[Senate Hearing 110-890]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-890
A RELIANCE ON SMART POWER--REFORMING THE PUBLIC DIPLOMACY BUREAUCRACY
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT,
THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE
of the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
__________
Available via http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html
Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
45-580 PDF WASHINGTON : 2009
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC
area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC
20402-0001
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TED STEVENS, Alaska
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
BARACK OBAMA, Illinois PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri JOHN WARNER, Virginia
JON TESTER, Montana JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire
Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware TED STEVENS, Alaska
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana JOHN WARNER, Virginia
Richard J. Kessler, Staff Director
Joel C. Spangenberg, Professional Staff Member
Jennifer A. Hemingway, Minority Staff Director
Thomas A. Bishop, Legislative Aide
Jessica K. Nagasako, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
------
Opening statements:
Page
Senator Akaka................................................ 1
Senator Voinovich............................................ 9
WITNESSES
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Christopher Midura, Acting Director, Office of Policy, Planning,
and Resources for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S.
Department of State, accompanied by Ambassador Scott H. Delisi,
Director, Career Development and Assignments, Bureau of Human
Resources, U.S. Department of State, Rick A. Ruth, Director,
Office of Policy and Evaluation Bureau of Educational and
Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State, and Peter Kovach,
Director, Global Strategic Engagement Center, U.S. Department
of State....................................................... 3
Douglas K. Bereuter, President and Chief Executive Officer, The
Asia Foundation................................................ 20
Ambassador Elizabeth F. Bagley, Vice Chairman, U.S. Advisory
Commission on Public Diplomacy................................. 22
Stephen M. Chaplin, Senior Advisor, The American Academy of
Diplomacy...................................................... 25
Ronna A. Freiberg, Former Director,Congressional and
Intergovernmental Affairs, U.S. Information Agency............. 27
Jill A. Schuker, Fellow, University of Southern California,
Center for Public Diplomacy.................................... 29
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Bagley, Ambassador Elizabeth F.:
Testimony.................................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 55
Bereuter, Douglas K.:
Testimony.................................................... 20
Prepared statement........................................... 46
Chaplin, Stephen M.:
Testimony.................................................... 25
Prepared statement........................................... 59
Freiberg, Ronna A.:
Testimony.................................................... 27
Prepared statement........................................... 63
Midura, Christopher:
Testimony.................................................... 3
Prepared statement........................................... 41
Schuker, Jill A.:
Testimony.................................................... 29
Prepared statement........................................... 68
APPENDIX
Chart referred to by Ms. Schuker................................. 79
Questions and Responses for the Record from:
Mr. Midura................................................... 80
Ambassador DeLisi............................................ 91
Mr. Ruth..................................................... 105
Mr. Kovach................................................... 112
Ms. Bagley................................................... 119
Mr. Chaplin.................................................. 127
Ms. Schuker.................................................. 143
``Getting the People Part Right,'' A Report on the Human
Resources Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy, 2008, The United
States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy................. 149
``A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future, Fixing the Crisis in
Diplomatic Readiness,'' Resources for US Global Engagement,
Full Report, October 2008, The American Academy of Diplomacy... 190
A RELIANCE ON SMART POWER--REFORMING THE PUBLIC DIPLOMACY BUREAUCRACY
----------
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Oversight of Government
Management, the Federal Workforce,
and the District of Columbia,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:29 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Daniel K.
Akaka, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Akaka and Voinovich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA
Senator Akaka. I call this hearing of the Subcommittee on
Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and
the District of Columbia to order.
I want to welcome our guests today. Thank you so much for
being here.
Public diplomacy is an essential tool, as it was in the
past, in our efforts to win the Global War on Terrorism. During
the Cold War, public diplomacy helped spread our values of
freedom and democracy to those who were struggling behind the
Iron Curtain. After the Cold War, the need for public diplomacy
to some appeared less certain. Political pressure to do away
with the organizations of the Cold War increased and the U.S.
Information Agency, along with two other agencies, was merged
in 1999 into the State Department.
The tragedies of September 11, 2001, renewed interest in
public diplomacy as a means to convince foreign publics,
especially those in Muslim countries, that we were friends and
potential partners. An array of commissions urged improvements
in our public diplomacy efforts and President Bush soon formed
Policy Coordinating Committees at the National Security Council
to better harmonize public diplomacy efforts. At the same time,
others called for creating a new public diplomacy agency,
dramatically increasing resources, encouraging more exchange
programs, engaging in a war of ideas, and communicating across
all types of media.
There is now a clear consensus that our public diplomacy is
a vital tool in America's diplomatic arsenal and our use of it
must be improved. A recognition of America's need for more
public diplomacy extends beyond its borders. In a recently
published report by the Asia Foundation, both Asian and
American leaders recommend a new program of cultural, artistic,
and intellectual interaction between the civil societies of
both the U.S. and Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian
representatives called for in particular the creation of new
American centers to promote a better understanding of the
United States. It is important that it is foreigners who are
demanding to better understand the United States.
In today's hearing, I want to examine more closely the
following issues. Is our existing public diplomacy strategy
accomplishing its objectives? How well are agencies
coordinating? What improvements need to be made to the public
diplomacy structure in Washington and in the field? What role
should the private sector play? And what are the State
Department's human capital and program gaps in public
diplomacy?
I also want to stress my belief that all of our diplomats,
especially those who project our image to another Nation's
public, need to continue to develop a deeper appreciation and
understanding of the culture within which they will work.
The United States is a country that values democracy and
freedom. For the United States to continue to recover its
international reputation, it not only needs to live up to its
values, but also share them in an effective manner with the
rest of the world.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today, and I
want to welcome you at this time. We have Christopher Midura,
Acting Director, Office of Policy, Planning, and Resources for
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Department of State. We
have Ambassador Scott Delisi, Director, Career Development and
Assignments, Bureau of Human Resources, Department of State;
Rick A. Ruth, Director, Office of Policy and Evaluation, Bureau
of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State; and
Peter Kovach, Director, Global Strategic Engagement Center,
Department of State.
It is the custom of this Subcommittee to swear in all
witnesses, so I would ask all of you to stand and raise your
right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give to
this Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Midura. I do.
Mr. Delisi. I do.
Mr. Ruth. I do.
Mr. Kovach. I do.
Senator Akaka. Thank you. Let the record note that the
witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Before we start, I want you to know that your full
statement will be made a part of the record. I would also like
to remind you to keep your remarks brief, given the number of
people testifying this afternoon.
Mr. Midura, will you please begin with your statement.
TESTIMONY OF CHRISTOPHER MIDURA,\1\ ACTING DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF
POLICY, PLANNING, AND RESOURCES FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND PUBLIC
AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, ACCOMPANIED BY AMBASSADOR
SCOTT H. DELISI, DIRECTOR, CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND ASSIGNMENTS,
BUREAU OF HUMAN RESOURCES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, RICK A.
RUTH, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF POLICY AND EVALUATION, BUREAU OF
EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, AND
PETER KOVACH, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL STRATEGIC ENGAGEMENT CENTER,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Mr. Midura. Mr. Chairman, I wish to express my thanks for
your invitation to testify here today on smart power and reform
of the public diplomacy bureaucracy. Secretary Condoleezza Rice
and Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
James K. Glassman look forward to continuing our close
cooperation with the Congress to strengthen public diplomacy's
role as a vital national security priority.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Midura appears in the Appendix on
page 41.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Under the direction of Under Secretary Glassman, we are
reviewing, improving, and modernizing public diplomacy
structures and programs in the State Department to build upon
the government-wide public diplomacy leadership role assigned
to the Under Secretary by the White House. Under Secretary
Glassman has emphasized in several articles and interviews, as
well as in testimony before Congress, that we are engaged in a
war of ideas with violent extremists who seek to attack the
United States and its allies and to recruit others to do the
same. Public diplomacy professionals are being called upon for
a renewed commitment to ideological engagement, designing
programs and spreading messages to directly confront the
ideology of violent extremism as practiced by al-Qaeda, the
FARC in Colombia, and other organizations.
We wish to amplify credible voices of moderation and to
discourage potential recruits from joining terrorist movements.
We can do this by combining our programs and technology to help
build real and virtual networks among groups in affected
societies who reject the terrorists' world view with a special
focus on young people.
Under Secretary Glassman has sought to reorient public
diplomacy toward these ends. Perhaps most visible has been his
coordination of strategic communication in the interagency
through his chairmanship of the Policy Coordinating Committee.
The PCC comprises civilian and military communications leaders
from the Departments of State, Defense, and the Treasury, the
National Security Council, the intelligence community, and
other agencies.
As a complement to the work of the PCC, another of Mr.
Glassman's interagency initiatives has been the creation of the
Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC), which serves as a
subject matter advisory group for the Under Secretary and
members of the PCC on topics relating to the war of ideas. GSEC
staff are active duty military and civilians from the
Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence
Agency and the director is a senior Foreign Service officer.
I would like to highlight here the increasingly coordinated
way that State Department employees are working with their
Defense Department and military colleagues around the world.
Today, the emblematic projection of the American Government
abroad is the Provincial Reconstruction Team, a flexible mix of
military capabilities with our civilian-directed development,
public diplomacy, information, education, economic, and social
tools. This week, we at the State Department co-hosted the
first ever worldwide synchronization conference for combined
State Department and DOD strategic communication leadership. I
think that is a glimpse of the future.
One of the most prominent recommendations in the 2003
report of the Djerejian Group, of which now Under Secretary
Glassman was a member, was the public diplomacy needed to
establish a new culture of measurement within all public
diplomacy structures. This criticism was echoed by the
Government Accountability Office soon thereafter. The
Department has since made major strides in establishing
rigorous performance measurement and evaluation standards. The
Evaluation Division of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs has been a leader in this field for several years by
demonstrating the impact of exchange programs in building
mutual understanding between Americans and people around the
world.
In order to bring evaluation and measurement for the rest
of public diplomacy up to ECA's high standard, the Under
Secretary recently established an Evaluation and Measurement
Unit (EMU), charged with development performance measurement
instruments and executing detailed evaluations of the
implementation and effectiveness of all State Department public
diplomacy programs overseas. We intend to boost our investment
in the work of the EMU, enabling us to better document the
value of public diplomacy to the Department, the OMB, the
Congress, and the American taxpayer.
Winning the war of ideas depends on getting the right
information to the right people, using the right technology.
Our Bureau of International Information Programs has been a
leader in taking public diplomacy to the Internet through its
America.gov website. This site features six language versions,
including Arabic and Persian, discussion groups, video content,
and special events, such as the Democracy Video Challenge, in
which foreign citizens are encouraged to upload their own video
creations to complete the phrase, ``Democracy is.'' IIP's
digital outreach team blogs extensively on U.S. policy and
society in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, giving us a voice in the
growing realm of online conversations. The Bureau is also
expanding into diverse areas such as online professional
networks, social media, virtual worlds, podcasting, and mobile
technologies.
While global ideological engagement has necessitated
greater focus on expanding and updating our information
programs, we also remain committed to maintaining the
excellence of the programs managed by our Bureau of Educational
and Cultural Affairs, which have for years formed the heart and
soul of public diplomacy efforts.
The Fulbright Program remains the unchallenged world leader
among academic exchange programs, while the International
Visitor Leadership Program brings to the United States each
year approximately 4,000 foreign professionals in a wide
variety of fields for invaluable exposure to our culture, our
society, and our policies. IVLP alumni have included 277
foreign heads of State. We will be looking to expand ECA's
English teaching and youth scholarship programs in the coming
months to target successor generations of youth, particularly
those from disadvantaged backgrounds and/or countries of
strategic priority for the United States.
To conclude, the modernization of public diplomacy
structures and programs is a top priority of the Department
Under Secretary Glassman. We are also working in ever-closer
coordination with our interagency colleagues, particularly our
strategic communication colleagues at the Department of
Defense. With the support of Congress, we will continue to
expand, carefully target, and rigorously evaluate our public
diplomacy activities to meet the challenges of global
ideological engagement.
Thank you for your attention, and my colleagues and I would
be glad to answer your questions at this time.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Midura. Thank you
for your statement. I am so glad you had included some of your
programs and especially programs with youth and to look at the
future. In a sense, this hearing is one that is looking at the
future, too. We will have a new Administration, whoever it will
be, but we wanted to take an early step to begin to work on our
diplomatic efforts. I personally feel it is so important for
our country to let the rest of the world know our culture and
who we are as well as to know their cultures so that we can
work together with the other nations.
