The Foreign Service Journal, October 2009

48 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 itself on its commitment to diplomacy, but it does not un- derstand well or appreciate public diplomacy. The clash of cultures continues. The traditional State Department mode of operations is Washington-centered, elitist, cautious and secretive—all qualities perfectly suited to the conduct of traditional diplomacy. But they are anti- thetical to public diplomacy, which is field-driven and en- courages egalitarianism, risk-taking and transparency. Similarly, when State looks to public diplomacy, it sees pub- lic affairs and focuses on immediate gains when it should be looking at long-term engagement, measuring “success” in decades, not hours. The scale and intensity of this clash of cultures are extreme: to use an oft-cited analogy, “tradi- tional diplomacy is fromMars and PD is from Venus.” Who is in charge? The overseas practice of public diplo- macy is lodged within each of the department’s regional bu- reaus, with a scattering of PD officers placed in functional bureaus, almost as an afterthought. Public diplomacy offi- cers abroad report through deputy chiefs of mission to re- gional assistant secretaries in Washington, D.C. — not to the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (known as “R”), as one might expect. Compounding the problem, there is no global view or oversight. Instead, embassy public affairs officers often find themselves pursuing conflicting and contradictory goals, sometimes becoming nothing more than press agents for their ambassador. There is no chain of command from R to the public affairs officers in the field who implement public diplomacy every day. Equally important, there is no feedback loop from the field to the PD leadership inWash- ington. Responsibility without authority spells trouble. Within the State Department, there is no central budgeting, man- agement and personnel authority over public diplomacy. Instead, each regional bureau has its own pot of money and set of personnel to deploy as it wishes, without any means to coordinate its actions with other regions. Even the two PD bureaus in State (International Information Programs and Education and Cultural Affairs) and the overseas PD operations in the regional bureaus operate in parallel uni- verses, with scarcely any coordination. Despite some tinkering with the original PD structure within State a couple of years ago, the under secretary still commands a relatively small “front office” staff and a tiny fraction of the overall PDbudget. It is simply unacceptable that a position responsible for the success or failure of America’s public diplomacy utterly lacks the authority to af- fect the outcome. The Voice of America suffers from laryngitis. The Broadcasting Board of Governors that inherited the civilian U.S. government international radio networks with the breakup of USIA in 1999 has had its own twisted, tortuous decade-long journey. With- out going into the details, suffice it to say that as trou- bled as public diplomacy is today, its problems pale when compared to themas- sive and costly dysfunction- ality of the U.S. govern- ment’s civilian international broadcasting as conducted by the BBG. Permitting in- ternational broadcasting to “go its own way” since 1999 has led nowhere but down- hill. A lead agency for public diplomacy is missing in ac- tion. Recognizing that not only State but also the De- partment of Defense, the U.S. Agency for Interna- F O C U S P ROPOSED U.S. D EPARTMENT OF S TATE S ENIOR L EADERSHIP Source: William P. Kiehl