dialogue” and “The Nature of the Dialogue” — essentially, the strategic and the tactical. The authors (including editor William P. Kiehl, executive director of the Public Diplomacy Council) revisit issues of longstanding debate within PD circles: what tools are and should be in the public diplomacy toolkit; how to evaluate program results; and how to reach audiences amid an infor- mation-saturated environment that lacks many of the traditional filters separating rumor from fact. (Karen Hughes’ departure as under secretary has only intensified the debate.) Throughout the book runs the valuable but possibly provocative theme — provocative, at least, to those who believe that public diplo- macy means choosing a message and sticking to it — that a dialogue has two sides, and the United States does not get to define both of them. A true exchange of views allows both parties to establish their bedrock positions, listen to the other side, ask clarifying questions and seek points of mutual agreement (or at least intersecting interests). With this in mind, several contributors make compelling cases for the “ability to listen to other visions of freedom” that may “come in different forms in different coun- tries.” The heart of the debate over how to define and deploy public diplomacy emerges in two of the book’s appen- dices. On one side is the Public Diplo- macy Council’s “A Call for Action on Public Diplomacy: Public Diplomacy in Crisis.” The council would create a “U.S. Agency for Public Diplomacy” — clearly a reconstituted U.S. Infor- mation Agency — and a Cabinet-level Interagency Committee on Public Diplomacy; increase PD overseas staffing by 300 percent and program budgets fourfold; ramp up interna- tional broadcasting; and create a pub- lic-private “Foundation for the Global Future” to fund exchanges. Five members of the Public Diplomacy Council dissent, arguing that returning that function to a sepa- rate agency “would weaken public diplomacy by separating it from policy formulation and implementation.” They caution that clear priorities, and metrics for evaluating results, must go hand-in-hand with increasing staff and budget or beefing up broadcast- ing. And they are skeptical that pub- lic-private funding would work, as the flow of private-sector monies could be difficult to anticipate or sustain. Both sides of the argument have merit. But questions of structure or chain of command must not over- shadow the dialogue between the United States and the world that this book so usefully analyzes. Steven Alan Honley is the editor of the Journal. 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8 B O O K S The authors revisit issues of longstanding debate within PD circles.