In a sense, we use the word here and for this hearing,
``smart power,'' reliance on smart power, and I am looking at
our witnesses as those who have had the experience in this area
and will be able to offer some recommendations that we may be
using as we try to reform the public diplomacy bureaucracy.
Mr. Midura and Mr. Kovach, the June 2007, U.S. National
Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication was
the first of its kind. Since the strategy was implemented, what
measurable progress have you made in meeting the three public
diplomacy priorities?
Mr. Midura. Mr. Chairman, the three priorities that we had
in that document, the three strategic objectives were America
as a positive vision of hope and opportunity, isolating and
marginalizing violent extremists, and promoting common
interests and values. These strategic objectives are truly
broad goals that give direction to our programs here and
overseas. I believe that public diplomacy programs are leading
us toward these goals, although we may never entirely reach
them.
This document has been valuable to us for a couple of
reasons. Within existing resource limitations, it has given our
overseas missions and our partner agencies here in Washington a
common agenda and that has helped us establish a basis for
better communication and cooperation through the interagency,
and Mr. Kovach can talk about that in a moment. The document is
simple, it is brief, it is easy to understand and use, and it
even contains templates to facilitate planning in offices here
and at posts overseas.
It has also given us an agenda for the priorities that we
need to address. Many, in fact, have actually been implemented.
Some of these include expansion of resources for exchange
programs, which is extremely important to us; the modernization
of communications, which has been a huge priority of our Bureau
of International Information Programs; updating technology;
creating regional media hubs, which is something that we are
engaged in around the world for better messaging; creation of
our Rapid Response Unit, which is our 24/7 office that monitors
coverage of the United States in the media overseas and offers
very quick guidance for responding to it.
We have also had greater program cooperation between the
public and private sectors. We have expanded our Office of
Private Sector Outreach to try and bring in more of these. And
we have had greater coordination within the interagency, and
Mr. Kovach, if you want to talk about that a little bit.
Mr. Kovach. Yes. Thank you for having us here today. It is
a great opportunity for an exchange at a very critical moment.
I became the head of Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC)
a month ago and I took the job--I had come back to Washington
slated for another job--simply because of Mr. Glassman's
incredible energy and the feeling that I could carry over an
important interagency structure into whatever comes next that
would hold.
I should back up 8 years because at exactly this stage of
the second Clinton Administration, I was essentially doing the
same thing. I was coordinating an interagency process that
could break out into working groups around any crisis and to do
strategic communication, and I can tell you, the culture has
really evolved in these 8 years. Probably September 11, 2001,
probably some credit to the Administration, people are really
leaning forward.
Now, at that time, the structure I ran was all State
Department officers and we would reach out into the various
other bureaucracies--DOD, VBG, USAID, the intelligence
community--as needed to pull around a working group on a
crisis. Serbian democracy was a crisis we worked. We worked on
Sierra Leone some with both European and international
organization partners.
The office I run now is actually staffed by people from the
intelligence community, the Defense Department, from our own
Office of International Information Programs. So we both have
reached out and we have reach in capabilities. My people are
learning the State Department, my people from outside, and we
are learning how to tap what we need in their bureaucracy. So
it is a terrific model and I can only say I hope it continues.
The one thing I wanted to add to what Mr. Midura said,
being a field officer, is that the emphasis on youth programs
is really a very new thing. I think 28 years ago when I came
into the Foreign Service, we rarely looked at anyone younger
than grad students, and now we have the Yes Program from some
vulnerable youth countries in the Muslim world, from some other
countries. It is a real sea change in our targeting and I just
wanted to recognize that. Thank you.
Senator Akaka. Thank you.
Mr. Midura, the 2007 PART assessment indicated that there
is no strong evidence that interagency or private collaboration
has led to meaningful resource allocation decisions. This
surprises me, since the U.S. Strategy for Public Diplomacy and
Strategic Communications stated that, ``all segments of the
U.S. Government have a role in public diplomacy.'' Do you
believe that the 2007 PART assessment was accurate, and if so,
what has been done since to correct the situation? The Program
Assessment Rating Tool, which is PART, is an evaluation tool.
Mr. Midura. And could you read the criticism again,
Senator, what the PART said?
Senator Akaka. Yes. Well, my question to you was do you
believe that this 2007 PART assessment was accurate? If so,
what has been done since then to--if needed to correct the
situation? Mr. Ruth.
Mr. Ruth. Thank you, Senator. Yes. In fact, what the 2007
PART assessment said, did have a great deal of truth to it. We
engaged very diligently with OMB and, of course, with the Hill
and with the Government Accountability Office and others over
the last several years to bring about what I consider to be
some of the most significant changes in the way public
diplomacy is measured, frankly, in the history of public
diplomacy.
Like my colleagues, I have been in this business for quite
some time, 33 years in this case, and I have seldom seen so
much happen so quickly. Before Under Secretary Hughes came on
board, and now under Under Secretary Glassman, there was, for
example, no office dedicated to the evaluation of public
diplomacy. Now, there is a full-time office, and as Mr. Midura
indicated, Under Secretary Glassman has institutionalized this
so that there is, in fact, an office in his own unit that is
staffed by full-time and professional performance measurement
experts and evaluators.
We have also instituted two very significant steps that are
global to address two simple-sounding questions that were posed
to us by both Under Secretaries. One is ``what,'' and the other
is ``so what?'' What are you doing around the world with all of
that taxpayers' money in public diplomacy, and what difference
has it made?
And so we have instituted, first of all, in answer to the
``what'' question, a new software system called the Mission
Activity Tracker, which is a global system used by all posts
around the world which can now record--in which they record in
real time all public diplomacy activities with a great deal of
specificity in terms of audience, strategic goal, venue,
individuals engaged, even the gender and so forth, and this
kind of data can now be analyzed back in Washington and reports
produced that can tell the Under Secretary and other senior
managers exactly what is being--what is happening and how the
public diplomacy fund is being spent.
So, for example, we could have certainly told you several
years ago that we were doing programs in certain ways of
certain kinds. Now we can say, for example, that under the
topic of civil society, that X-percentage of programs involve
this kind of audience, journalists, or educators. We can say
whether they involve women or men, whether they involve
parliamentarians or not, whether they are cooperative with
local institutions. We have a wealth of data that public
diplomacy senior managers have never had before.
The second, in answer to the ``so what'' question, which is
the most interesting, of course, I think for most of us and
also the most difficult to get at, we developed what was called
the Public Diplomacy Impact Project to precisely ask that
question. What has been the aggregate impact of public
diplomacy on the audiences we have engaged around the world? We
conducted this program the first time last year and it sounds a
little bit like a Supreme Court case because I refer to it as
``Landmark v. Limited.'' It is a landmark case, landmark study
because it is the first time that the State Department ever
undertook to analyze in a statistical quantitative way the
impact of public diplomacy.
But it is very limited because it has only been done once
so far in a specific period of time with a certain sample size.
We are now working on a second version, the Public Diplomacy
Impact second version, so we can begin to move from a baseline
and start to see if there are trends and changes in different
directions.
And so from my perspective, these have put real teeth, if
you will, into what Under Secretary Glassman has referred to as
the culture of measurement.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much for that response.
Mr. Midura, State places great emphasis on engaging and
leveraging the resources of the private sector for public
diplomacy. In 2005, State strongly endorsed GAO's
recommendation to develop a strategy for engaging the private
sector in pursuit of common public diplomacy initiatives. Has
State developed this strategy?
Mr. Midura. Well, Mr. Chairman, I can't speak for the rest
of the Department here, only for Public Diplomacy itself. We
have our own Office of Private Sector Outreach and that office
has been looking for ways to work with the private sector to
expand our public diplomacy reach. These partnerships have
occurred between us and businesses, NGOs, foundations,
educational institutions, and others. We define these
relationships as sort of a collaborative arrangement between
the U.S. Government and our non-governmental partners in which
the goals and the structure are set out beforehand.
The Under Secretary's office concentrates on building and
maintaining new relationships with leaders in U.S. businesses,
and an example of that that we have had recently was a U.S.
marketing college that was held in conjunction with Novartis,
Kraft, and eBay and was hosted at our Foreign Service
Institute, and it combined strategic communicators from the
interagency to listen to private sector experts on marketing
and the kind of tools that the private sector uses to market
products. While they realized that was an imperfect comparison
in some respects with public diplomacy, it is a means of
thinking outside the box and this week-long intensive course
was so successful that we are going to work with the same
organizations to do it again in January.
These are the kinds of things that we have been able to do.
Obviously, we would like to expand in this area even more. We
have had some success in the past with humanitarian relief, but
we would like to be able to use, to leverage, our contacts with
the private sector to expand particularly in English teaching,
but also in youth exchange and other similar programs.
Senator Akaka. Yes. This recommendation that I mentioned in
2005 by GAO was included in a report entitled, ``Interagency
Coordination Efforts Hampered by the Lack of a National
Communication Strategy.'' From what you just mentioned, you
have been working on it and my question was whether you had
developed a strategy for that.
Mr. Midura. Yes. The national strategy that we were
discussing earlier was directly related to that criticism and
the need for getting a document out there that would allow the
different agencies and the different posts to be working from
the same sheet of music. I think this document does that.
Obviously, it is something that we will probably want to update
again in the not-too-distant future. But as you mentioned
earlier, going into the Presidential transition period right
now, it is probably a good time for us to be thinking about
future directions of public diplomacy but perhaps not exactly
producing a new national strategy for a while yet.
Senator Akaka. Well, let me call on my friend, Senator
Voinovich, for his statement or questions that he may have for
this panel.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for
not being here for your testimony, but we had Secretary Paulson
before our policy luncheon. I wanted to hear from him about a
few things, what he thinks we ought to do right now.
As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have had
the opportunity to see firsthand the success and failure of our
efforts to win the hearts and minds of world citizens and I
remain concerned that our public diplomacy is arguably at its
lowest point in history. I once described it as our President
got elected and he thought he was talking to Texas. Then he
realized he was talking to the United States, and then he
realized he was talking to the world. Once that happens, when
the water goes over the dam, it is hard to get it back up
again.
As a Nation, we must do a better job communicating our
policy objectives and actions on the international stage. The
solution to this challenge does not rest solely with the State
Department, however, nor does it lie in the creation of a new
government entity.
Mr. Chairman, you and I have worked on some concrete tools
to improve our public diplomacy, such as reform of the visa
waiver program, combining security enhancements while also
facilitating legitimate travel by some of our closest allies.
In some of those nations over there, this is the most damaging
thing that we had because they felt that they were being denied
the opportunity of a visa waiver.
Now we must ensure the State Department has the leadership
capacity, the resources and people necessary to do the job we
have asked them to do. Our men and women in uniform can no
longer be responsible for foreign assistance and messaging.
Secretary Gates, in July, called for increasing our investment
in the capacity and readiness of the State Department. I think
it was welcome news for everybody.
Congress has had a number of thoughtful reports and
recommendations to improve our global engagement, including the
recent report by the Commission on Smart Power and the
forthcoming report by the American Academy of Diplomacy. The
Commission on Smart Power emphasized the fact that our success
in public diplomacy depends in large part on building long-term
people-to-people relationships. Given the short-term duration
of our hardship posts, I am concerned about the ability of our
Foreign Service officers to cultivate the relationships
necessary to carry our message forward.
According to the American Academy of Public Diplomacy, the
number of State Department personnel responsible for public
diplomacy is 24 percent less than in 1986. The Academy outlines
a plan to meet this shortfall, which includes a focus on
training. The Academy also recognizes the need to more
effectively use the Internet to win the hearts and minds of
broader audiences.
The Subcommittee's oversight work on radicalization shows
that much work needs to also be done in that area.
Congress must recognize its responsibility by making
careful choices among the many domestic and international
funding priorities to ensure the State Department has the tools
necessary to meet new realities and emerging challenges. Our
budget situation demands that we allocate scarce resources to
areas where the United States can achieve the greatest return
on investment.
