Good Ideas Sometimes Come in Unexpected Places

I just came across this article in the on-line edition of The American Interest and I wanted to share the relevant excepts about public diplomacy with this Blog's readers. Of course the article is brilliant mainly because it mirrors the thrust of my own opinions (see Humpty Dumpty Redux etc.) but doesn't have the burden of being written by an ex-USIA officer and public diplomacy professional.

Here it is:
Excerpt from: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=536&MId=23

The American Interest On Line

Nation-Building in America

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

HOW TO CHANGE AMERICA


William A. Galston

(Begin excepts)
Deconsolidation. Other institutional changes President Obama could adopt are less momentous but could still significantly improve government performance at modest cost. Reversing unsuccessful consolidations would be a good place to start.
When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, Congress and the Bush Administration cast a wide net. Indeed, they cast it too wide—much wider than suggested by the initial expert proposals for a such a Department. Including the Federal Emergency Management Agency in DHS, for example, made more sense in bureaucratic flow charts than in the real world. To be sure, FEMA has raised its game since the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. But as long as this agency remains buried in a department whose principle mission is fighting terrorism, it will not command top-quality management or adequate resources. As the Kennedy School’s Elaine Kamarck has argued, the best and simplest remedy is to restore the status quo ante—namely, an independent FEMA, an arrangement which performed well during the Clinton Administration.
Our nation’s public diplomacy institutions mark another instance of a failed consolidation. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued last year that, in waging and winning the Cold War, institutions mattered as much as people and policies. In the wake of the Cold War, we weakened not only our military and intelligence capabilities, but also the institutions of “soft power” that enabled us to communicate effectively with other parts of the world. The fault was bipartisan. During the 1990s, arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) applied relentless pressure to abolish the U.S. Information Agency. He found partners in two successive Secretaries of State interested in bringing public diplomacy under State Department control, and in a White House eager to demonstrate that it was reinventing government. By 1999, as Secretary Gates put it, “the U.S. Information Agency was abolished as an independent entity, split into pieces, and many of its capabilities folded into a small corner of the State Department.”1
Today, the United States finds itself engaged in new ideological struggles against authoritarian populism and Islamist radicalism. Opinion surveys show that we are on the defensive and losing ground. While inherently unpopular policies are largely responsible, our failure to build bridges to other peoples has made matters worse. What we are doing is not working. Simply recreating the institutions of the past is unlikely to make matters better, but neither will simply adding people and money to today’s flawed structures.
Our public diplomacy will remain weak as long as it is subordinated to the State Department’s traditional concerns—a fact that leading conservatives are readier to acknowledge than are most liberals. To give public diplomacy the clout it needs, we should create a new cabinet-level Department of Global Information and Communications (DGIC) and back it with the resources it would need to succeed. Its functions would include: training public diplomacy officers for embassies and consulates around the world; offering media and communications training for State Department officials and those other agencies that represent the United States abroad; jump-starting the study of critical foreign languages through a new National Security Languages Initiative; bolstering area studies, including creating new interdisciplinary centers and convening high-level conferences; sponsoring and conducting ongoing survey research on public opinion abroad; assuming responsibility for international broadcasting beyond pure news; expanding vital people-to-people programs, including exchanges of scholars, students and cultural institutions, expert American speakers abroad and English-language teaching; and launching a massive new translation program, the “American Knowledge Library Initiative”, designed to make the best of our thought and culture available abroad in critical foreign languages.
The DGIC would assume a significant role within the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy. For example, its representative would be at the table during interagency deputies’ meetings, articulating the consequences of policy options for our standing in the world. As the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Muslim and Arab World argued in 2003,
while the United States cannot and should not simply change its policies to suit public opinion abroad, we must use the tools of public diplomacy to assess the likely effectiveness of particular policies. Without such assessment, our policies could produce unintended consequences that do not serve our interests.

In addition, a senior official of the DGIC would chair an interagency Policy Coordination Council on public diplomacy, with representation from the State Department, USAID, Defense and Commerce, among others.
(End Excerpts)

1. Gates, Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, November 26, 2007.

About the Author:
William A. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies.