A Reliance on Smart Power: Reforming the Public Diplomacy Bureaucracy (Post Hearing Questions)
September 23, 2008
Post-Hearing Questions for the Record
for Ambassador Elizabeth F. Bagley
from Senator Daniel K. Akaka
Q1: In the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy’s June 2008 report, it recommended that the State Department needs to improve how it recruits candidates for the public diplomacy career track, based on a candidate’s skills and experiences. Could you please elaborate on how this would differ from the current practice?
A1: We start with the basic construct that undergirds the Foreign Service personnel system, and that is the “generalist” construct. The system seeks to bring in “generalists” who will, over the course of a 25- or 30-year career, be able to serve effectively in a number of geographic regions and in a number of functions. And thus, no one at State ever sits down and says, “Hey, public diplomacy is the most important thing we’re doing now, so let’s figure out a way to get people with that particular skill-set into our ranks”; the same is true vis-à-vis the political, economic and other career tracks. Basically, the State Department wants to bring in people who are intelligent, who know something about America and the world, who can write well, and who have good judgment and common sense. That’s fine, as far at it goes, and for the most part, we are accomplishing that objective. But the problem is that the Department makes no special effort, according to recruiting officials themselves, to go out and target in its recruiting efforts people who have particularly strong backgrounds in the relevant field – in our case, public diplomacy. And so we bring in generalists, but then express surprise when those generalists do not achieve experts’ results. The problem is not with the people, per se. We do, in fact, have some very bright, talented and capable people serving in the ranks of the Foreign Service, and in the PD career track – there’s no question about that. The problem is with our system, which places an institutional premium on “generalism” over specialized expertise. The Commission recognizes that this problem – and, in fairness, I should add that not everyone would necessarily view it as a problem – is rooted in the entire intake system, and it affects not only PD officers, but all Foreign Service officers (“FSOs”). Philosophically, the Commission believes we need to be going after more specialized expertise, particularly in as sensitive a field as PD – an area in which most graduate students and young professionals rarely have much grounding prior to joining State. We understand, however, that this will be hard to do absent a significant reform of the current intake system. But we raised the issue because we think it is important. The State Department doesn’t just need “smart people” – it needs, and our Nation needs, the right smart people.
Q2: If the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is not training public diplomacy officers in what the Commission terms “the science of communication,” then what, exactly, is FSI training them in?
A2: That is exactly the question the Commission asked at the outset of our exploration of this issue. As a preface, let me reiterate a point that our report made and that I made in my opening statement. The fact is, public diplomacy training is much stronger today than it was even a few years ago. There are more courses, and better courses, on the books today than was the case in the years right after the 1999 consolidation of USIA into the State Department. So, in fairness, I think FSI deserves a lot of credit – and, in particular, Secretary of State Powell deserves a lot of credit – for realizing that we needed to do a better job of training our PD officers and getting those courses on the books. Having said that, however, the fact remains, FSI PD training continues to focus almost exclusively on administration, rather than substantive communication. There are precious few courses offered at FSI on such substantive communications-related disciplines as communication science, political communication, advertising, marketing, the use of public opinion polling in the development of message campaigns, the management of message campaigns more generally, and so on. Instead, to get back to your question, we train our outgoing PD officers on such matters as how to administer programs and grants, run press conferences, or, perhaps, how to give an interview. But the bigger-picture knowledge sets are unaccounted for. The fact is, communications is a serious discipline, with an enormous literature and a host of well-understood principles and best practices. There are proven ways of communicating more effectively, just as there are proven ways of doing so less effectively. The multi-billion-dollar-a-year advertising industry – and, indeed, the political advertising industry – wouldn’t exist, or be so profitable, if that weren’t the case. But rather than train our people and arm them with this body of knowledge as they go out to communicate with the world on behalf of our Nation, we essentially say to them, in effect, “Just wing it!” The Commission knows we can do better than that, and we genuinely hope that the Department will act on our proposals in this area. We believe that PD, like politics and economics, is a discipline that has associated with it a significant corpus of knowledge, and we need to do a better job of instilling this knowledge in our Nation’s professional communicators.
Q3: What should the Public Affairs Officer’s role at embassies overseas be, if not management?