Again, I am sorry that I wasn't here for your testimony,
but are you at all, any of you, familiar with the
recommendations that are coming from the American Academy of
Public Diplomacy or are familiar with what Joe Nye and Richard
Armitage did in terms of smart power. I would be interested in
what you think of those recommendations.
Mr. Midura. Yes, Senator, if we can talk about them
separately. I think that the smart power recommendations are--
public diplomacy was only a part of that and I believe that the
report was pointing in the right direction. Obviously, there
are resource issues. While we support the President's budget, I
think I would be untruthful if I didn't say that if we had more
public diplomacy resources, we could probably do more and could
probably move the needle a bit farther, as you implied.
The Advisory Commission report was largely focused on
personnel issues. As we have here, the Director of our Office
of Career Development and Assignments in the Bureau of Human
Resources, I think it might be good for Ambassador Delisi to
address that one.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. We have heard from the folks
that have been--a lot of those folks, Tom Pickering and others,
have had some good experience, but you are the ones that are on
the firing line and I would really like to know just how you
feel about it, and if we had the capacity to do it, do you
think what they are recommending in the area of human resources
is adequate to get the job done.
Mr. Delisi. I will try to answer some of that, Senator.
Thank you for the question and thank you for the chance to be
here.
I have spent most of my career in the field, and I came
back about a year ago and became the Director for Career
Development and Assignments. This is my first time dealing with
some of the resource implications of our business, and it is
frightening when we look at it. Right now, when we look at our
Service as a whole, we are probably short at least 1,000
officers just to fill the jobs that we have. But even then,
when we are filling these jobs, we aren't giving them the
training that they need. We wouldn't have enough bodies to do
the training, give them the linguistic skills, and address all
of the other challenges they are going to face out there.
So to give them that training, it means that some of these
jobs are going to go unfilled even if we had that extra 1,000
bodies. Now, this is in the Foreign Service broadly. I will
talk about public diplomacy, as well.
But when we look at it, we also recognize that in the past
few years, increasingly, we don't need to just fill those 1,000
jobs that we are short. We need to fill more. We need to be
creating additional positions. We need to be doing more in
China, in India, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa, and in
Indonesia. The demand to get our people out there is greater
and greater, there are greater challenges, and we just don't
have the resources.
On the public diplomacy side of the house right now, I
think it is even--there is some positive news, but it is a grim
picture overall. When I look at the mid-level up, from our
Foreign Service 02 ranks and above, we face deficits in every
single one of those grades, including in our senior grades,
most heavily at the 02 and 01 level. A lot of that is because
right before the merger, USIA's hiring, as I understand it, had
really dropped off. USIA's hiring was low.
Since then, we had a surge, as you know. We had the
Diplomatic Readiness Initiative and we brought in a number of
folks, and that has helped. At the lower grades, we have a
group of new young public diplomacy officers who are coming
along and that is good. And when we looked at DRI, we brought
in a greater proportion of public diplomacy officers than
officers in some of our other skill codes. So that is helpful.
But in the past 4 years, we basically have been hiring
again at attrition. So we aren't able to really get ahead of
this curve, and even as it is, if we bring these folks up--
right now, on the public diplomacy side of the house, we
probably, in raw numbers, we have a 64-officer surplus. That is
our latest figure. But again, they are at the wrong grades, and
while you have 64 extra officers--by the time we put them into
training slots, give them the linguistic training, 2 years in
Arabic, 2 years in Chinese, what have you--we are still
considerably short to fill the jobs we have, and we want to be
filling even more.
So we have a real challenge on our hands. For this coming
year, we are able to hire 186 more officers--186 above
attrition. We will bring in a greater percentage of public
diplomacy officers within that group of 186 than in our other
cones--than in political, management, economic, etc. But still,
we have to bring in officers in all of our cones. So we have a
considerable way to go.
The good news is that while we have these gaps in the
senior ranks among the public diplomacy officers, in a service
that is made up of generalists, right now, for example, we have
136 Foreign Service officers who are not public diplomacy
officers but who are filling public diplomacy jobs. The bulk of
them are political officers, many economic officers and also
consular and management. We are seeing that they get the
training and, let us say, in today's world, all of us have to
be public diplomacy officers. I mean, I am a political officer.
That is what I grew up as in the Foreign Service. But you learn
very quickly. We all have to have these skills.
And I think there is a much greater emphasis these days on
ensuring that our officers get these types of training, even if
they aren't PD officers, that they at least get fundamentals of
public diplomacy training early in their career, and if we are
going to put them into public diplomacy, we really make every
effort to ensure that they get the training. And the biggest
constraint on that is just sometimes it is a function of
timing. Again, given the lack of resources, sometimes we have
to choose between filling the positions and giving them the
full range of training, and it is a balancing act and we
usually consult closely with the geographic bureau and the
embassy and public diplomacy colleagues and say, what is the
trade-off here? Where are we going to get the best value?
Senator Voinovich. Are you familiar with the
recommendations from the Academy of Public Diplomacy?
Mr. Delisi. I am not, sir.
Senator Voinovich. I would like you to become familiar with
them because we are going to be dealing with this next year and
I would like to have their recommendations verified from those
of you that are on the firing line and get your best opinion on
it.
Mr. Delisi. Their recommendation--was this in terms of
additional numbers----
Senator Voinovich. It was human capital. They are talking
about the core diplomacy. They are talking about public
diplomacy. They are talking about economic assistance. They are
talking about restructuring, of helping governments to
restructure. You also have the initiative that we have back
from Secretary Condoleezza Rice where she is talking about
adding more people, I think, what, 500 in the State Department
and 500 throughout other Federal agencies and then another
volunteer corps that would be available to deal with--we have a
lot of problems that deal with our public diplomacy. So I am
anxious to get your best thoughts on those recommendations.
I think the last thing I would like to mention is the issue
of the change of the guard over there. You had Charlotte Beers,
then you had Margaret Tutwiler, and then you had Karen Hughes,
and now James Glassman. Does anybody want to comment on how
that doesn't work, impedes your ability to get things done?
Mr. Midura. I think it is fairly obvious that quick
turnover at the Under Secretary level is not particularly
helpful in terms of developing a coherent long-term strategy
and progression for public diplomacy. I think that there are
certain commonalities to all of them. I believe that every
Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy favors increasing exchanges
and working with the Congress on exchange programs.
Under Secretary Glassman's particular focus, as we were
mentioning earlier, is on the war of ideas. That is, if not
unique to him, at least a focus that he has chosen to make
during the short time that he has remaining in his tenure. It
is an item that was part of the National Strategy. It was the
second of the three. But he is a strong believer that this is
an area in which public diplomacy can make a very great impact,
and so that is how he has chosen to focus most of his attention
during the remaining time here. That doesn't mean we aren't
still working for improved mutual understanding or working with
our partners on exchanges, but it does mean that we are
investing more of our resources right now in programs that are
information-based and that are intended to establish a hostile
climate for violent extremists.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I was just mentioning to Senator
Akaka, how would you like to get together and draft a resume of
the next person? Would that be inconsistent with your job?
Mr. Midura. Senator, yes, I think you could say that.
[Laughter.]
Yes, it would probably be inconsistent.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I am serious. I think that one of
the problems that we have is that we don't pay enough attention
to the people that we hire for these jobs, and I think that the
better we have--I am on the Foreign Relations Committee. The
more information we have about what it is, the kind of
characteristics that we are looking for, the better off we are
going to be. And instead of waiting for them to send somebody
up, to send something over there and say, this is a very
important post. Our public diplomacy is at the lowest it has
ever been probably in this Nation's history. This is a very
important job and here is the kind of individual that we think
you are going to need in that job if we are going to turn this
thing around, including the next President and how he handles,
or she handles their job.
Mr. Midura. Yes, I appreciate that, Senator. Obviously, our
focus is going to be primarily on the structure of the public
diplomacy cone itself and whether we are doing the right things
in terms of the structure of our overseas posts, whether we are
doing the right things in terms of strategic planning, and what
we could do better in the future, and then discussing this with
the transition team. I will leave the selection of the next
Under Secretary to the next Administration and to you.
Senator Voinovich. If you would do me a favor, with or
without attribution, to define what you think we should be
looking for in that position. With or without attribution. Mr.
Kovach.
Mr. Kovach. If I could speak to that, I have worked with
all four Under Secretaries that you mentioned and I have to say
the turnover has not been ideal, but all four of them, I think,
brought an important component to the job.
Charlotte Beers, coming from Madison Avenue, was frankly
appalled at how anecdotal, impressionistic our baselines were.
When we looked at PD communication problem, we saw a foreign
audience that we were trying to move more toward our position
or to support of our position or at least to dissonance so they
wouldn't support, let us say, violent extremism, and she really
brought a strong sense of that culture of measurement, and I
think some of our initial attempts to define measurement that I
took part in happened on her watch. I think that is a very
important set of skills in a leader.
Margaret Tutwiler, who was our spokesperson, understood
public affairs and understood the domestic political arena,
went over and was our very successful ambassador in Morocco and
she came back and she has kind of got street smarts. Most of my
career has been in the Arab world. She understood that some of
the people we most had to address were not only the youth, not
only elite youth, middle-class youth, but we had to go--for any
of you who have ever been to Rabat, Morocco, across the river
there, there is a huge, what they call in French, a Bidonville,
that we would call a slum, and that was really the recruiting
ground for potential jihadists in Morocco. And she came up with
this great idea of access English programs, where if we could
give them 2 hours of English after school on the high school
level with some kind of follow-up that the best students would
be tracked into other scholarship opportunities, we would have
a very successful program, and that program has flourished
throughout the Muslim world since. A huge contribution, in my
view.
Karen Hughes--I was in Pakistan as the PAO, the public
affairs officer, the year of the earthquake and the private
sector partnership she and four other CEOs cobbled led to, I
think close to $150 million of private American corporate aid
going to Pakistan, well publicized by my team. And what was
really touching, I think what some editorialists picked up on,
was that some of that aid was not from the companies, it was
from the employees of the companies who contributed. That was a
huge--I mean, you talk about private sector participation in
public diplomacy. She brought that, and then she brought us a
much greater awareness of how effective exchanges are and how
that needs more support.
Mr. Glassman is terrific. Under Secretary Glassman, he has
such vision. He is such an experienced communicator,
connections in the world of publishing and the world of ideas.
All four of them bring great resumes, and I could say any
combination of those skill sets as you look to confirm the next
Under Secretary would be great. I just wish that we had a
longer time with each of them.
Senator Akaka. Thank you, Senator Voinovich.
On paper, the public diplomacy area officers report to
regional assistant secretaries and through them to the Under
Secretary of State for Political Affairs. But I understand that
these officers actually take policy guidance and get resources
from the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and
Public Affairs. Does this arrangement happen with only the
public diplomacy function, and if so, why is that?
Mr. Midura. Senator, I don't know if it is entirely unique.
It is a little different in the case of public diplomacy
because the public diplomacy offices located in each of the
regional bureaus, depending on the needs of that particular
bureau and the arrangements that have been reached and the
staffing, are all a little different in terms of their
relationship with the regional bureaus. But as you said, they
do report to their Assistant Secretary. They are considered to
be part of those bureaus and the relationship with the Under
Secretary for Public Diplomacy is a policy-related one, not a
direct line of authority.
That said, we do have the resources at our disposal that
are used for public diplomacy programs. My office transfers
these resources both in terms of dealing with base budgets at
the beginning of the year, but also to answer specific program
requests during the year. So we have an extremely close
relationship with these offices. The Under Secretary meets on a
weekly basis with the Public Diplomacy Deputy Assistant
Secretaries from each of the regional bureaus and we in our
office also meet with the public diplomacy office directors
once a week. So we know what their resource concerns are. We
know what their policy concerns are.
And although the relationship is not absolutely direct in
terms of lines of authority, it works for the context of the
Department, and in a manner of speaking, it is also the same
relationship that, say, a political officer working in the
European area would have with the Under Secretary for Political
Affairs. Although that line of authority may be a little bit
more direct than with public diplomacy, they still report to
the Assistant Secretary and that is still the head of the
office that they work for. So it may not be entirely unique.
Mr. Delisi. In my current position, we don't really get
into this. Speaking as someone who has been out in the field
dealing with this, for us, what we have found is that the Under
Secretary's office had the money. They had the resources. They
had the programs. And they provided us with kind of the big
picture and the global vision and here are the broad themes
that we want to sound and we are going to make these programs
available to you to advance this goal.
