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Looks Like We’ve Given Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For decades now the US has been closing its cultural centers and trying to whip up enthusiasiam for cheap substitutes which surveys have shown to be ineffectual.  The rationale for the cost cutting jag?  That old end of history canard.  Once the Cold War was over, there’d be no need to promote the American brand.  We’d won.  The future was us—the U.S.

The Greeks were so right about the need for self-knowledge and the dangers of hubris.  Our joy and relief when the Berlin Wall came down were so extreme that we thought the U.S. would be on top for ever—well, there were some level headed sorts who considered such thinking to be absurd, but they were pooh-poohed.  We cut back on our public diplomacy programs, and within ten years our public diplomacy agency went poof!  Gone.  In all fairness, I need to add that the Brits were cutting back on British Council expenditures, the French were less generous to their Alliance Française operations and the Germans were closing Goethe Centers, too.  The West, in general, was pretty smug about winning the Cold War and was determined to reap financial dividends.

But history, as it will, moved on.  Islam exploded, Russia refused to play the role of deferential poor provincial cousin, and if the 20st century was the American century, the competition for which country will dominate the 21st century seems to be constrained only by the never properly appreciated or understood efforts of India to deny the honor to the Chinese.  However, the Chinese are looking so good that the Russians, evidently, have decided to follow the Sino one-party-capitalism model to prosperity.

Where, Please, Are the American Media?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was watching the PBS Newhour tonight.  It was followed, as usual, by a half hour segment of the BBC news.  During the latter, I learned that the important debate we thought we were having about possible troop enhancements in Afghanistan is probably over.

Britain’s PM Gordon Brown is sending an extra 500 fighters to Afghanistan, evidently, but only because he can count on an American surge:  President Obama will likely be complying with General McCrystal’s request to beef up the American contingent.  And there’s more.  The numbers may exceed the 40,000 we ordinary American citizens were given to believe was the target number of the General's request. 

Why am learning this from a foreign news medium?  Do the American news media not know?  Have they decided—or been persuaded—that the U.S. public does not need to be informed of what our government is planning to do? 

Either possibility is unnerving.

I saw the BBC videocast at 6:30 pm mountain time.  It is now 10:30 pm mountain time.  A quick look at Google news shows CNN reporting only the proposed British buildup, while the  NYT is opting for process, not substance, a truly unhelpful trend in news reporting.  The Washington Post does mention the British assertions, but the story rests on the well-worn official statement that the President hasn’t made up his mind and won’t for a number of weeks yet.  Of the major US media, only the LA Times seems to be truly interested in the BBC report.  It reproduces a transcript of a press conference with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who ridicules the notion of getting Obama news from the BBC, not him.  So—do we believe the President’s man or the BBC? 

Yes.  Who are we to believe?  Once it was easy.  I trusted the American press to dig and pry and muckrake.     However, considering the derelictions of main stream media in recent years, especially the tendency to feed us unquestioned official versions of anything delicate, I’m inclined to go with the BBC version.  They’re not likely to go out on a limb without good reason.

All of which makes me sad and angry.   There are many among us who assert that we can no longer count on the U.S. press to keep us fearlessly well informed about our government and those we have chosen to lead us.  I've been slow to resign myself to this possibility, and maybe my doubts will turn out to be ill founded.  But the mere fact that I am doubting is the crux of the matter.

The Field: Where Foreign Policy Succeeds or Fails

Public Diplomacy Today

Part 4

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Foreign policy needs and goals are defined in Washington, but foreign policy succeeds or fails in the field.  Attention is sought.  Criticism is met.  Competing influences are neutralized or co-opted. Friends are made. Alliances are built.  Goals are achieved—or not.   It helps hugely when policy is intrinsically attractive.  Being militarily strong helps, too, up to a point. Overwhelming strength is often resented.  It becomes, paradoxically, a disadvantage to be adroitly overcome, since no other country wants to appear to have been coerced.  But raw power flaunted or sheathed, even the U.S. can’t go it alone in today’s world.  Public diplomacy’s role is to move governments by inspiring their citizens to see American goals as good for them, too.

The Trifecta:  Information, Culture, Education

Public Diplomacy in the field, at post, works both directly and indirectly.  It aims simultaneously for immediate and longer term impact, the two time lines corresponding roughly to the two branches of traditional PD work: information and culture.  Sometimes the information function is confused with the manipulations better known today as propaganda, although PD’s need for reliability and credibility makes it more akin to journalism.  Cultural programs are often dismissed as frills, expensive indulgences whose impact is difficult to measure, which is true, but only because conventional polling is at its weakest when assessing qualitative phenomena and complex interactions. Straddling the two, though not customarily administered as such, are the educational programs which involve knowledgeable Americans interacting with foreign audiences, short trips to the U.S. for promising mid-career foreign citizens, youth exchanges, academic exchanges like the Fulbright program and even, until recently, university linkages. 

Informational, educational, cultural—these are the co-equal mutually-supportive elements of an effective PD program.  Properly orchestrated, they enhance the overall American image, making the U.S. better understood and more attractive as an ally.  They create lasting links between individuals and institutions, which keeps doors open and ensures a hearing when tough or sensitive issues need support.   They provide, via all media platforms, relevant, accurate and timely information to foreign publics whose mobilization is critical if American foreign policy goals are to be met.

