The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

that Hughes has, in fact, shown “outright hostility” to career staff, surrounding herself with deputy assistant secretaries “who don’t know or care about the Foreign Service.” Third, Hughes needs to coor- dinate the public diplomacy mis- sion with other agencies that share responsibility for carrying it out — most prominently the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the United States’ foreign broadcasting, but also the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as other Cabinet departments such as Defense and Commerce. Three Goals and Five Es By all accounts, Hughes’ tenure at State got off to an inauspicious start. Her visits to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia in the fall of 2005 were pilloried in the foreign and U.S. press. The most memorable, and demoralizing moments, came in Saudi Arabia —where a group of local women took issue with Hughes’ criticisms of Saudi cul- ture, insisting that they were happy, despite the Saudi rules that bar women from driving and require strict sep- aration of the sexes — and in front of Indonesian stu- dents, where Hughes was challenged repeatedly about U.S. policy in the Muslim world. “I think it was maybe the case of mixed expectations as opposed to reviews,” Hughes said earlier this year, reflecting on the trip. “I mean, I remember talking with the reporters. The idea that I’m going to sit down with a group of people who are adamantly opposed to the war in Iraq and, because I am there to listen to them, that some- how I’m going to change their minds, I don’t think any- one in this room would expect that that’s a very realistic expectation.” But unfortunately for Hughes, that was where she made her biggest headlines during her first year at State. And the reports of the trips still linger in the minds of many Foreign Service officers, continuing to inform atti- tudes about her competency. “She started out not just badly, but horrifyingly, shockingly, embarrassingly badly,” says one Washington-based officer who has done 10 over- seas tours. For many State officers, those encounters showed that Hughes was out of her depth. She walked into an impos- sible situation, sounded trite as she described herself repeatedly as “a mom” and recited clichés about U.S. democratic values. To her foreign audiences, she came off as insincere and conde- scending. And back at State, such encounters confirmed con- cerns that Hughes was a public diplomacy lightweight, with no experience working abroad, appointed to a vitally important post simply because she was a friend of the president. But other FSOs, even some who are sharply critical of her in other areas, say that the trips were a welcome wake-up call for Hughes. “She seems to be really smart, flexible and adaptable, and willing to change her tactics to accommodate the facts,” says one longtime PD officer. “She seems to be capable of learning from her mistakes.” Since the trips, she has recast her role by defining a clear mission and setting three overarching goals. The first, she says, is that the United States must “continue to offer the world a positive vision of hope and opportunity that’s rooted in our values, our belief in freedom, our commitment to human rights, our belief in the worth and dignity and equality and value of every single person in the world.” Second, the United States must work with allies and friends to isolate and marginalize violent extremists. Finally, the U.S. must encourage recognition of the “common interests and common values between Americans and people of different countries and cultures and faiths across the world.” To accomplish those goals, Hughes has laid out tactics that she dubs the “five Es,” which are “engage, exchange, educate, empower and evaluate.” Many officers admit that they can’t help rolling their eyes when they hear Hughes try to boil down the public diplomacy message into pithy talking points. But her effort to define the mis- sion does square with the recent recommendations of the Government Accountability Office, as well as the influ- ential 2003 Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World. The latter was chaired by Edward Djerejian, director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and a former ambassador to Israel and Syria. Both studies argued that U.S. public diplomacy lacks the clear message and force- ful, coordinated delivery that define a good private-sector F O C U S 22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 6 By all accounts, Hughes’ tenure at State got off to an inauspicious start. But there is also agreement that she has learned from her mistakes.