We still, though, would engage with our assistant secretary
and our public diplomacy office in the Africa Bureau, in the
South Asia Bureau, because each of these programs, while the
vision remains the same, depending on where you are and how you
implement that vision, the context of the program is going to
be a little bit different and it has got to reflect the policy
considerations for Eritrea or whatever country you are in.
And so we found it worked reasonably well. I mean, I never
had real problems in balancing our engagement with the Under
Secretary's folks and getting their idea of the broad
directions we wanted to go in and balancing and making that
reflective of the specific policies unique to the countries we
were serving in. It worked pretty well.
Senator Akaka. I also understand that the Public Diplomacy
Area Office Directors, the directors attend meetings with
regional assistant secretaries and deputy assistant
secretaries. I just wonder about whether the attendance at
these meetings translated into policy outcomes. Mr. Kovach.
Mr. Kovach. I was the Director of the East Asia Office for
2\1/2\ years and I can tell you that they did. I had a
respected voice. We were dealing--this is 2003 to 2005. We
dealt a lot with how to, I think, put certain security programs
in Southeast Asia to Muslim majority countries or to Muslim
media directed at Muslims. We instituted public diplomacy in
the Pacific Islands, an area where the Chinese were exerting
more and more soft power, and we came up with a formula to do
that. We talked to the Chinese about reaching out to their
Muslims to give them more of a sense of global connection,
supplied speakers at, I believe, the 600th anniversary of Islam
in China, which a group of Chinese Muslim intellectuals were
celebrating with seminars and historical reflections.
So yes, there was a lot of that. Then day-to-day issues
would come up, Burma and how pronounced we should be about our
feelings about the regime there, publicly versus through
private diplomacy in APAC and the Southeast Asia Organization.
So yes. I mean, public diplomacy and reorganization started
with a proposition that we would have a seat at the policy
table and I think that has been gained by having those offices
in the regional bureaus that spearhead our main product, which
is bilateral diplomacy. And I think that at the same time, even
then in probably a less perfect iteration of structure, I
regularly saw the people from the Under Secretary's office and
we regularly had a dialogue on resources. I got a line budget,
but I also was able to compete for discretionary money against
the originality and relevance, policy relevance, of projects I
would put forward. So I thought it was a great perch.
Senator Akaka. Yes. Well, can you give me an example, and
my question is whether any of these policy profiles were used,
such as what impacts have public diplomacy offices had on
issues like NATO enlargement, national missile defense, and
Georgia?
Mr. Kovach. Well, those were not issues in the East Asia
Bureau, but I truly believe that the way we put our policies
forward, especially--I mean, look at the main issue of this
decade, has been counterterrorism and the global war. Some of
the ways we--some of the agreements we crafted with countries
in that region might get the backs of moderate Muslims up, and
I think that we were at the table not only in figuring out how
to structure those agreements, but how to publicize them, what
should be in the public domain and what should remain in the
domain of diplomatic discourse. I think we had a very important
seat at the table in determining that and those in some ways
were our major diplomatic products of that mid-decade period.
Senator Akaka. Yes. Well, Mr. Midura and Mr. Ruth, the
public diplomacy area offices are apparently designed to be the
field's window on Washington and Washington's window on the
field. In this age of instantaneous e-mail communications, I am
concerned that this arrangement may not add value. For example,
if an officer at the post has a problem relating to the
Fulbright program, why isn't it more efficient for that officer
simply to reach out directly to the appropriate office in the
Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs?
Mr. Midura. Mr. Chairman, they do routinely. In fact, I can
vouch for that one personally because as the Cultural Attache
in Prague, I had a substantial Fulbright program, a substantial
number of International Visitors, U.S. Speakers and others, and
we coordinated routinely with ECA and IIP on these programs. We
obviously let our desk officer know what was going on with
these, as well. But the desk officers had a lot of
responsibilities and particularly within the PD area. Many of
these desk officers are responsible for more than one country.
So as long as the concern was with an individual program, it
was much more likely that I was going to get a problem resolved
by going directly to the bureau that ran that program.
We worked with the desk officers primarily on resource
issues, on policy issues that needed the support of the bureau,
and ad hoc things that came around where we did not necessarily
know where to go in the Department and were enlisting the
support of the desk officer to find the right person. But when
it came to programs from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs or IIP, we had contact people within those bureaus and
we went to them directly.
Senator Akaka. Mr. Kovach.
Mr. Kovach. If I could give you an example, my last
overseas tour was in Pakistan and during my time, we negotiated
the largest student Fulbright Program in history, and this was
not an easy negotiation because there were three funding
groups, including the Government of Pakistan using, I believe,
World Bank money, and USAID and the State Department. If my
regional public diplomacy office hadn't had good contacts with
the branch of ECA, the Academic Programs Branch, because the
politics were very tricky, and it is not only the Academic
Programs Branch, but it is the Board of Foreign Scholars and
what their attitudes are because this was a program that had
some interesting features to it, let us just say.
Without those cues from that desk, I don't think I ever
could have pulled this off with the State Department, with my
own agency, believe it or not. It was vital to have them there
as intermediaries. It would not have happened.
Senator Akaka. Thank you. Senator Voinovich.
Senator Voinovich. Would you agree that our public
diplomacy is at a low point?
Mr. Midura. I don't really know how to answer that,
Senator. I mean, my experience goes back for 20 years, and from
the perspective of the individual officer, I think people are
pretty much doing the same things they have always been doing.
Now, whether the resources have kept up with the needs or not
is another question.
Senator Voinovich [presiding]. I think we know that they
haven't.
Mr. Midura. We try and work with what we have got. I mean,
that is really the--the posts know they have a certain amount
of money each year. They know that, we in the Under Secretary's
office, have a certain amount that we are going to try and get
them as much as we can. In the case of countries where there
are immediate crisis needs, we work with our Congressional
partners for supplementals. It would be nice if we had more in
the way of resources, but at the same time, I am not certain
that we would be able to handle a huge influx of new resources
right now without also reviewing our staffing patterns and
other things. I think all of these things are of a piece and we
probably have to look at the whole picture for the next
Administration and we know how that is going to go.
I mean, speaking as an individual PD officer, I don't feel
any lower or higher than I did 10 years ago. I think we go out
there and we try and do the best we can with what we have.
Senator Voinovich. Did anybody sit down and say, like Karen
Hughes or Jim Glassman come in and say, hey, I think we have a
problem. Let us get all you folks together and let us develop a
strategic plan on how we can do better. Is there such a plan at
all in existence?
Mr. Midura. Well, I mentioned earlier that with the
transition coming up, we are certainly going to have to look at
revising the strategic plan that we have got right now. It is
the sort of thing that we would definitely want to look to do
in the future, to see whether the one we have from 2007 is
appropriate to the coming Administration and the needs of PD in
the future. We will update that document. It is just a question
of when.
Senator Voinovich. One of the things that we have tried to
do is we have a high-risk list that the GAO puts together, and
Senator Akaka and I have tried to work on getting OMB and GAO
to sit down and develop a strategic plan on how we are going to
get them off the high-risk list and develop metrics in
determining whether or not progress is being made. It would
seem to me that with a new Administration coming in, that would
be really good for the State Department to look at that area
and look at the human resources that you need, but also here is
where we are and here is where we want to be, here are the
problems, and try and develop a real plan on how to do better
than what you have been able to do.
Mr. Midura. I absolutely agree. As far as the evaluation
piece is concerned, that is something that I think we are going
to make good progress on fairly quickly. Mr. Ruth mentioned PD
impact earlier and how we are attempting to aggregate data and
look at the impact of public diplomacy programs worldwide. We
have had a good start on that, but due to resource constraints,
we were only able to do a limited number of sample posts at the
beginning. While OMB was very pleased with the measures that we
used and the indicators, the response that we got was, OK, this
is good, but we need a lot more. We need a much larger sample.
And, in fact, we have invested a substantial amount of this
year's resources in expanding that sample. We have the contract
for that coming up soon and we will expand that to other posts
so that we can get a better baseline view of exactly how
effective these programs are. I think that will help a lot.
We have already discussed the human resource issues. That
is something we are definitely going to have to look at. It is
being reviewed. And we do have the good news that people are
moving up in the ranks and we are going to have a lot more 02
public diplomacy officers in the not-too-distant future than we
do right now. So the huge deficits that we have been facing
will disappear. So there are optimistic elements to this.
Senator Voinovich. If we provide the money.
Mr. Midura. Well, some of them are there already. I mean, a
lot of these people right now are at the junior officer level,
or entry-level officer. They are doing consular tours in many
cases and they will move into public diplomacy when they have
completed those tours. So we should have more of these people
for the future.
Senator Voinovich. Are there any benchmark programs out
there? I mean, is there a consensus of what country is doing
the best job in the area of public diplomacy right now?
Mr. Midura. I don't know if we have that done by country.
We tend to do evaluation more by program. Mr. Ruth, if you want
to address that.
Mr. Ruth. Thank you, Senator. No, there is no ranking
country by country of who is considered to be doing the best
job. There are now, as I mentioned, that we have the
information and the Mission Activity Tracker, it is possible
for the Under Secretary, and, in fact, any State Department
manager or policy maker, to look and see exactly what each
country, in fact, is doing, which audiences they are engaging
on which topics and in what format, and that gives us a large
leg up in terms of transparency and accountability and the
ability to make decisions about resource allocations in the
future. The kinds of formal evaluations that we undertake are
generally program by program and not country by country.
Senator Voinovich. I have no other questions. I don't know
if Senator Akaka wants to ask any more questions.
Senator Akaka [presiding]. Yes. Well, thank you very much,
my friend, Senator Voinovich.
I want to thank this panel very much for your experience, I
think even wisdom on how we can work on our diplomatic areas in
the future of our country. I would tell you that I am very
interested in my friend's suggestion about resumes----
[Laughter.]
As something that can really help determine the type of
person we need in the office. And so that is something that we
need to work on.
I want to thank this panel very much for your responses and
your testimony here and ask you to continue to be close to us
as we continue in this effort and look forward to working with
you in the new year.
Again, I want to say thank you very much for your
statements and your responses.
Mr. Midura. On behalf of my colleagues and myself, thanks
to both of you and thank you for your support of public
diplomacy. We really appreciate it.
Senator Akaka. Thank you.
Now, I would like to welcome the second panel of witnesses,
the Hon. Douglas K. Bereuter, President and CEO of the Asia
Foundation, and a former U.S. Congressman; Ambassador Elizabeth
Bagley, Vice Chairman, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public
Diplomacy, Washington, DC; Stephen Chaplin, Senior Advisor, the
American Academy of Diplomacy, Washington, DC; the Hon. Ronna
Freiberg, Former Director of Congressional and
Intergovernmental Affairs, U.S. Information Agency; and the
Hon. Jill A. Schuker, Fellow, University of Southern
California, Center for Public Diplomacy.
As you know, it is a custom of this Subcommittee to swear
in all witnesses, so I ask all of you to please stand and raise
your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give this
Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Bereuter. I do.
Ms. Bagley. I do.
Mr. Chaplin. I do.
Ms. Freiberg. I do.
Ms. Schuker. I do.
Senator Akaka. Thank you. Let the record note that the
witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Before I start, I want you to know that your full written
statements will be part of the record. I would also like to
remind you to keep your remarks brief, given the number of
people testifying this afternoon.
It is great to see a friend, my former colleague in the
House, Mr. Bereuter, and it is good to have you here. May I ask
you to begin and proceed with your statement.
TESTIMONY OF DOUGLAS K. BEREUTER,\1\ PRESIDENT AND CHIEF
EXECUTIVE OFFICER, THE ASIA FOUNDATION
Mr. Bereuter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Voinovich.
It is nice to be here today. And thank you for the opportunity
to testify. As I understand the focus of the Subcommittee's
inquiry, it builds upon the widespread recognition that America
needs to increase its public diplomacy efforts and especially
to make its public diplomacy far more effective than it is
today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Bereuter appears in the Appendix
on page 46.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I will not neglect your invitation to give you my thoughts
on the subject of desirable administrative and structural
reforms. The views I offer today are not the position of the
Asia Foundation, but strictly my own. I wrote my own testimony
based upon 26 years of serving in the House and 20 years of
that on the Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 years on
Intelligence, now the last 4 years chairing the Asia
Foundation, which is, I think, the premier development
organization working in Asia.
