The Foreign Service Journal, December 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2015 21 American Foreign Service Association/Scholarship AFSA.org/Scholar American Foreign Service Protective Association afspa/FESB afspa.org/dental Asheville School ashevilleschool.org Basis Independent McLean McLean.Basisindependent.com CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield fepblue.org/2016bene ts Clements Worldwide Clements.com Dulwich Collegel, Shanghai dulwich-shanghai.cn/ Embassy Risk Management Embassyrisk.com The Fountain Valley School fvs.edu The Hirshorn Company Hirshorn.com/USFS McGrath Real Estate Services McGrathRealEstate.com Stanford High School Summer College summercollege.stanford.edu Stanford Online High School ohs.stanford.edu Tilton School tiltonschool.org WJD Management wjdpm.com attributing the impact of new busi- nesses, democratic reform efforts and the empowerment of women brought about by U.S. government-funded leadership training and skills-building courses is a far more daunting task. Measuring the impact of public diplomacy programs will become more and more difficult as we shift resources away from educating a manageable target group of elites about the United States (propaganda) toward trying to instill democratic values and empower broad swaths of civil society to reform their countries (development). Art, Science or Religion? In light of the problems we have had in proving the impact of our PD pro- grams, a logical question arises: How do we justify continuing to implement and expand programs without sufficient evidence of their effect? I’ve posed this question to many of my PD colleagues over the past few years. The most common response is that public diplomacy is an art, not a science. As long as your programs are strategically focused, they assure me, you shouldn’t worry too much about measuring the impact. After all, any PD officers worth their salt know “in their gut,” from site visits and anecdotal evidence, whether a program is working or not. While I have been known to say similar things myself in the past, I now find that claim unsatisfying (to be satis- fied by anecdotal evidence alone is to be self-satisfied). By continuing, year after year, to evangelize about the greatness of democracy, proselytize on behalf of mul- ticulturalism and preach the importance of equality without significant proof that we are in fact having any real impact, we make ourselves vulnerable to the charge that we do so largely on the basis of faith. One might argue we are closer to practicing a religion than to implement- ing an effective foreign policy program. Even though it’s true that many government programs, domestic and foreign, continue to be funded despite their inability to live up to the congres- sional requirement that federal agencies be “accountable for achieving program results,” we should not be complacent. Our inability to prove the effectiveness of our programs should bother us, because it impedes our ability to make intelligent decisions about our funding priorities. For example, when the State Depart- ment proposed cuts to the Fulbright Europe program in the Fiscal Year 2015 budget to increase funding for newer initiatives, there was a large outcry from Fulbright alumni, some of whom published opinion pieces and started an online campaign (www.savefulbright. org) arguing that cutting the program would have dramatic negative conse- quences for our foreign policy. Many of the arguments relied on rhetoric that was full of fallacious reasoning (e.g., appeals to history, anecdotal evidence, slippery-slope arguments, begging the question). That’s not to say that the Fulbright Program hasn’t had great impact; it could very well be our most effective public diplomacy effort. But without evidence to help us weigh the cost- effectiveness of one program compared to another, we won’t ever have a way to adequately and dispassionately adju- dicate budget disputes. Rhetoric will continue to rule the day. What Is to Be Done? Is there a way we can move from our current “faith-based” public diplomacy model toward a more evidence-based