The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

42 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL W ORLD In a fast-changing world with tensions and needs exacerbated by the pandemic, the practice of public diplomacy demands a swift reconfiguration. BY J I AN ( JAY ) WANG RETHINKING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY FOR A Post-Pandemic Jian (Jay) Wang is director of the Center on Public Diplomacy and an associate professor at the University of Southern California ’ s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. T he outbreak of the novel coronavirus will be remembered as one of the worst global crises in modern history. As the damage and devastation continue to unfold, the world we live in is getting more stressed by the day. The basic contours of the calamity are now familiar enough. Yet international cooperation to defuse and defeat the COVID-19 pandemic is elusive, at best. Every nation fends for itself in the battle, while our fates are decidedly intertwined. As the world is watching, the reputation and credibility of each nation, through its words and deeds, are also put to the test. This disruptive reality forces a question about the future of global affairs: While maintaining a stable world demands an ever more nuanced multilateral approach, will a broad spectrum of the public succumb to the siren call of resurgent nationalism? These tensions are, of course, not new, but the current pandemic will exacerbate them. And, as a result, public diplomacy is becoming a more, not less, significant component of every nation’s international relations and influence, serving as it does as a critical, collective linkage between policy and people, domestic and international. Because the “soft power” that public diplomacy helps generate is now an indispensable currency in global affairs, effective PD assumes new urgency. How will this crisis be a catalyst for reshaping a nation’s public diplomacy resolve and capability? Transformative Trends While the pandemic does not alter the fundamental dynamics already underway that are disrupting our thinking and prac- tice concerning public diplomacy, it is poised to accelerate the change once the turbulence of the crisis simmers down. As the practice of public diplomacy is essentially a set of communica- tion-centric activities, we see several overarching transformative, interwoven trends along every key aspect of the enterprise. First and foremost, the broader geopolitical and geoeconomic FOCUS ON PANDEMIC DIPLOMACY