I feel it is my duty to tell you today as a citizen with
that experience base that although administrative and
structural changes in the bureaucracies of our important
departments and agencies surely could bring positive changes in
the effectiveness of America's public diplomacy, a more
fundamental reorientation of our public diplomacy effort and
emphasis is far more important.
I think it is a common mistake or misunderstanding repeated
over and over again when our government or advisory groups seek
to improve the American public diplomacy structure. It is a
failure to recognize that while bureaucratic reorganization and
better management practices can bring improvements, the most
important American public diplomacy assets are, (a) the
American people, and relatedly, (b) the opportunities for
foreigners to see demonstrated or otherwise experience those
characteristics of our country and our people which the world
traditionally has most admired.
The world has admired American openness, its system of
justice, popular culture--generally, and unmatched environment
of opportunity. They admire, above all, the practices,
principles, and values undergirding America's tradition of
democracy, pluralism, rule of law, and tolerance, which
Americans embrace as universally applicable. It is only when we
seem to have strayed from those principles, practices, and
values that we disappoint the world and we are seen as
hypocritical.
Today, while there is still some confusion and uncertainty,
a misplaced sense of priorities and ineffective practices in
the public diplomacy of the country, it is fortunately
recognized increasingly and accepted that public diplomacy
cannot just be regarded as a job of the Nation's diplomats,
high-level State Department spokesmen, or other governmental
officials. A major impediment to improving America's public
diplomacy, in my judgment, has been the prevalence of the view
that improving our Nation's image and influence abroad is
primarily a direct governmental function. One might say to
emphatically make a point that the implementation of effective
public policy and public diplomacy specifically is too
important to be solely or primarily the responsibility of
government officials.
I looked at the recommendations of eight high-level task
forces, commissions, committees convened in the aftermath of
September 11, 2001. I found a very strong consensus that it is
in our national interest to not only emphasize public
diplomacy, especially in the Islamic world, but also that such
an effort should be implemented with a very major role for non-
governmental organizations, credible high-profile individual
Americans, and the private sector in general.
Ambassador Edward Djerejian had something to say about that
and he certainly endorses that kind of view. He said the United
States should recognize that the best way to get our message
across is directly to the people rather than through formal
diplomatic channels, and I have a cautionary note on page three
of my prepared statement about the use of American business
expertise in public diplomacy. I am not going to go into that
in detail because of the shortness of time.
I also suggest on the bottom of that page and on page four,
as well, that some of the views of one of the country's noted
scholars and programmatic and practical advisors on the
subject, Dr. Nancy Snow of the Newhouse School of Public
Communications at Syracuse University has a lot to say that is
very valuable. I take four of her 10 points there and I
specifically call them to your staff's attention and to you.
So there is nothing really new about the U.S. Government
conducting some of its public diplomacy programs through non-
governmental organizations. We, at the Asia Foundation, do a
lot of that. We have a whole range of things that I mentioned
on the bottom of page four that, in fact, are public diplomacy,
and we use USAID funds, we use from private donors, we use from
other governments who also are trying to encourage democracy,
pluralism, tolerance, citizen participation, and they help
reinforce the principles and values which Americans embrace, as
I said, universally.
I call to your attention, as Senator Voinovich has
mentioned, the CSIS Commission on Smart Power. I was there when
they released its report. Two of your Senate colleagues served
on the body, two from the House, former Senator Nancy
Kassebaum, and that report emphasizes that the American public,
drawn from every corner of the world, constitutes the U.S.'s
greatest public diplomacy asset, especially those citizens who
beneficially volunteer, study, work, and travel abroad, if
their conduct reflects those things which foreigners have long
admired about America and our country.
As I said, in my judgment, the American people and the
positive features of our whole American experience, observed
abroad and here at home by example or direct contact, are our
two greatest assets. They make our case better than any
government agency ever can. Our public diplomacy officers
abroad should not have the view that they directly deliver
public diplomacy. They should employ Americans and the
experience in America, even if that experience is demonstrated
in Asia or Africa or elsewhere in the world. That is their
duty, to use those resources not directly, but to use the best
resources of the American people.
So I looked at about 10 specific categories of proposals
that various organizations and people have made. I am going to
make very candid comments about them, I think things that are
realistic from a Congressional point of view as to what can be
accomplished. You can take items from No. 2 and No. 6 and No. 9
and No. 10 that make sense in my judgment.
But I would like to conclude, Chairman Akaka, Senator
Voinovich, and Members of the Subcommittee, by saying that the
primary message I give to you today is to emphasize that for a
truly effective public diplomacy effort, America must return
to--and I say return to, and then reinforce and remind people
throughout the world by example what they have especially
admired about our country and our people. That won't be
accomplished by an improved governmental relations campaign, by
governmental reorganization, or only by adding more State
Department public diplomacy officers in our embassies or
consulates or Washington, DC. However, greater good will,
respect, credibility, and support for our country can be
regained. Changes in policies and emphases, a smarter variety
of public diplomacy, and perhaps some governmental
reorganization are only part of the answer.
The primary orientation of your effort must be to remind
people abroad and reinforce by example and our direct
experience what they and their leaders traditionally have liked
and admired about America and our country. We have done it well
in the past. We can and we must do it again.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Senator Voinovich [presiding]. Thanks very much. Ms.
Bagley.
TESTIMONY OF AMBASSADOR ELIZABETH F. BAGLEY,\1\ VICE CHAIRMAN,
U.S. ADVISORY COMMISSION ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
Ms. Bagley. Thank you, Senator Voinovich. Thank you for the
opportunity to appear before you at this hearing on reforming
the public diplomacy bureaucracy. I am honored to represent the
U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy this afternoon and
to brief the Subcommittee on our 2008 report entitled,
``Getting the People Part Right: A Report on the Human
Resources Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Bagley appears in the Appendix on
page 55.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the outset, Commission Chairman William Hybl and I would
like to ask the Chairman's permission to enter the entirety of
our report in the record.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ The report submitted by Ms. Bagley referred to above appears in
the Appendix on page 149.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senator Voinovich. Without objection.
Ms. Bagley. Thank you. Just over a year ago, the Commission
reviewed the extensive recent literature on U.S. public
diplomacy and determined that few, if any, observers had ever
sought to look under the hood and study the impact of internal
human resource practices and structures on our Nation's efforts
to communicate with foreign publics. We decided to explore this
basket of issues because, in the final analysis, as Congressman
Bereuter just said, people are the key to success of our
Nation's public diplomacy.
Over a one-year period, the Commission met with scores of
State Department officials and outside experts on Public
Diplomacy (PD) human resources issues, and we learned a great
deal in the process. Our 2008 report contains our findings and
recommendations. In this short statement, I would like to
highlight our key conclusions. Later, I will be happy to
elaborate, if necessary, and answer any questions the Members
of the Subcommittee might have.
In sum, Mr. Chairman, we found that the State Department
recruits smart people, but not necessarily the right people for
the PD career track; tests candidates on the wrong knowledge
sets; trains its officers in the wrong skills; and evaluates
those officers mostly on the wrong tasks.
In terms of personnel structures, State has a PD
bureaucracy in Washington that hasn't been critically examined
since the 1999 merger and that may or may not be functioning
optimally. Its overseas public affairs officers are spending
the majority of their time administering rather than
communicating with foreign publics. And meaningful integration
of public diplomacy into State Department decision making and
staffing remains elusive. In short, Mr. Chairman, we are not
getting the people part right. Let me now take up each of these
points in a little more detail.
On recruitment, very simply, the Department of State makes
no special effort to recruit individuals into the public
diplomacy, or PD, career track who would bring experience or
skills specifically relevant to the work of communicating with
and influencing foreign publics. No serious Presidential or
Congressional campaign or private sector company would hire
communications personnel who have no background in
communications, but to a large degree, that is exactly what the
U.S. Government is doing and we need to change that.
Turning to the Foreign Service examination process, we
found that the Foreign Service Officer Test and Oral Assessment
do not specifically test for public diplomacy instincts and
communications skills. Since we neither recruit for nor test
for these skills, it is thus possible for candidates to enter
the PD career track, and for that matter the other four Foreign
Service career tracks, without having any documented
proficiency in core PD-related skills. This is problematic. The
Commission believes we need to modify the exam, particularly
the Oral Assessment, to include more substantive PD content.
In terms of public diplomacy training, though there have
already clearly been some improvements in recent years, a
number of conspicuous and serious blind spots persist. For one,
we make virtually no effort to train our PD officers in either
the science of persuasive communication or the nuts and bolts
of how to craft and run sophisticated message campaigns. The
Commission believes we need to rectify this. We would like to
see more substantive PD offerings at the State Department's
Foreign Service Institute, including a rigorous 9-month course
analogous to the highly regarded one currently offered to
economic officers.
With respect to the State Department's Employee Evaluation
Report (EER) form, the essential problem is that it lacks a
section specifically devoted to PD outreach and thus contains
no inherent requirement that State Department employees
actually engage in such outreach. Until it does, PD officers
overseas will continue to spend the overwhelming majority of
their time behind their desks administering rather than out
actually directly engaging with foreign publics. The Commission
wants to see outreach built into the EER form, and we also want
to see at least one substantive PD communication task built
into the work requirements of every PD offices in the field. A
one-line change in the EER form of the type we have proposed
could result in thousands more outreach events per year than we
are seeing now. Now is the time to put direct outreach at the
center of American public diplomacy, right where the current
and previous Secretaries of State have said they believe it
should be.
Let me now turn to the public diplomacy area offices. At
present, the mechanism by which public diplomacy considerations
are ostensibly brought into State Department policymaking is
the PD area office, about which you already talked with the
previous panel. This is a self-standing office within the six
regional bureaus. The Commission looked at this structure and
concluded that though PD now has a higher profile within the
State Department than it did some years ago, the jury is still
out as to whether that higher profile has been translated into
appreciable services and policy outcomes. The current
bureaucratic arrangement is anomalous in two ways. First,
Washington-based PD officials take policy direction, as we
talked about before, not from the official to whom they
nominally report, and that is the Under Secretary for Political
Affairs, but rather from an official to whom they do not
formally report, namely the Under Secretary for Public
Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Second, PD is the only
substantive function not permanently represented on the county
affairs desk, the focus of Department policymaking. We think it
is time to revisit the current arrangement to see if it is
working as it should.
With regard to the role of public affairs officers (PAOs),
at post, particularly at large posts, the Commission was
surprised to find that notwithstanding the job title, most PAO
responsibilities were inwardly, not outwardly, oriented. In
short, our PAOs are essentially administrators, not
communicators. The Commission recognizes that program
administration is an important component of public diplomacy
that will always be a part of the job. Nonetheless, we would
like to see the Department take a critical look at the PAO
position, particularly at large posts, to see if these senior
officers are playing the role they ought to be playing and if
this expensive managerial layer is cost effective and adding
value.
Finally, a few words about the integration of public
diplomacy officers into State Department staffing. The stated
goal of the 1999 merger of the USIA into the State Department
was to integrate PD considerations and PD personnel more fully
into the mainstream of State Department planning and policy
making. The Commission has found that this integration remains
largely elusive, and concomitantly that PD officers continue to
be significantly underrepresented in the ranks of the
Department's senior management. As we put in the report, ``the
PD career track is no longer `separate,' but it certainly is
not yet `equal.' '' If the Department is to attract and retain
first-rate PD officers, then it needs to demonstrate that these
officers will be regarded as capable of holding senior
Department positions.
Let me conclude. Getting the people part right can go a
long way toward enhancing the overall effectiveness of
America's outreach to the world. As our report suggests, there
is much work to be done. That said, most of the needed fixes
are feasible. With some political and bureaucratic, and perhaps
some Congressional attention--they can be made. We certainly
hope they will be.
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much again for this
opportunity. I look forward to responding to any questions you
may have.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Ms. Bagley. Mr. Chaplin.
