by Craig Hayden

So I’ve had some time to digest the conversation on McHale’s proposed new framework for US public diplomacy strategy. Upon reflection, as Rhonda Zaharna describes in her insightful and clarifying new book, Battles to Bridges: US Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy after 9/11, the framework is yet another example of how “grand strategy,” “strategy,” and “tactics” get muddled in the conceptualization of public diplomacy objectives and the world-view that it is based upon.

The sticking points in public reactions to this framework take on two distinct dimensions: conceptual and structural.

The first, epitomized by Phil Seib’s excoriation, is that the proposal offers nothing fundamentally new. Seib has a particular vision of what it should have focused on:

Nothing in the new plan addresses the need for public diplomacy to worry less about branding and more about service; to step away from Cold War-style monologue and embrace a comprehensive plan for interactive communication; to shift from a Middle East-centric public diplomacy to a more balanced global outlook; to realistically employ public diplomacy as an antiterrorism tool; and to reach out to diasporic populations and virtual states.

Seib’s critique is conceptual and strategic. There are elements, however, of what he is asking for already in the framework. It’s just that they are emphasized as crucial, or, they are mentioned alongside some of the more antiquated conceptions that continue to define US public diplomacy thinking.

Others have noted that the framework doesn’t really read like strategy at all, but more like a laundry list of things to do, or to express that the US do more.

Matt Armstrong has also noted in various venues that the framework continues to foreground the conceptual distinction between foreign and domestic, when, as Seib also notes – the notion of the foreign is complicated by the fact that states are increasingly virtual. Nation-states are interpenetrated by diasporic populations, both mobile and connected via technology, that complicate the notion of “target audience,” if not the impossibility of a stable notion of audience.

The final conceptual critique seems to center on the notion of “listening.” Essentially – the framework does not emphasize the actions and responsiveness that would reflect a strategic posture of listening. For many in the critical community of PD watchers, the notion of listening is the final frontier of real transformation. It also happens to be the concept that would most tightly bind the functions of PD with the overarching foreign policy apparatus.

The other strand of critique is structural. Bill Kiehl, commenting on MountainRunner, notes that the proposal to add new regional DAS’s to help coordinate the bureau’s with McHale’s office has already been tried. Kiehl writes:

This is not exactly the change that public diplomacy needs. Fussing around the edges instead of a major structural change will not make enough of a difference. The public diplomacy DAS in the six regional bureaus idea was tried before and it proved to be ineffective in either bridging the gap to policy or in bringing some unity of command to public diplomacy abroad. Putting a DAS for international public affairs in perhaps the most dysfunctional bureau in the State Department (PA) will not cure the dysfunction or dramatically improve the “message” to overseas audiences. There is really nothing here that inspires confidence that America’s public diplomacy will improve.

What’s interesting, at least from my perspective, is that the structure appears to be as much an internal appeal to revitalizing the “R” division of public diplomacy among the functions of the State Department as much as it is a necessary structure for an effective PD. I say this because of the continued presence of figures like Alec Ross, who operate clearly in the conceptual domain of PD, yet are not in fact under the authority of McHale. The Undersecretary’s new framework, as an organization template, is an assertion of organizational relevance as much as a strategic argument.

Of course the framework is not without its defenders. Or rather, the critics are not immune to criticism. In the comments section of another Phil Seib post on the framework, James Glassman, President George W Bush’s last Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs takes Seib to task for being too general and sweeping in his criticism.

But I think that what Seib may be getting at, something I’ve heard echoed elsewhere, is that the framework is not really reflective of what has been said repeatedly for years by academics and policy commentators regarding public diplomacy. I’m sure that individuals like Seib can acknowledge the positive steps taken by leaders like Glassman to revitalize US public diplomacy, but I don’t think Seib’s critique rests entirely the structural, procedural, and resourcing of PD. Seib, like myself, is concerned with conceptual reform – perhaps a reform so radical as to be difficult to embrace easily. I’ve been writing about an evolution of public diplomacy that would invert the functions of public diplomacy and traditional diplomacy; an effacement of conceptual boundaries that will likely be driven by foreign policy objectives more than top-down institutional redesign.

This kind of conceptual identity change requires input and reflexivity from the State Department. A willingness to accept outsider perspectives and wisdom. It strikes me that Seib’s points on the framework reveal a more insular strategy formation process than he or others are comfortable with.