Planning for Success

Because every country is different—even Canada and the United States differ in ways that would call for modulated communications strategies—a Washington-dictated, one-way, one-size-fits-all approach to public diplomacy, however tempting it might seem to bean counters, doesn’t work. Therefore, once Washington establishes policy priorities, experienced, skilled, perceptive  and imaginative field officers must be trusted to devise ways to sell it. 

In the past, USIA posts were required to submit an annual country plan assessing the state of the bilateral relationship, describing (in cooperation with the entire mission) how the post proposed to nourish the relationship while promoting, according to carefully specified strategies, Washington’s policy priorities and, last but not least, requesting the financial, human and material resources to do so.  Expectations for evaluation and feedback were built in.   Naturally big posts in big countries enjoyed more staff and bigger budgets.  But all posts in all countries were guaranteed sufficient resources—Public Affairs Officer plus American and/or locally-hired personnel; a vast range of highly-responsive, Washington-based backup services; firewalled budgetary authority; the wherewithal to run a full service American Center; an appropriate inventory of up-to-date equipment; and, last but not least, PD-controlled vehicles—to offer a high-quality, well-balanced, year-round program that could and would put America in the best possible light.  

The State Department has a habit of bemoaning the lack of administrative skills among its high level officers—and yet, at every post, there was, for decades, a whole cadre of field-tested managers who were also Foreign Service Officers: the public diplomacy people.  Even fairly junior officers had managerial responsibilities, and anyone who wanted to be a Public Affairs Officer had to be an adroit CEO, a dollar-squeezing CFO, a supervisor with a knack for delegating, a program coordinator, a cultural impresario, a human resources geni, a master of media, a public relations whiz, a social psychologist, a linguist, a self-confident performer—and make it all look smooth and easy to the public, which is why, perhaps, the typical State Department officer found it so difficult to appreciate what those public diplomacy colleagues were doing.  Even today there are calls for outside hires to supply the State Department with managerial talent.  Meanwhile, the superb managers that State acquired when it absorbed USIA, were ignored or devalued.  Many, therefore, retired prematurely.  Although a very few prospered and even became Ambassadors, Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Consul Generals, most public diplomacy operational skills are in a state of disuse bordering on atrophy and will soon be lost, except as recorded in the memoirs of better times. Talk about squandering capital!

Forget Twitter - Tea with Sylvester’s More Fun

By Patricia H. Kushlis

 

Meet Sylvester, the extroverted cockatiel who belongs to Nancy, a friend of mine who lives near Central California’s coast.  I’m not really sure whether Sylvester belongs to Nancy or Nancy belongs to Sylvester.  My guess is the ownership relationship is mutual.

 In any event, Sylvester lives in Nancy’s kitchen and spends most of his time perched on the top of his cage next to the windows with a well supplied tin of feed for handy nibbling right in front of his beak. The kitchen is where Sylvester and I met several months ago.

For the record, Sylvester is no spring chicken.  I understand he was born in the 1980s.  But don’t remind him of his age – actually, he’s probably not interested anyway.  But he is interested in human attention and conversation as long as he’s included, too.

If there’s one thing Sylvester does well is attract both – and he doesn’t confine himself to 140 character one-way tweets to do so either.

No 140 character tweets for him

He also varies the volume - the more he is ignored the louder he gets - and he has one trick in his repertoire that he made sure I saw. After appropriate prior noisy chatter to ensure audience attention, he grabbed onto a bar on top of his cage with his beak and then flipped his body over - somersault style into the entry of his cage’s open door below.  It’s really quite a remarkable sight – and just to make sure his now captive audience didn’t miss it – he repeated the same feat numerous times.

Now perhaps it was because I was in a resigned doing-the-laundry mood desperately needed after a several days on the road – Nancy had given me access to her washer and dryer and tea kettle that morning - or the weather was California Central Coast drizzle and the antics of a small yellowish, grayish, whitish colored bird with an elaborate feathery headdress turning tricks in a kitchen corner simply attracted my attention, I don’t know.

But Sylvester turned out to be a most unusual and athletic companion on an otherwise dreary foggy April day.  No he’s not a canary – he doesn’t sing – but he is a mimic.  In fact, he’s not just a mimic but a show-off.   And as you can see from his photo above, he’s also too small to be a parrot.

So if you find yourself in need of cheering up or are simply looking for distraction provided by an avian Woody Allen seek out Sylvester – or a relative.   Who needs Twitter?  Sylvester’s more fun.   

Photo of Sylvester by Patricia H. Kushlis, April 2009.

      

 

      

 

Pay for View the Murdoch Way: Money or Influence Which Is It?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Oh my gosh, right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced earlier this summer that he plans to charge for access to online news content. Since I’m no fan of Murdoch productions – online, in print, or in any other form – that’s just hunky-dory with me. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think he should be encouraged to do so.

Let me explain.