A3: The job title, “public affairs officer,” would itself seem to imply that the person encumbering that position has, as a principal task, the responsibility of interacting with the public. But when we looked at PAO position descriptions and spoke with PAOs and former PAOs, we found that, in fact, PAOs spend the overwhelming majority of their time on internal tasks, such as, “supporting” or “managing” the ambassador, “running interference” vis-à-vis Washington, and so on. We were, frankly, very surprised to learn how little public engagement is built into these positions. As we noted in the report – and I made allusion to this in my opening statement, as well – there are PAOs out there whose formal job requirements are exclusively inwardly oriented. Indeed, there was no inherent requirement for these officers even to use the foreign language facility that, in many cases, the Department had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars training them to develop. Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, what struck the Commission was this basic fact: with the possible exception of a small number of “American Presence Post” (APP) officers, there is virtually no one in the State Department whose primary job it is to directly engage foreign publics on matters salient to U.S. policy. And to the extent some officers do have some responsibilities in this area – for example, information officers – those officers are not the PAOs. We understand that management is important, but we see the balance between internal and external exertion as being very out-of-kilter at present. I should note that Department officials generally agree with our assessment of the issue, and rather than rebut the point, they tend to explain why this is so – with one common explanation being that the old USIA-era “executive officers” who handled a lot of the administration went the way of the dinosaur with the 1999 consolidation. But the question remains: does the Department – and does Congress – believe that, say, “managing the ambassador” is the kind of thing that highly-paid PAOs should be spending the great majority of their time doing? If so, then the system is working well. If not – and if, instead, we’d like to have these capable, and often foreign language-proficient, senior officers engaging foreign publics in support of our top foreign policy objectives – then, the system isn’t working. This is the issue that we wanted to flag.
Q4: What, specifically, would the Commission suggest by way of building greater public diplomacy content into the Foreign Service exam?
A4: First of all, let me say that the Foreign Service examination process is generally well-regarded. The Commission, too, regards the examination – and, in particular, the Oral Assessment – as a “best practice,” and we made that clear in our 2008 report. The problem with the examination process, from the standpoint of public diplomacy, is that there really is very little PD content in the exam, and thus, we have a situation in which 1) we recruit generalists, as we have noted; and then 2) we fail to test those generalists on the skills that, presumably, lie at the heart of effective public diplomacy. Of course, this begs the question, “Well, what skills do lie at the core of effective public diplomacy?” That’s a big topic, but let me just observe that, frankly, I’m not sure the Department has thought through that question with the rigor it deserves. If one takes the Commission’s basic position – that a PD officer ought to have proven aptitude in persuasive communication, a penchant for creative and effective outreach, an understanding of how message campaigns are crafted and run, and so on – then it is clear that we are not testing for these things on the exam as the exam is currently constituted. One might take issue with the premise – that PD officers ought to have these skills, though, frankly, I think it would be hard to defend that position – but if one grants that premise, then the question arises, how do we build these types of skills into the exam process? The Commission believes that it is most appropriate to build them into the Oral Assessment, and that is what we have recommended. We have a negotiating exercise in the Oral Assessment, and we have other exercises in there, but we don’t, at present, have a straight PD component to the exam. Why not have the candidate deliver a speech, or respond to tough questions from a hostile media, and so on? This is doable. The State Department could modify the exam process to bring PD into it to a much greater degree, and we think it should. Otherwise, we’ll continue to have a situation in which people are able to join the PD career track, and the Foreign Service itself, without ever having had to prove that they can deliver the a policy-related message effectively. And that does not make a lot of sense to us.
Q5: What changes would the Commission want to see made to the employee evaluation report form?
