Is there ever a discussion of American public diplomacy that fails to endorse the idea of “winning hearts and minds.” Winning hearts and minds: it produces such a heartwarming feeling. And who could want otherwise? Wanting and getting, however, are not the same. I am suggesting here that “winning hearts and minds,” as such, was always a delusive goal. That being the case, given our present national condition, winning either is close to inconceivable.
It Was So Easy
During the cold war, public diplomacy was simple. We told people around the world that we had a better system, which we did, in most every way. It was more productive, which made us richer. Its political and judicial processes were creating ever greater equality for blacks, women, the handicapped. Our educational system was a magnet for the talented and ambitious. A stubborn remnant notwithstanding, the problem of poverty appeared to be solved. Refugees from corrupt, poor and repressed countries flocked to America for freedom and opportunity.
And oh! how proud of ourselves we were then! We used every conceivable medium to convey our triumphal national story, and people believed us, not only because we were clever at communications, but because the story we told was, in the main, true.Being a practitioner of public diplomacy back then was easy in other ways as well. Very little moral compromise was required of those who signed up for it. There was virtually no need to lie or equivocate, internally or externally, to get the job done. We actually believed in ourselves as representatives of something like the good.
Practices that Worked
Thus, willy nilly and almost by chance, the U.S. invented what now goes by the name of public diplomacy: an accretion of practices that worked. Not that the fancy new name came with an impressive, all-encompassing theory. Public diplomacy, for all its effectiveness, operated in the presence of a theoretical vacuum that cried for remedy, although, as I argue below, the crucial vacuum lies at the heart of a very different America. Nevertheless, the jockeying to fill that theoretical vacuum is under way, with practitioners, academics and the departments of State and Defense contending to define public diplomacy’s goals, tools, methods and appropriate place on the federal organizational chart. Is public diplomacy properly an arm of traditional diplomacy? Should it be an adjunct to military might? Or is it sui generis and deserving of its own niche in the foreign policy apparatus? For that matter, is it a profession or merely something any patriotic citizen can do?But always: how best to win hearts and minds? To which the short answer is: not head on.
The Happiness Paradigm
Let’s look at it this way: Happiness sought directly is like a mirage. It recedes. It dissolves. It can’t be attained. Yet happiness arises quite readily as a by-product, from jobs well done, from services well rendered, from things well made, from lessons well learned, from a clear conscience. Thus, during the cold war, America opposed a bad system and offered a better system we largely exemplified. As a consequence, hearts and minds almost everywhere were well disposed towards the U.S.
Unfortunately, we Americans let ourselves bask too long in that sunshine, imagining we had “won” those hearts and minds for all time. We were the best and the brightest, the exceptional country in a unipolar world, the beacon of inspiration. Every country, every society, with any sense, we thought, would want to be like us. Exactly like us. Above all, many of us actually believed (and still believe) that American dominance was the culmination of human history, if not the working of God’s will, notions that led directly to arrogance and complacency—and to forgetting the performance imperative.
There’s some consistency here. Even at home in recent decades Americans have worshiped at the altar of unconditional love. It’s near heresy to demand of those who wish to be loved some effort to make themselves loveable. The correlative child-rearing mantra has been: you are special, no matter what you do or don’t do. Well, humans are not mere tools and true love is generous, but undemandingness taken to extremes leads to egocentricity and irresponsibility. It leads to a cocooning sense of entitlement. Very comfy. Very easy to nod off and not notice how the world has changed.
Which has happened. The world has changed. And so have we, and not necessarily for the better. Forget about unconditional love. These days we have a difficult time generating the fig leaf of cooperation in pursuing our goals on the world stage. As for emulation, we no longer dare to expect it.
Who We Are Now
Asked to generate a list, many observers would include the following as the salient characteristics of the America we now live in: an increasingly unequal society with a tax system that overwhelmingly favors the wealthy; a stalemated political system held hostage to big money and crony capitalism; a country with a health care system so defective we surpass other industrialized countries in infant mortality and lag in longevity; a country that is systematically defunding its once great university system; a country with a retrograde transportation and communications system; a country with a failing ancient infrastructure; a country with a drug habit so extreme that other countries are being ruined in order to supply our addictions; a country where a good percentage of the population condones torture, belittles civil liberties and supports a brutal prison system crowned by capital punishment; a country where—well, that’s illustration enough, I think.In the past, public diplomacy was easy because we could point to America’s reasonably shining example. We were so cocky we freely admitted to the odd wart on the body politic. And now? With the U.S. more like a once healthy body eaten away by a very nasty aggressive cancer, the best we can say is this: well, if you look really hard beneath the ugly stuff, there’s still something attractive, sort of.
How can this appeal to thoughtful minds? How can it attract sensitive hearts? Directly or indirectly?
Money and the Military
Yes, the U.S. is still the most powerful nation on earth, militarily, although that military machine is eating us up. It’s unsustainable. Everything else is being sacrificed to keep it supplied and to keep it fighting more and more hot wars. Given the realities of the U.S. budget, it's no wonder that traditional diplomacy, public diplomacy and development aid have been migrating to the Pentagon, handmaidens all to our present inability to achieve our goals through non-coercive means.In today’s America, amazingly enough, it is above all the military that is expected to win hearts and minds, first through fire power, then through some mysterious seduction by which the violated maiden comes to love her rapist for ever and ever amen. On a less melodramatic plane, it might be well to remember that our dear friends the English thought they were bringing civilization to India. The Indians thought otherwise.