TESTIMONY OF STEPHEN M. CHAPLIN,\1\ SENIOR ADVISOR, THE
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DIPLOMACY
Mr. Chaplin. Senator Voinovich, thank you for the
opportunity to appear here today to testify on what can be done
to improve public diplomacy's performance in achieving foreign
policy objectives. I spent a 32-year career with USIA, was a
member of the Senior Foreign Service, and acted as a member of
the steering committee at USIA on the consolidation of the
Department of State.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Chaplin appears in the Appendix
on page 59.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today, I represent the American Academy of Diplomacy and
the Stimson Center, which together have produced a new report
entitled, ``The Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future: Fixing
the Crisis in Diplomatic Readiness.'' I served on both the
advisory group and the working group that prepared the report,
which will be issued next month.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ The report submitted by Mr. Chaplin appears in the Appendix on
page 190.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think the best description of why this report is
necessary are some words in the foreword from Ambassadors Ron
Neumann, Thomas Pickering, Thomas Boyat of the Academy, and
Ellen Laipson, President of Stimson, ``The study is intended to
provide solutions for and stimulate a needed conversation about
the urgent needs to provide the necessary funding for our
Nation's foreign policies. We need more diplomats, foreign
assistance professionals, and public diplomacy experts to
achieve our national objectives and fulfill our international
obligations. This study offers a path forward, identifying
responsible and achievable ways to meet the Nation's needs. It
is our hope that the Congress and the next Administration will
use this study to build the right foreign affairs budget for
the future.''
Now, many fine studies have been published in recent years
that have recommended institutional reorganization of foreign
affairs agencies, offered guidance on how U.S. foreign policy
should be conducted. This report is different. Its purpose is
straightforward: Determine what the Secretary of State requires
in terms of personnel and program funding to successfully
achieve American foreign policy objectives. Based on informed
budgetary and manpower analyses, the Academy and Stimson report
provide specific staffing and cost recommendations.
My colleague, Stanley Silverman, a longtime USIA
Controller, and I focused on public diplomacy. This is what we
found. Despite recent increases, public diplomacy in the State
Department is understaffed and underfunded. The fiscal year
2008 PD budget is $859 million. The PD's current staff of 1,331
Americans is 24 percent less than a comparable figure of 1,742
in 1986. According to State data, public diplomacy in early
fiscal year 2008 had a 13 percent Foreign Service vacancy rate.
That is equivalent to 90 man years.
To have a reasonable chance to accomplish its objectives,
PD needs to cover an employment shortfall, establish additional
positions, obtain greater program funding, and significantly
expand training. We believe that our recommendations for the
2010-2014 time frame will significantly improve PD's
capability.
We are all familiar with international public opinion
surveys showing extensive dissatisfaction with many U.S. global
policies and the disagreement of U.S. allies with certain U.S.
decisions. However, these survey results don't fully convey
foreign attitudes toward the United States. More than any
Nation, the United States is looked to for ideas, innovation,
and opportunity. In much of the world, the United States is
viewed as a society that recognizes individual initiative and
rewards talent. Given these factors, public diplomacy, properly
funded and staffed, can make a difference.
Before I mention our specific recommendations, I want to
stress that PD field officers still successfully deal in
traditional programs such as exchanges, lectures, media
placement, and cultural events. However, in 2008 and beyond,
they and the Washington support units must reach out to broader
audiences to what I would call the Internet generation of 20-
to 40-year-olds with credible information, and in many
instances, entertaining Internet media, which are essential to
reach these audiences.
Whether it is traditional programming or Internet-based
programming, public diplomacy's success results from a long-
term commitment of staff effort and funding. Our report
recommendations cover exchanges, advocacy of U.S. foreign
policies and informational and cultural programs about American
society, institutions, and values.
Briefly, they include: Increase permanent American staff by
487 and locally-employed staff by 369; increase academic
exchanges over this 5-year period by 100 percent, international
visitor grants for rising foreign leaders by 50 percent, and
youth exchanges by 25 percent; expand the capacity of PD
English and foreign language advocacy websites aimed at
experts, young professionals, and students, and hire additional
specialists in website design and program content; establish 40
American cultural centers to broaden the daily U.S. worldwide
cultural presence where security conditions permit; reengage
the U.S. Binational Center network in Latin America of over 100
centers and 100,000 members who desire closer ties with the
United States; expand other programs, particularly overseas
staff and operations, to increase PD effectiveness.
In total, from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2014, the
staff increases we recommend will cost $155.2 million and
program activities $455.2 million. Overall funding increases
will total $610.4 million in 2014.
Finally, while training recommendations are located in
another section of the report, they call for substantially
increased training opportunities for PD personnel. PD Foreign
Service officers, in particular, need more extensive training
in foreign languages and area studies, technology applications,
public speaking, and resources management.
I will be very happy to respond to your questions. Thank
you.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Mr. Chaplin. Ms. Freiberg.
TESTIMONY OF RONNA A. FREIBERG,\1\ FORMER DIRECTOR,
CONGRESSIONAL AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, U.S. INFORMATION
AGENCY
Ms. Freiberg. Thank you, Senator Voinovich. As a veteran of
USIA, I have a continuing interest in the effectiveness of the
Nation's public diplomacy and our ability to adapt it to the
demands of the 21st Century. My remarks today reflect my own
views and not those of any organization.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Freiberg appears in the Appendix
on page 63.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is no secret that our public diplomacy apparatus needs
reform. Creating a consistent and coherent outreach to foreign
publics must be a high priority for the next Administration. In
the past few years, as others in this room have said, we have
been flooded with reports from numerous high-level task forces
studying what should be done and to reinvigorate and to
strengthen public diplomacy. The report that Mr. Chaplin just
described is the newest addition and it contains some valuable
information as well as valuable recommendations.
Some of the reports have also suggested creation of an
independent or quasi-governmental organization to perform all
or part of this function. Although the ideas have merit, it is
still unclear to me how a new entity would interface with the
State Department and how it would operate in the field. For
this reason, I have focused my testimony on improving State
Department's current public diplomacy organization and
operations.
In his book on soft power, Joe Nye described public
diplomacy as not only conveying information and selling a
positive image, but also building long-term relationships that
create an enabling environment for government policies. The
consolidation of USIA into the State Department in 1999 has not
made it any easier, I think, to sell a positive image or to
build long-term relationships. The merger, in my view, has been
less than successful for public diplomacy, which continues to
be plagued with underfunding, lack of interagency coordination,
a culture that still undervalues and marginalizes it, and the
encumbrances of a large bureaucracy.
Since this is the situation that the next President will
inherit, I don't advocate recreating the old USIA. The question
is, how can we make public diplomacy better? I have seven
recommendations for reform, and since some of these have been
mentioned by other witnesses, I will not go into great detail
in these few minutes.
First, we do need to clarify and strengthen the role of the
Under Secretary. We have talked about the sort of bifurcated
situation that now exists with personnel in the regional
offices and in the field reporting to regional Assistant
Secretaries and to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs. I
believe that the regional PD offices need to be able to report
directly to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. Or, we
need to create a bureau for field operations. I can go into
that in the question period if you would like.
Second, we need to increase public diplomacy resources.
Better minds than my own, including that of Secretary Gates and
my colleagues at this table, have made the same point, that if
we are serious about our commitment to public diplomacy, we
must find the resources to expand it in a number of areas, some
of which are detailed in my written testimony. Among those
options, I would focus on expanding exchanges, augmenting the
size and technology of the Bureau of International Information
Programs, and restoring some of the positions and facilities in
the field that were lost in the 1990s, such as American
Centers.
Third, we have to, I think, restore the country plan. Prior
to the consolidation, area offices developed detailed country
plans which defined communication strategies and set objectives
for overseas programs. The country plan would bring additional
coherence to the policymaking process and encourage greater
coordination between regional bureaus and PD field operations.
Fourth, develop a plan for private sector engagement. That
theme has been repeated on numerous occasions recently and
during the last hour-and-a-half. Several of our witnesses, I
think, agree on that point. The current State Department Office
of Public Diplomacy does have an Office of Private Sector
Outreach. That office should produce a detailed strategy for
the next Administration on how to leverage private sector and
nonprofit resources and expertise in the coming years. If we
opt to create an outside organization for public diplomacy, one
of its central objectives should be to encourage and better
utilize this private sector input.
Fifth, bring coherence to the management of interagency
coordination. Too many departments and agencies, Defense and
USAID, just to name two of them, engage in public diplomacy or
strategic communications activities, resulting in inconsistent
messages and lack of accountability. The next Administration
should inventory these activities government-wide, consider
consolidating some of them, and at a minimum, decide at what
level and how to make them work together. That includes the
possibility of elevating the NSC Policy Coordinating Committee
on Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy to a body on a
par with the NSC, the HSC, and the NEC at the White House.
Sixth, strike a balance between security needs and public
access to programs abroad. Current security arrangements at
posts, though necessary, in many cases hinder efforts by public
diplomacy officers to interact and engage with both media and
citizen groups at post.
And finally, this, I believe, is the most important thing
we can do moving into a new Administration, and that is we must
launch a major government-wide international education effort.
Both our national security and our international
competitiveness demand it. It will require interagency and
certainly Congressional support. Such a campaign would have
three elements.
First, attract and welcome more international students to
this country. The university environment fosters interaction
with our values, our political system, and our citizenry.
Further refinements in visa policy and cooperation with
institutions of higher learning are needed. Other nations have
created comprehensive national strategies to attract students,
and we are competing with those other nations. Our lack of such
a strategy works to our detriment.
Second, find ways to make our own students more aware of
the world beyond our borders by increasing the number and
diversity of students who have the opportunity as
undergraduates to study abroad and the diversity of locations
available to them, particularly in the developing world and
emerging economies. Study abroad should not be an opportunity
limilited to the wealthy.
The third element of an international educational strategy,
is to expand funding for international educational exchange
programs, beyond the increases of the past 5 years, which have
gone largely to the Middle East. Participants and alumni of
these programs are vital public diplomacy assets.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, our success in foreign policy
depends on our ability to engage and influence foreign publics
through the power of our values, our institutions, and our
national character. It depends also on understanding our
audiences and building the kinds of relationships that outlive
the policies of any one Administration and sustain us during
times of international crisis.
Yes, it is about message, but it is also about people-to-
people programs. Yes, it is about mastering communications
techniques and state-of-the-technologies. But it is also about
translating our Nation's positive attributes into realities
that others can experience. Too often, people associate public
diplomacy with public relations. That is only a piece of the
puzzle. The art of salesmanship is transient. The art of
fostering understanding and good will becomes the work of many
generations.
Thank you. I am happy to answer questions.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Ms. Freiberg. Ms. Schuker.
TESTIMONY OF JILL A. SCHUKER,\1\ FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA, CENTER FOR PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
Ms. Schuker. Thank you very much. Senator Voinovich, Mr.
Chairman, and the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity
to address you today on the important organizational challenges
facing public diplomacy in this new century.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Schuker appears in the Appendix
on page 68.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Through your hearings on smart power, this Subcommittee has
been in the forefront of forward thinking on this issue and
capturing the urgency and attention it deserves. Twenty-first
Century U.S. public diplomacy is at a crossroads of both
challenge and opportunity and it will be a centerpiece issue
for the next Administration taking office in 2009. As the Smart
Power report concluded, public diplomacy is indeed a companion
for effective U.S. foreign policy. It is an opportunity, if
effectively shaped and executed, to create new levers of
influence that will ultimately make better use of hard power
when needed and provide diplomatic alternatives to mutual
threats and challenges.
Simply put, public diplomacy must be intimately involved in
effectively identifying and promoting our national interests
and informing smart power policy. But public diplomacy problems
lie in both expectations and structure.
First, the United States is expected to lead by example, as
you have said, and this becomes a key measurement for effective
public diplomacy abroad. Poll after poll tells us that we are
at a low point in moral authority globally.
Second, 10 years ago, mistakes were made in the rush of
``jerry-built'' architecture for public diplomacy that, in my
view, in part, threw the baby out with the bathwater, leaving
gaps in our public diplomacy readiness and effectiveness. Many
of these challenges have been mentioned. The multitude of
serious public diplomacy reports over the last years share the
same main message of change, and that change is needed both
structurally as well as for the role of public diplomacy and
how it plays in the policy process.
In addition to the report that was mentioned that is about
to come out, a new one is about to emerge, I think on October
1, from the Brookings Institution that was funded also by
Congress, which I think will have some very interesting things
to say.