Although there are a very few news organizations that have successfully succeeded in firewalling off their content to subscribers only, most have failed. And the few that have succeeded – The Financial Times and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal – do so because in Jeff Jarvis’ (The Guardian) view their “readers . . . make money on the content, and pass the cost on to their employers.”

If Murdoch’s goal is foremost to increase his oversized fortune – I wish him the best of luck – but if NPR CEO Vivian Schiller is right, and she should know, he’d be financially more successful if he left his news operations alone.

When you click on WhirledView.....

We love spontaneity and there’s no way we’re going to be bound to anything like an invariable format. The world keeps changing, new ideas crop up, even old players aren’t always predictable and we, like you, get easily bored. Still, readers and editors benefit from some predictability. You may have noticed a certain rhythm to our postings recently, but we’d like to make it explicit.

Monday through Friday we concentrate on the so-called serious stuff, the think pieces that WhirledView readers expect. Over the weekend we’ll try to offer lighter fare: travel, food, fun, life. And several times a month, often but not always on Thursday, we’ll aim to feature a guest post.

Every day we’ll hope for comments from some of you.

Europe Breaks the Microsoft Stranglehold; Time for America to Follow Suit

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Two fascinating stories on the business front this week.  Neither has terribly good new for Americans.  Here are the headlines:

    Dateline Berlin:  To Avoid a New Legal Battle, Microsoft Offers Europe a Choice of Browsers

    Dateline Washington, D.C.:  Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown

The European Union has long accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the operating system market to foist its media players, browsers and other consumer software products on computer buyers, who might prefer other products, if they could be got to run on XP or Vista or any other Microsoft OS without endless annoying complications, thanks to the bundling process, which tangles up code so hopelessly that the non-nerd hasn’t a chance for independence and sticks, however resentfully, with Microsoft.  Result: smaller competitors haven't a hope of succeeding.  The Microsoft position today verges on monopoly, and the Europeans, thank goodness, object to that.  Under threat of a prodigious fine, Microsoft has reached an agreement with the EU.

From now on, computer buyers in Europe (but not in the U.S. or anywhere else outside Europe) will be presented with a ballot screen that will allow them to choose which browser they want to use.  Explorer will be one of the choices, but it will no longer be confusing and time consuming  to choose a non-Microsoft browser.

Microsoft has evidently also agreed to release “confidential technical information worldwide that would help competitors design software” that works more smoothly with Windows and other Microsoft products.  That’s good news for all of us.

I’ve been using Firefox for years and have been totally satisfied with everything about my choice, except the business of disabling MS Explorer and installing Firefox whenever I buy a new computer.  I have go through all sorts of  stupid rigamarole before I can get on the Web the way I want to get on the Web.  Even so, every so often, Explorer breaks through and tries to take over.  I am not amused.

When are U.S. anti-trust authorities going to have the guts to take on Microsoft so that we American computer users can enjoy the same freedom? 

Getting It Wrong

by Cheryl Rofer

Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.

But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.

It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.

Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.

The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.

Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.

Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.

The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)

Do Pictures Lie?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Not exactly.  But our interpretations may be way way off.

Look at this photo.  Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari is extending two hands and he’s smiling—grinning really, as if he’s trying hard to be agreeable. He wants to be friends, and he wants the camera to get this.  But Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, apparently isn’t buying it.  His body is rigid.  He’s allowing, just barely, his hand to be grasped.  The absolute diplomatic minimum.  Aha! I thought, when I first saw this photo, a wonderfully graphic indication that Singh and India want as little as possible to do with Pakistan, until Pakistan takes stronger action against those behind the murderous rampage in Mumbai last year. 

So that’s how I was going to play it when I was writing my post on Pride and Paralysis.  

Fortunately before I’d posted that draft, I came across another photo, this one of all the principals at the BRIC conference in Russia.  Look at Manmohan Singh, who has no reason to be conveying anything negative in this situation.  The same aloof body posture.  That now familiar, seemingly reluctant participation in the rite when all the others are reaching eagerly into a two handed press-the-flesh fest for photographers.   (This time, of course, there is a ghost of a smile, which may or may not mean anything. )

So I advance another hypothesis, which I’ll share with you.  Manmohan Singh does what’s necessary, diplomatically, but maybe he really doesn’t like handshakes.  As an Indian of the old school, he may prefer a namaste.  Folded hands.  Gentle reserve.  No physical contact.

But that, too, is only a guess.

Photo Credits:  The Hindu; The New York Times.

A Divided Pakistan through Pakistani Eyes

By Patricia L. Sharpe

In ten minutes you can see Pakistan from a number of perspectives.  With the exception of the first item, which was written by a Pakistani for the Asian Times on Line, all the items below appeared recently in the Pakistan-based media.

Pakistan is fighting for its tribal soul:  Asia Times on Line

Pakistan is divided against itself: Daily Times

Sprawling Karachi makes a perfect refuge for Taliban: Dawn

Baitullah is booked for the murder in Lahore of a moderate cleric: The Nation

A young tribal chief will take on Taliban leader, then go after foreigners in Afghanistan: The Nation

Violence against Taliban is not a good idea: Daily Times

Offensive against South Wazistan begins:  The News