The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

Congress to restore funding to permit cultural chief Dina Powell to expand exchanges, export fine and performing arts, reopen lib- raries and cultural centers, rebuild English teaching, foster high-quali- ty book translations, showcase fea- ture films, nurture inter-university relations and enhance two-way stu- dent flows. Without these time- honored building-blocks of the U.S. cultural presence, today’s world has come to see the U.S. doing precisely what the Wahhabi-Salafis and their terror- ist friends want us to do: leave culture and education to them. For a cultural diplomat, the PD debate thus far falls well short of relevance. The real issues lie beyond alter- native PD rhetoric, “telling America’s story to the world,” or better spin and focus. Welles and MacLeish saw one core issue in 1940 and it has not changed: the U.S. role in the world of tomorrow. American citizens need to understand that, without their advice or consent, govern- ment has taken on the responsibil- ities of global hegemony. If Americans in fact want this, then what kind of hegemon do they want America to be? And is our citizenry prepared, in accepting that role, to bear the visible and invisible costs of empire. Only public and private intellectual and executive leadership can help Americans deal with these ques- tions. Thoughtful guidance can help Americans under- stand how government and civil society might work together to create a true American public diplomacy — and, surely more important, a decent, affordable and effective U.S. cultural diplomacy. F O C U S O C T O B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43 The strategic problem of sweetening a sour policy when the audience has lost faith in the messenger can take decades to address.