A5: The Commission believes that, all things being equal, employees work to their evaluations. That is, they spend the most time and effort trying to achieve the objectives laid out, in agreement with their supervisors, in their work requirements. In fact, when you think about it, that fact is exactly what the entire performance evaluation process is predicated upon. In the Foreign Service EER, there is no section specifically devoted to public diplomacy outreach – even for PD officers. Indeed, the form itself is standardized; the same form is used for PD officers, political officers, consular officers and everyone else. Thus, at present, there is no requirement inherent to the form itself that says, “You have to reach out to foreign audiences.” So the issue becomes, “What do the individual officer’s work requirements say?” And what we found was that, too often, these individualized work requirements, even for PD officers, gave short shrift to public outreach and substantive communication with foreign publics. And, in terms of the rubber meeting the road, what that means is that, for the PD officers, or any officers, who genuinely want to undertake outreach, they are really swimming upstream, because they are going to be held to account for – and evaluated on the basis of – the administrative tasks they are required to complete, and in a sense, they have to “carve out” time to undertake PD outreach, if they are able to do it at all. In a sense, it is not their “real job.” The result of all this is that there is an institutional, or at least corporate cultural, bias against outreach and in favor of administration. And the result of that is, predictably, we do less outreach than we otherwise might. That is what the Commission is attempting to change. We want to see the form itself require outreach of every officer; and we also want to see PD officers’ work requirements statements mandating at least one ongoing outreach objective per rating period. These proposed fixes are neither complex, nor costly – in fact, they’re essentially no-cost – but they would result in a dramatic increase in outreach events literally overnight. That’s because officers would know they are being evaluated on their performance in this area. Right now, the most underutilized resource in our PD arsenal is the PD officer himself – our proposal would go a long way toward rectifying this and generating greater value out of our Nation’s investment in cultural and language training in that officer.
Q6: Given the perennial resource constraints, what would you say are your top priorities – in other words, if the Commission could pick just two or three of its recommendations for “fast-tracking,” which ones would they be?
A6: Let me begin with a general point. The Commission sees the seven issues we identified and focused on in our report as being very directly inter-related. In fact, we would argue that all seven issues need to be addressed concurrently, as part of a holistic approach to “getting the people part right.” Each issue we identified has an impact on the others, often in very direct ways. For example, merely recruiting the right people, but then not testing them or training them on the right substance solves part of the problem, but obviously, not all of it. Eliminating the PD area offices, if management were to want to go that route – and, as a Commission, we are not necessarily recommending that it should – would have a major impact on the ability of PD officers to rise to the top, because there would no longer be a senior-level outlet for PD Senior Foreign Service officers as there is now; and thus, the best PD officers would be forced to compete for country desk officer director positions and other senior jobs, a point we made in our report. Revising the EER form to mandate outreach would ensure that these officers then bring an outreach mentality to the Department’s senior decision-making. And so on. So, again, the Commission advocates a holistic approach to these problems. That said, let me nonetheless try to answer your question. I think the three top priorities of the Commission would be: 1) beefing up our PD training and, in particular, adding a multi-month intensive long-term training course that focuses on substantive communication strategies and skills; 2) revising the EER form and work requirement statements, as we have described, so that they are better aligned with the Secretary’s vision of PD outreach, which they are not at present; and 3) taking a fresh, and intellectually honest, look at the PD area office structure to determine if real value is being added – and then going where the answers take us, rather than viewing the matter through the prism of parochial bureaucratic interests or simply continuing to do what we’ve been doing “because that’s how we’ve always done it.” With a few tweaks to our system, along the lines of what the Commission has recommended, we can significantly enhance the quality of our PD outreach within a relatively short period of time. In the end, that is what the Commission wants to see.
Q7: Looking ahead to the 2008-2009 period, on what issues does the Commission plan to focus?
A7: We have a very full agenda. First, we plan to work closely with the State Department on implementation of our report recommendations. We sense that senior State leaders recognize that we have raised some serious issues and they seem to be keen to do what can be done to deal with those issues – particularly those that might be characterized as the “low-hanging fruit.” Second, we are working on a “Memorandum to the President-Elect,” which will lay out the Commission’s perspective on the key PD-related issues of the day. We also have meetings scheduled for October and November, at Yale University and the University of Texas, respectively, where we’ll hear from a wide range of distinguished interlocutors on transition-related issues, as well as other topics. These meetings follow on successful meetings we have held over the last year at two of the country’s top centers of academic expertise in public diplomacy, the University of Southern California and George Washington University. In terms of longer-term projects, we have three main priorities: 1) we want to play a significant role, in collaboration with the State Department and academia, in developing the substantive PD training course that we are calling for; 2) we are developing a “Country Music Initiative” designed to leverage the power of America’s most popular genre of pop music – 60 million daily listeners! – and the desire of the country music industry to get more involved in public diplomacy; and 3) we would like to host a “National Public Diplomacy Summit” in the summer of 2009 that would bring together many of the country’s top minds and produce a proceedings paper that can serve as a useful reference for the new Administration. Without a doubt, this is an ambitious agenda, and we will work with Congress to try to ensure that the Commission has the resources it needs to undertake these and other projects, but for now, let me just say that the Commission is excited about the year ahead and very much looking forward to working closely with Congress to ensure that U.S. public diplomacy is as strong and effective as it can be.
