My PD Blog: THE WHITE OAK RECOMMENDATIONS ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

My PD Blog: THE WHITE OAK RECOMMENDATIONS ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

THE WHITE OAK RECOMMENDATIONS ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

If you haven't read the White Oak Recommendations, you should do so at an early opportunity.  I've appended a link below to the Recommendations and a list of those individuals who generated them.   Most of the members of the White Oak group are known to me and they are serious people committed to improving American public diplomacy.  Indeed we agree on 90 percent or more of what is recommended. 

The recommendations are not exactly a great surprise or a departure from conventional wisdom and with the seventy or so people gathered around "the White Oak table", so to speak, it would be remarkable to gain an agreement on anything but the conventional.  And while I do agree with nearly all of what was listed in the recommendations (after all, a quick reading of them might strike anyone as a perfectly reasonable approach) I do get the feeling that there was an element of group think at play here.  

Nearly all of the participants are on record as solid Obama supporters, politically center-left and avowed Democrats.   Nothing wrong with that although I think that any conversation about public diplomacy benefits from a diversity of political or ideological views as well as a diversity of organizational backgrounds.   But because of this political uniformity it may have been more important to the participants to show unity rather than risk creativity which might have caused some to go in different directions and produce a messier set of recommendations to the administration and the Congress.   

On the recommendations, there are two elements with which I do not agree.  Indeed it will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with my writings that I would take issue with two of the recommendations.  The first begins with the "self-evident truth" that "Re-fighting old battles over the consolidation of public diplomacy is neither feasible nor productive at this time."  If not now, when?  Other than the State Department and perhaps the ghost of Jessie Helms, is there anyone who would fight to keep public diplomacy in the Department where it has been so disfunctional for the past decade?  People have used the lame excuse that restructuring public diplomacy is in the "too hard to do" box or have claimed that it would distract from the urgent business of doing public diplomacy.  When this argument is seen for what it is, then budget is raised as though a return to an independent public diplomacy agency would somehow cost more than the bloated bureaucracy of State or DoD. When USIA thrived it had a lean and non-partisan structure and there is no reason why a lean and non-partisan structure cannot be put in place today.  

The second point of disagreement between my colleagues at White Oak and this commentator is over the coordination of public diplomacy.  As the White Oak group acknowledges, it is unlikely that an Under Secretary for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy could serve as the "coordinator" for public diplomacy among the many forces within and outside the government that have an input into American public diplomacy.  Their "solution" is to create another Senior Director position at the National Security Council on a permanent or temporary basis to "fix" the coordination problem.  Public Diplomacy is a highly operational profession and I question why the NSC should be placed in the middle of operations--the last time that happened we had the Iran-Contra scandal.  

There is a better way to operate public diplomacy and a better way to coordinate public diplomacy in my view.   If you want to know more, see the link below to an article I wrote on these issues in March 2008.   Kudos to the White Oak group--they got it 90 percent right.  

Links:  http://mountainrunner.us/files/whiteoak/The_White_Oak_Recommendations_onPublc_Diplomacy.pdf

 http://mountainrunner.us/files/whiteoak/The_White_Oak_Recommendations_Endorsement_List.pdf

 http://www.pdworldwide.com/Services.html