When the American government says it seeks improved relations with a country like China, it typically refers to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party-state and not the nation of China. This is because the U.S. State Department is biased toward relations with governments and not people. And by the very form of our diplomacy, the governments are, in effect, declared to be legitimate representatives of their people.
But some governments do not actually represent the people. They rule without the consent of the governed – or any partial variant of consent embodied in such cultural traditions, like respect for the hierarchical authority of kings or tribal chieftains. So, when our diplomacy, in effect, bestows legitimacy on totalitarian tyrannies – regimes that oppress their people – we harm relations with their subject peoples. We demoralize them. We reinforce the regimes’ efforts to consign them to a psychology of futile resignation and fatalistic acceptance that political change is impossible.
Some presidencies have held public diplomacy, relations with foreign people, to be a major priority. For example, President Reagan bore moral witness to the sufferings of people under communism. He connected with them – so they no longer felt alone with no moral support in their opposition to communist tyranny. He elevated the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in the hierarchy of foreign policy agencies. He bolstered the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty with an infusion of $2.5 billion ($8.17 billion in today’s dollars). He delivered speeches and interviews to the peoples of the captive nations. He told the truth about oppressive communist tyrannies and showed the captive peoples that communist power was no longer so great that it could get U.S. Presidents to censor themselves. It was that public diplomacy – and the associated political and ideological warfare strategy against communism – that provided much of the explanation of why a million people could demonstrate in Moscow for radical political change.
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Today, President Trump has a tremendous opportunity to reconnect with the peoples suffering communist tyranny. But whatever efforts he makes will last only so long as he is President, unless he and Secretary of State-designate, Marco Rubio, reform the State Department.
That reform must involve creating a U.S. Public Diplomacy Agency – similar, but not identical to the former U.S. Information Agency (USIA) – within State whose director would be a deputy secretary and a statutory observer on the National Security Council. Other public diplomacy entities, such as Voice of America (VOA) and even U.S Agency for International Development (USAID), should work under its umbrella. This structure will only work long-term if career incentives encourage foreign service officers to become “full-spectrum diplomats” capable of excellence in public diplomacy and its “cousins,” like political warfare, ideological competition and psychological strategy – instruments of non-military conflict that can enable us to “win without war.” Accordingly, the enabling legislation should specify that 50 percent of all ambassadorships and deputy assistant secretaryships occupied by career officers should go to those who have spent most of their careers in public diplomacy.
After making all our government’s global messaging platforms accountable to U.S. foreign policy, the messaging must then change. The contents of VOA broadcasts and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center have suffered from the influence of leftist ideology that fails to hold up the American constitutional order as a truly positive and humane alternative to the narratives of contemporary totalitarian powers, such as Communist China and the global jihadist movement.
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To that end, the mission of the VOA cannot continue to be simply “good journalism.” It must be “good public diplomacy” that serves our national security. We don’t need another version of a publicly funded media outlet like NPR. Instead, we need to tell America’s story to the world and counter the massive narrative warfare conducted against us by Communist China. We must show, for all the sins of our ancestors, how America’s unprecedented civilizational capacity for self-improvement has made our nation the freest, most innovative, prosperous and generous nation in history and how alignment with the U.S. can generate these gifts for other nations, too.
While conventional wisdom insists that incoming President Donald Trump has a non-interventionist mandate from a war-weary electorate, the truth is that, should we choose to ignore the world’s problems where they are, they will show up on our doorstep and worse than they were before. A comprehensive approach to foreign policy that prioritizes persuading and empowering the people of other nations, rather than placating their corrupt or adversarial governments, has already proven to be effective. We saw it clearly in the 20th century. A quarter of the way into the 21st, it’s time to do what we know works.