The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

give them assurances that hard work and training in the public diplomacy arena will lead to career advancement. USIA: Gone but Not Forgotten Among public diplomacy officers, current and past, there is still great nostalgia for the United States Information Agency, an independent agency that guided the United States’ communications efforts overseas for nearly 50 years with great success. Seven years after USIA became part of State in 1999, PD officers say that they still feel like outsiders in the department. When the Public Diplomacy Council — a group of top diplomats organized by The George Washington University — issued a “Call for Action on Public Diplomacy” in January 2005, its first recommendation was essentially to reconstitute USIA as a new U.S. Agency for Public Diplomacy. The unintended result of the merger of USIA and State, the report said, had been “to weaken strategic communication as an effective foreign policy tool.” However, the report argued, simply creating a new public diplomacy bureaucracy within State would not work: “Without direct control of public diplomacy per- sonnel and financial resources, an under secretary will continue to be held responsible for, yet have no real authority over, public diplomacy — a prescription for fail- ure. A new structure ... must be built.” Not everyone agrees with that argument. Edward Djerejian himself calls the dismantling of USIA a “strategic lapse in judgment.” But he adds that it would be very difficult to resurrect another govern- ment institution. Instead, he believes the challenge is: “How do you reinvent public diplomacy within the Foreign Service?” Quainton, who is vice president of the Public Diplomacy Council, says that there’s a strong argument to be made that it would be more efficient if State could be made to carry out the public diplomacy mission. “They’ve been groping for a structural solution to integration, which I think is still far from perfect,” he says. “It’s turned out to be very, very difficult.” Djerejian points out that Hughes has taken steps to boost the profile of the public diplomacy mission by, for example, shifting rating stan- dards for ambassadors to include an evaluation of their success in speaking out on behalf of the United States, and encouraging their missions to do the same. In addition, he notes, Hughes has succeeded in having a deputy assistant sec- retary for public diplomacy placed in each of State’s six regional bureaus. Quainton worries that promotion opportunities are still not as bright for public diplomacy officers as they were during the days of USIA. “There are no senior jobs guar- anteed to public diplomacy diplomats now,” he says. “That’s a distinct downgrading of career opportunities from what existed before.” PD officers have a greater opportunity, of course, to seek ambassadorships; but that, as Quainton notes, is not a purely public diplomacy func- tion. The bottom line, says Djerejian, is that “To change [the] culture you have to lead a campaign and get it done, and I think more work needs to be done on that. Foreign Service officers have to understand they are on the front lines of public diplomacy no matter what their function may be.” The Broadcasting Piece of the Puzzle If reshaping State’s culture weren’t enough of a chal- lenge, an equally daunting task may be integrating State’s public diplomacy efforts with those of other government agencies and, in particular, the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG oversees myriad, disjointed foreign broadcast networks that have both a responsibility to coor- dinate with State and a mission that requires journalistic independence. At a House Appropriations Committee hearing inMay, Rep. Alan B. Mollohan, D-W.Va., laid out the problem: “We’ve had the Coalition Information Center and the White House Office of Global Communications, Strategic Communication Policy Coordinating Committee, and the MuslimWorld Outreach Policy Coordination Committee. And the DOD’s had the Office of Strategic Influence,” he said, touching on some of the previous efforts to coordi- nate. “To what extent can we realistically think that we’re going to coordinate all of the agencies in a unified mes- sage?” F O C U S 24 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 Many FSOs fear Hughes is trying to run the PD apparatus as she would a political campaign, from the top.