The Foreign Service Journal, October 2009

O ver the past decade a new generation of public diplo- macy officers has risen to the mid-level ranks of the Foreign Service. We have no institutional memory of the U.S. Information Agency; many of our careers began with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pen- tagon, and the realization that not everyone loved America or our values. We departed for our first tours with the goal of dispelling increasing misper- ceptions about America, spread at an alarming rate through the unregulated, and often inaccurate, new world of mobile technology. It was at that point that our govern- ment realized what many of us learned through experience: people-to-people exchanges matter; we need to invest in the long term when it comes to diplo- macy; and we cannot achieve our pol- icy objectives in democracies without gaining buy-in from foreign publics. The new generation of public diplo- macy officers is ready to take on these challenges in order to promote U.S. strategic interests. But to do this, PD officers need to be empowered, inte- grated and equipped to succeed in the 21st century. There have been a number of re- ports on public diplomacy from the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the RAND Corporation and the Heritage Foundation, and frommembers of Congress. However, to our knowledge this is the first time a group of active-duty mid-level officers has come together to discuss these is- sues and put pen to paper. We hope our comments and suggestions will add a new perspective, and start a conver- sation about the direction of public diplomacy among current State De- partment PD practitioners. Give All Public Diplomacy Officers a Seat at the Table In practice, it is up to every single public diplomacy officer to insert him- self or herself into policy discussions in Washington and at post. For the past few years, PD officers have been em- bedded in the regional bureaus, specif- ically in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. This arrangement has been beneficial for the bureaus, the regional offices and the embedded officers, generally re- ferred to as “embeds.” Embeds have gained an under- standing of the broader policy issues surrounding their particular countries and, in turn, bring public diplomacy expertise to policy discussions from the outset. For their part, bureaus can bet- ter achieve their policy objectives when they have an integrated public diplomacy strategy. The following three examples illus- trate the strategic importance of PD. When Kosovo declared its inde- pendence in 2008, it was the embed- ded PD desk officer who spearheaded the outreach plan for gaining public support in Europe for formal recogni- tion. Similarly, during the August 2008 Russia-Georgia War, the PD desk offi- cer coordinated real-time formal mes- saging to be used by the interagency community and our embassies to counter Russian misinformation. And during interbureau and interagency discussions of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, the PD desk officer has consistently emphasized the point that a major obstacle to increased Euro- pean commitment is the low public support for the mission among the populations of Allied countries. As such examples demonstrate, the PD desk officer adds value by explain- ing the importance of negative public opinion as a “drag” on achieving our policy objectives. Moreover, such of- We hope to start a conversation about the direction of public diplomacy among current State Department PD practitioners. 14 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 9 Public Diplomacy: A View from the Front Line B Y THE P UBLIC D IPLOMACY F RONT L INE W ORKING G ROUP S PEAKING O UT