Others testifying here today as inside-government public
diplomacy practitioners have spoken more expertly and directly
about the viability of specific present office structures,
personnel, and portfolios, but let me enumerate quickly my
thoughts given my own expertise both inside and outside of
government.
First, while U.S. public diplomacy clearly is directed to a
global audience, effective public diplomacy must begin at home.
This demands a more aware and better educated U.S. public,
ensuring that at every level of our society and government we
are structurally geared to preparing ourselves for the 21st
Century challenges, such as shifting demographics.
Targeted public diplomacy and the training of our
professional civil service in all departments must be given an
integral place so that all sectors, be it health, housing, the
arts, sciences, etc., have both accountability and an awareness
and an expertise in public diplomacy. The recent Washington
Post article highlighting a new intelligence forecast looking
to 2025 reportedly being prepared for the next President
predicts that our increasingly competitive flat world will
enable the United States to remain preeminent, but ``its
dominance will be relatively diminished because of the rise of
everyone else.'' Public diplomacy needs to prepare for and
navigate this successfully.
Overall, public diplomacy needs recognition of the
professionalism of the public diplomacy function, the
independence of its work, the quality professional corps, and
deeper resource and financial support that is needed, and the
reality that effective public diplomacy means long-term
planning, outreach, and engagement, which is now missing.
The dismantlement of USIA, which I am not asking to have
reconstituted, but the dismantlement of USIA and its transfer
into the Department of State continues to have repercussions.
This transfer caused serious disruption with the departure of
many professionals and the resistance by and to a new culture,
whatever the good intent. Lessons should be learned from this
experience about how to reinvent government more successfully.
The President sets the tone and agenda, but State runs the
function.
Day in and day out, it is the cadre of professionals who
need and must have adequate resource support, funding,
training, and respect, which is not always there. An
appreciation by the Foreign Service of public diplomats'
expertise is too often taken for granted by regional bureaus,
and in the conflict of shifting directives from the regional
bureaus, the ambassador if abroad, and the Under Secretary.
This must be better rationalized and the independent public
diplomacy role respected.
It is also important to recognize that the role of the
public diplomat is intrinsically, in my view, separate from
that of a spokesman or press officer, and this has gotten lost
in translation. Public diplomacy is definitionally a two-way
street, seeking to reach out and dialogue with the street
beyond traditional networks of officialdom, the basic
diplomatic focus of the State Department. This is actually one
of the oddities of public diplomacy being based at State.
The seige mentality that has overtaken much of our
diplomatic in-country outreach since September 11, 2001,
clearly also has hurt the effectiveness of public diplomacy. So
many of our embassies have become armed camps, cut off from the
countries in which they reside and their publics. How to find a
better balance between security and contact is a major
challenge that needs to be addressed, and this includes visa
reform, as well, which you have also mentioned, which would
enable better reverse public diplomacy in terms of students and
cultural exchanges.
Public-private partnerships also are very important to
optimize effective public diplomacy engagement. They need to be
more aggressively and successfully pursued to embrace the reach
and resources they can provide outside of government, impacting
public diplomacy in ways that cannot be successfully
accomplished by government alone.
Some of the dollars, which is in my testimony, that the
private sector has, for example, Citigroup's budget in 2007 in
100 countries was $81.7 billion. In 180 countries, this was
nine times the amount that the State Department is dealing
within its entire budget.
We also need better training and mastery of the new media
by our public diplomats. These provide a different way to
social network and inform citizens of other countries about
United States' interest and values. This ranges from the
Internet to blogging to all modern public diplomacy vehicles
which, in addition to traditional skills, we need to encourage
new information, technology-savvy public diplomats.
Priority must also be attached to the nomination and
confirmation process for the Under Secretary for Public
Diplomacy. The short-tenured revolving door of this particular
job has swung often since the reorganization of the late 1990s
and added to its woes. The reasons need to be assessed by this
Subcommittee. Public diplomacy's troops have not had the full,
consistent, internal integration and direction needed and
required for full success.
Specific programs face problems, as well, including Alhurra
and even Radio Sawa and programs being run through the
Broadcasting Board of Governors. Too often, they are viewed as
propagandistic rather than as hard news or providing an honest
broker perspective. If we are going to put money and muscle
into broadcasting, then we should look at what has worked for
us--Voice of America, for example--and not diminish or undercut
or dilute these structures. Does cutting out VOA to India, as
has been done recently, I gather, or cutting it back in former
Soviet republics really make sense for our long-term smart
power interests? Are we letting specific short-term policy and
low funding run public diplomacy before public diplomacy can do
the job? This is unproductive and a challenge for Congressional
consideration.
We also need to bring into government public diplomacy
talent we have either been ignoring or discouraging from
outside of government, including skilled immigrant Americans
who have language skills and geographical and cultural
knowledge. One of our country's strengths is our diversity and
it is one of the most identifiable ways to demonstrate tangibly
abroad what we mean when we say public diplomacy begins at
home.
On funding, which has already been mentioned, funding is
minuscule relative to funding for similar activities at the
Defense Department, which indeed both Joe Biden recently, as
the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well
as Secretary of Defense Bob Gates have mentioned, and those
have been addressed already in testimony.
Two final points quickly about the structure of public
diplomacy. Both our Presidential candidates have mentioned the
importance of ideas such as AmeriCorps, America's Voice
Initiative. I think these would be very useful.
Last, and I mention this in my testimony, I would recommend
serious consideration by the next President of having a senior
advisor in the White House responsible to the President with
responsibility for public diplomacy, sending an immediate
signal abroad. This would not be the running of day-to-day
public diplomacy, but it would add a dimension that I explain
in some detail in the testimony. Thank you very much.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you.
The American Academy of Diplomacy, Mr. Chaplin, has done, I
think, a pretty good job of making some recommendations. It was
interesting, I was over at John Kerry's house and there was a
presentation between Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft about
bipartisan foreign policy and I asked the question, what about
the human resources that you are going to need to implement the
policy, and not very much in the book about it?
I think one of our big problems here is that, at least on
this side of the government, there is not enough appreciation
about the fact that you need the people in place to get the job
done. So the real challenge, I think, is if we are going to
change this around and do a better job of public diplomacy, we
are going to have to make the commitment in terms of the
resources that are necessary, also to try and make sure that we
get the right individual in, as I mentioned. Some of you were
here for the previous panel, but what is the job description
for the individual that ought to head up this part of the State
Department?
It gets back also to the issue of even the State Department
in terms of management. I think that Dick Armitage and Colin
Powell did a pretty good job of stirring some esprit de corps
back into the State Department. Condi had lots of things to do.
In my opinion, Bob Zellick should never have gotten the job.
That wasn't the job for him. So having the right people in the
right places at the right times makes a big difference.
I think all of you in your respective roles should keep
working on trying to get this across to whichever candidate you
are supporting, or your organization can make that available to
them.
The big issue, again, is the funding. Mr. Bereuter, you
spent a lot of time here. Now you are with the Asia Foundation.
You have also headed up the NATO Interparliamentary Group. Do
you believe that the fact that we are kind of taking care of
the rest of the world in terms of our military prowess, and if
you look at the budgets, that of the NATO nations that they are
supposed to be coming up with their 2 percent, they don't come
up with that money at all. We are doing it for them. As a
result of that, I think we are pouring so much more money into
defense where we should be putting it more into the public
diplomacy area.
I would like all of your observations. Which countries are
doing a better job than we are in public diplomacy? Are there
any benchmarks out there that we can look to?
Mr. Bereuter. Thank you, Senator Voinovich, for that
question. Well, I have always thought that, unfortunately, we
seem to have to do the heavy lifting, and for many parts of the
world, we come across as the heavy in that respect. I have
always thought it would be nice to be, for example, a
Scandinavian country and focus most of your resources on soft
power and present this image to the world.
But we do have some advantages yet because people around
the world still admire our people, our country, our system,
when we live up to the principles and values, so we have those
advantages. We have shown in the past we can do it (public
diplomacy) very well.
I will come back to resources, if I may, in just a second.
The number of public diplomacy officers we have today is not an
insignificant number. It has been increased substantially. The
problem, in my judgment, is that they spend only a small amount
of their time really on that role, and you heard from a very
distinguished member of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Delisi,
what I thought was the fundamental problem, and the fundamental
problem is they are still talking about resources as if our
public diplomacy officers must have this incredible variety of
language training and other skills--highly desirable, no doubt
about it, but it is not their responsibility, in my judgment,
nor the effective way to regard themselves as responsible for
the direct delivery of public diplomacy. They have to
understand how to manage the resources we have in the American
people and the experience that we can give the foreign public
here and abroad. That magnifies our resources tremendously if
they have that attitude.
But to believe that public servants, people in our
government primarily are responsible for the direct delivery of
public diplomacy fails to take advantage of the resources and
the expertise we have. So that is my point. I guess I have made
it before, but we have those advantages. We took advantage of
them in the past when we had USIA, to a greater extent.
Let us take a look at public libraries today, U.S.
libraries abroad. There are very few today. They are behind
security. They are inaccessible, largely. Our American Corners
facilities too are few and far between. We deliver in the Asia
Foundation over a million books a year abroad, all donated by
our American publishers, and they are located in some 43,000
locations in Asia. We get some USAID assistance to help us move
them across the ocean, but we certainly, could use more
resources. This is a way of taking the American experience
through books and materials to an extraordinary number of
people.
Muhammad Yunus, for example, a Nobel Prize winner, said,
``I first had my look at America, my experience, by looking at
books that you delivered to me in Bangladesh when I was a
boy.'' So within the problems of security we have today with
our embassies, we need to look at other alternatives in that
specific area, for example.
Senator Voinovich. Ms. Bagley, you mentioned that from your
Commission's point of view, that we are recruiting the wrong
kind of people. What kind of people should we be going after
and where do we find them?
Ms. Bagley. I think, Senator, it goes back to what Mr.
Bereuter was saying, and others about the kinds of people that
we want to have and those are those who have communications
skills. You can worry about management. You can talk about
managing your programs, which is the IV Program, the Fulbright
programs, all the wonderful cultural and exchange programs,
which I do agree should probably be increased, but there is so
much more that a PAO should be able to do overseas.
I think the kind of person you want is someone who has
communications skills already, who understands how to
communicate with the public, who understands how to look at
polling and use that as an expression of whatever the sentiment
is in that particular country. That is on the overseas part.
At the State Department level, and that goes back to the
kind of holistic approach which the Commission has endorsed,
and that is to start with the testing, we have two tests. The
Foreign Service exam does not test to any communication skills
or any kind of strength that would be natural to the PD career
track.
Senator Voinovich. Well, you could look for people that do
have communications. There are great schools----
Ms. Bagley. I know. Exactly.
Senator Voinovich. My alma mater has the Scripps School and
they do a bang-up job at producing people.
I think maybe the State Department would be saying there
are some folks there that could be--I mean, it is amazing to
me. My chief of staff, when I was governor my last 2 years, was
out of communications, a great manager, but he knew how to
communicate. I mean, that seems it is a no-brainer, I would
say.
Ms. Bagley. It is not rocket science, no, and that is
something they don't really do yet at this point and I think
that was one of our big recommendations, was that with the
Foreign Service Exam, especially the Oral Assessment, just to
begin with communications. When they talk to a Foreign Service
applicant, they never ask them if they have ever had
communications training. They don't test them on their speech
making or before a board to talk about press inquiries. There
are a lot of things you could test them on that they are not
tested. So we are hoping--and that was one of our
recommendations--that just to begin with, the testing should
require some sort of communication ability for the PD officer,
in particular.
Senator Voinovich. We are getting those people in, but
today, we have a lot of political appointees that have gone in
and there is no requirement that they speak the language of the
country in which they are going into. I have seen the
professionals and I have seen the appointees, and some of them
are really great and some of them are----
Ms. Bagley. Right. I know.
Senator Voinovich. I mean, these are the people
representing the United States of America. I think more careful
work should be done in deciding who we are going to send
overseas to get the job done for those political appointees.
Mr. Chaplin, I haven't finished the report that the Academy
has done, but I have heard, and I keep hearing, that this
exchange of individuals, of sending our people overseas and
bringing people here to this country has been something that
has been very good for us, and we see evidence of that over and
over and over again. In the report, how much emphasis was
placed on that? On other words, if you have resources, you can
bring people in the State Department. You have got X-number of
dollars and you allocate resources. If this is something that
is really good but is the kind of thing that doesn't pay
dividends like that, it is one of those things that pays
dividends over----
Mr. Chaplin. Long term----
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. Fulbrights and so forth, I
can't recall, did you get into that?
