The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

38 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A recharged public diplomacy needs to join whole-of- government policy deliberations at the highest level. BY DONALD M . B I SHOP A Foreign Service officer for 31 years, Donald M. Bishop led U.S. public diplomacy programs in China, Afghani- stan and other nations. He is now the Bren Chair of Strategic Communications at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. This article is also available on the website of the Public Diplomacy Council, with full citations. T he medical and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 emergency are grave enough, but the crisis shouts another wake-up call. The challenging environment of a contested global information space, where facts, logic and even science compete with disinformation, malign narratives, conspiracy theories and propa- ganda, is on full display. This is public diplomacy’s arena. Candor requires us to first acknowledge that these are domestic challenges, too. American factions argue. Talking heads spin. Think-tanks advocate different policies. Friends tweet hearsay medical advice and rumors. Social media users click on conspiracies. Others create memes to suit their biases. Every press conference by the president, governors and city mayors is put through the wringer. All this is amplified by America’s current political and social polarization. Decades in the making, it has become acute in an election year when the record of a loved and hated president is so vehemently contested. Public diplomacy (PD) practitioners know that all our domestic disputes are exported and repackaged by the world’s media; the theme of their rewrites can range from dismay to delight. I am confident that the enduring strength of America’s constitutional structures—separation of powers, federalism, advice and consent, and elections among them, with journalists, editors, policy experts and scholars playing their own roles—will enable us to weather both the crisis and the current distempers on our own. But for U.S. public diplomacy, there’s more. Many countries are “weaponizing” information, espe- cially through social media. They craft narratives that support authoritarian rule, stoke nationalism to deflect discontent with their own governance and seek to weaken the United States in several ways—to discredit America’s international leader- ship, erode its soft power, undermine confidence in American democracy and subvert the cohesion of U.S. society. Chinese and Russian Disinformation In this charged information environment, many states and nonstate actors are in motion, but Russia and China are the pacing threats. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo reacted sharply when FOCUS ON PANDEMIC DIPLOMACY a Pandemic DISINFORMATION Challenges in