Mr. Chaplin. Yes, sir, Senator. I think you are right.
First of all, the investment in exchanges is a long-term
investment, and you just have to wait and see the results. But
if you choose people wisely based on their competence and the
abilities you think they have, it can pay off in lots of ways.
We recommended on two major exchange programs. On the
Fulbright Program and programs affiliated with Fulbright, we
recommended a 100 percent increase, and that would bring
several thousand people more. I think a couple of points on
Fulbright--it has a proven track record, but foreign
governments also contribute a part to it and that has been one
of the geniuses, I think, of a program as designed by Senator
Fulbright. They have a stake in this and so they want to be
sure they send qualified people.
Second, the fact that you are bringing over a number of
either students or scholars from other countries who have not
had experience in the United States previously, and I think
this opens their eyes in many ways. They learn about the values
of American people as well as the fact that we are a consumer
society and all the other things we can show off, and that is
important because they take that back with them. And I think
during times when we may have difficulties with certain
countries, there is still a reservoir of good will towards the
United States in these particular groups that can resurface
once things improve.
So we think that well-organized and well-executed programs
can pay dividends. The International Visitor Program, the other
major program, and that is spotting leaders as they are rising.
It was pointed out earlier today that 277 former heads of state
have gone through that program, but also writers, labor
leaders, economists, journalists, a lot have gone through, and
this is an investment. A committee within the embassy which
selects the people they think are going to really rise and be
important in that society, and that has paid off, as well. And
again, you are talking about these are kind of friends for
life. They may be critical of us on individual policies, but
their basic feeling about the United States is a positive one.
So I think the more that we can do on that. There obviously
are private sector programs which are also very effective,
university-to-university programs, other student exchanges. The
more of that can be done, when people see America firsthand and
when they deal with Americans firsthand, those are kind of the
major advertisements I think we have for our society.
Senator Voinovich. One of the observations is that, too, is
using our private organizations in the country more fully to
try to figure out how we can integrate them into this whole
process, the NGOs, what you are doing, Mr. Bereuter, and your
organization. There are others out there--a better
coordination.
I am going to finish on this, Senator Akaka. One of the
areas that I think we don't do a very good job on, and it is
something that carries over from my days when I ran for
president of the student body at Ohio University, and I engaged
a guy named Mong Sah Min, who was from Burma, to be my campaign
manager with the international students because they had a
right to vote, and my observation was is that these students,
and I don't know if it is the case or not, maybe from your
observations getting around to universities, is they come to
the universities and they all hang out together and there is no
effort to try and get them out or get people at the university
to spend time with them.
I got elected and Mong set it up and we had these folks
going out to fraternities and sororities and to the dormitories
to have dinner and to talk about their countries and answer
questions and really got something going there. And I just
thought, I just wonder how many universities today have the
same old thing. They all get together, and how often do they
intermingle with the other students there, and are the students
there taking advantage of this wonderful resource to get to
know somebody from another country, or do they just go on with
their own sorority and fraternity or dormitory work.
Mr. Chaplin. In my case, just from anecdotal experience, I
think you are probably right. Times have changed in that. But
universities which can organize host family activities and
others to try to get people engaged often do pay off, but it
takes some effort by the university, I think, to organize these
outings and bringing them closer with American families.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I just think that I am going to
really look into it to find out what is really being done. I
mean, we have in Cleveland the international organization. My
folks used to bring in kids, adults from the School of Social
Work at Case Western Reserve and they would stay with us for a
month and they got a chance to get to know a family and we got
to know them. I would think there is a tremendous opportunity
here if somebody really started to pay attention to it and
probably could do it without a whole lot of money.
Mr. Chaplin. I want to just mention one thing, sir. The
proposals that we recommend that total $610 million, $410
million are devoted to exchanges. We either need the resources
to bring people over to the United States or we need the public
diplomacy infrastructure to support the programs abroad.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. Senator Akaka, I have taken
up too much time.
Senator Akaka [presiding]. Thank you very much, Senator
Voinovich.
I want to say at the outset thank you very much, Mr.
Bereuter, for this book, and to mention that on pages 52 and
53, you have a statement there pointing out the blunder of
reducing USIA and the need to come back with better programs.
I just want to say that we will be facing four votes that
were supposed to happen at 4:30, but it hasn't yet, and that I
intend to adjourn this because it will take about one hour for
us to do that.
I have questions that I am going to submit for all of you
to respond to, but I have two questions, one to Mr. Bereuter,
and this in particular is about the U.S. Marketing College. How
do you feel about the U.S. Marketing College, the State
Department's new partnership with the private sector?
Mr. Bereuter. Thank you, Senator Akaka. I am happy to
deliver that report to you, by the way. It is interesting. As
you pointed out, the views it contains come from Asians making
this recommendation to us, and Senator Voinovich, I brought one
for you, too.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you.
Mr. Bereuter. I don't think we have enough experience to
really know, but my cautionary note on, I think it is the top
of page three, about marketing, there is great expertise in
marketing and public relations in our private sector,
extraordinary, the best in the world. But public diplomacy is
not like selling toothpaste. So we need to take that expertise,
particularly the kind of surveys that they have expertise in
conducting, and realize that that is an expertise that is
important to public diplomacy, but it is only an element in our
arsenal and you can take it too far.
I was concerned, for example, what I heard mentioned
earlier about strengthening the White House's role in public
diplomacy. That seems natural, yet public diplomacy is not
selling the foreign policy du jour of an Administration.
Administrations come and go. Presidents come and go. But what
we are talking about, as you heard before, in part is long-term
investment and building the relationships with the foreign
publics. Sometimes that only will pay off in a generation or
two.
So I think it is an interesting step. It can be a very
positive step. I just give you the cautionary note that I
explain more fully in my testimony here today.
Senator Akaka. Thank you.
Ambassador Bagley, in your testimony, you recommended that
the State Department should review its public diplomacy area
office staffing structure to determine if the current
arrangement is functioning optimally. In your experience, can
you please explain this issue in a little more detail?
Ms. Bagley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, the area offices,
as the previous panel of State Department officials has already
noted, come from the 1999 merger where they basically--my
view--kind of plunked the USIA structure into the State
Department without, I think, a lot of thought as to whether it
would really work well. So you have a PD office within, say,
EAP Asia, and the PD officer reports to the DAS, the Deputy
Assistant Secretary, and then to the Assistant Secretary
nominally, but then really reports to the Under Secretary for
Public Diplomacy and Public Policy. So while he or she is
working within that area office, he is not really responsible
to that office in itself. He or she is responsible to the Under
Secretary.
So it makes for a kind of difficult arrangement because
from what we have found talking to a lot of these PD officers,
they don't really feel that they are part of the policy
formulation. Although they report to the Deputy Assistant
Secretary, they don't really feel that they are really part of
the team because ultimately they are reporting to the Under
Secretary for Public Diplomacy.
So it is an amalgam that doesn't, I don't think, seem to
work, although on this particular point, I am speaking for
myself. The Commission has not taken a position on it.
Basically, on the Commission, we have each had differing
positions and we came to the conclusion that it needed to be
looked at again. It needs to be analyzed. Perhaps it is not
working. Perhaps you don't even need a PD officer in the area
offices. It might be better to have them in on the country desk
where all the policy formulation begins.
The bottom line is if you want to integrate the PD function
into the State Department, we are not doing a very good job
within that context. So I think it needs to--and the
Commission's recommendation is that we need to look at it. The
Congress needs to look at it. The State Department needs to
review it to see if this is really an effective use of the
public diplomacy officer.
Senator Akaka. Well, thank you very much for that.
I wanted to follow up with anybody from the panel who
wishes to comment, whether you agree with Ambassador Bagley's
comment about the public diplomacy area offices. Ms. Freiberg.
Ms. Freiberg. Yes, Senator. I do think there needs to be
some clarification of what these relationships are. I would
like to suggest that the PD area offices report to the Under
Secretary for Public Diplomacy and make it that simple,
although I realize none of this is simple at all. I think when
you are being reviewed by one set of offices and you are
getting your policy direction and your resources from another
office, it can make life confusing. Although there may be
Foreign Service officers in this room who would disagree with
me on that, it is the feed back I have received from many
practitioners. As I said in my testimony we need to strengthen
the role of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.
Senator Akaka. Any further comments on this?
[No response.]
Well, thank you very much. I just want to ask you for your
top three recommendations for improving the effectiveness of
U.S. public diplomacy. It is not that simple, is it?
Ms. Bagley. Could I answer?
Senator Akaka. Ms. Bagley.
Ms. Bagley. I think for the Commission, our top three
priorities would be, first, training at FSI. We should do a
better job of training our PD officers. We are recommending
that there be a substantive training course of 9 months or so
at FSI, the Foreign Service Institute, that would be similar to
the one that they give to the economics officers, which is very
highly regarded. So that is our first point.
Second point, outreach. We need to build PD outreach into
the standardized Employment Evaluation Report (EER), so that we
actually know that in the work requirements, there is a
requirement for communications skills. That would encourage or
incentivize the public diplomacy officer to actually do more
communications and develop those skills because he or she would
be evaluated on that as part of their work requirement.
And finally, PD area offices. As Mr. Chairman, you already
dealt with and asked the question both of the previous panel
and of us, we do need to undertake an honest zero-based
assessment of the PD area offices to see if they are
functioning optimally, or if they are not, how they should
function. We have some ideas about that, but we are not making
a judgment as to whether it works. We just think it should be
reevaluated.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Bereuter. Senator, your question took me back a little
bit, but I will try to take a stab at it. I heard Secretary
Glassman elsewhere today say we spend basically the same amount
on the Broadcasting Board of Governors as we do on public
diplomacy. Broadcasting is important, but I think more
resources are needed for other forms or methods of delivering
public diplomacy.
Second, I think that the Bureau of Education and Cultural
Affairs funds should be put in the hands of your public
diplomacy officers in the regions.
I believe that--third, I would say that more of the USAID
programs, development programs, ought to have integrated within
them the objectives of trying to bring practical experience in
democracy and pluralism to the foreign publics as an integral
part of those USAID programs. That might be my top three.
Senator Akaka. Thank you. Ms. Schuker.
Ms. Schuker. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would say
three points, and this relates to some of the other comments
already made. First, is the understanding that public diplomacy
has a long-term responsibility, that it is not just a byproduct
or related to specific short-term policy goals. I think this is
where we have been running into a lot of trouble during
certainly these last years in terms of both the perception
abroad of the United States and the role of public diplomacy,
and it has sort of become a handmaiden to policy, a specific
policy, as opposed to informing the policy and having a longer-
term profile. That gets back to values and principles.
Second, in terms of the organization of public diplomacy, I
think there has got to be an understanding that there is a very
unique function for public diplomacy. It is a two-way street.
It is ``to the street'' and not directly to officials, which is
the sort of meat and potatoes, so to speak, of the State
Department. This is part of, I think, the confusion of the
locus of public diplomacy, although I am not, as I said in my
testimony, suggesting that it be totally changed at this point,
but it certainly needs to be addressed in terms of how the
public diplomacy function is organized and respected.
And that gets directly to the money, the resources. It is
very difficult for the State Department, I think, to run
effective public diplomacy or to run public diplomacy
effectively when its budget is basically a minuscule amount of
what, for example, the Department of Defense has in terms of
public diplomacy. If you are going to run an interagency
function and are going to basically sit at the top of the food
chain and be able to be effective interagency, you have to have
both the imprimatur as well as the resources to put your money
where your mouth is in terms of the work.
Senator Akaka. Thank you very much.
May I ask that others of you please respond. We are going
to send these questions to you and have you respond to this.
I want to thank all of you as witnesses today. You have
proposed some exciting and new ideas to make our public
diplomacy more effective. I hope the next President will give
them priority. I plan to do what I can by bringing them
directly to the new President's attention.
I want to thank you again. The hearing record will be open
for one week for additional statements or questions other
Members may have, and I have already told you I will send you
my questions for your responses and look forward to your
responses.
Thank you very much for being here, and this hearing is
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:54 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
----------
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]