Q8: What are your top three recommendations for improving the effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy?
I have laid out what the Commission views as our top three priorities in the context of the human resources dimension of U.S. public diplomacy. More broadly, I think there are a number of things that can be done to enhance the overall effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy. Before I delve into those recommendations, however, let me make a basic point at the outset. I think we can and should view our Nation’s public diplomacy as comprising two very distinct elements: cultural exchanges (writ-large) and policy advocacy. With respect to the exchanges part of the equation, I think our Nation is already doing a good job. We bring tens of thousands of foreign citizens to this country every year to learn about our values, culture, society and politics, and, in turn, we send thousands of Americans overseas to gain a better understanding of foreign countries. Though it is effectively impossible to measure the “bottom line” impact of these exchanges on our national interest, most of us in the public diplomacy world take as a matter of faith that exchanges further the important cause of mutual understanding and that the United States derives some unquantifiable, but real, benefit from this type of activity. This aspect of U.S. public diplomacy has very little to do, in a direct sense, with the U.S. policy initiatives of the day; for this reason, exchanges are often referred to as the “big wheels” of public diplomacy that continue to turn independently of what the United States is doing in the world, and that is as it should be. Presumably, the main way to “improve” on our work in the exchanges area would simply be to do more of it, and myriad reports on public diplomacy, including the American Academy of Diplomacy’s recently-released budget study, have called for increased resources for exchanges. In fairness, and in a spirit of intellectual honesty, since we don’t know for certain how these exchanges contribute to America’s national interest “bottom line,” it is not immediately self-evident that more is necessarily better; but that said, it probably is, albeit in some unquantifiable way.
Now, let me turn to the question of policy advocacy, which, I think, is the facet of U.S. public diplomacy at issue in your question. Here, I think there is considerable room for improvement.
First, at the most fundamental level, I think we need to do a much better job of taking public diplomacy considerations into account in our foreign policy deliberations. The American tradition of doing just that dates back literally to the Declaration of Independence itself, which articulates – in its first line – the “require[ment]” to show “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” At present, however, our basic model seems to be: “Let’s craft our foreign policies on the basis of our national interests, then bring in public diplomacy after-the-fact to clean up any mess that we might have made along the way.” The central premise of this approach is that global public opinion is somehow external to our national interest calculus, rather than an integral part of it. The Commission views that premise as fallacious. We have argued, as I have noted in my earlier comments and responses, that our bureaucratic apparatus seems, on its face, ill- (or at least, oddly) suited to ensuring the integration of PD considerations into the foreign policy-making process. In fact, though, the anomalous bureaucracy is probably just a symptom of the larger problem, which is the failure to conceive of favorable foreign public opinion toward the United States as a legitimate national interest unto itself. Somewhere in our decision-making process, the question needs to be asked: “If we pursue this policy, will the gain we realize by doing so merit the price we might pay in terms of diminished standing in the world, reduced moral credibility, etc.?” Conceptually, I believe the answer to that question can be either affirmative or negative, but my point here is that it is not clear that policy-makers are even asking the question, let alone answering it.
Second, we need to radically improve the quality of our messaging process – to the extent we can even speak of such a “process” in the first place. At present, there is a very ad hoc quality to our communications with the world. We are communicating as if there weren’t a bottom line. As I noted in my testimony, the Foreign Service – unlike, say, presidential campaigns or top-flight advertising firms – does not recruit for expertise in this particular discipline, and neither do we test or train for it. On top of these obvious flaws in our system, we don’t seem to have a mechanism whereby we bring public opinion polling, research and analysis into our message-crafting process in a methodical, systematic way. In fact, such data should be informing and even driving our communications efforts, just as they do in the “real worlds” of politics and business. We also continue to do a poor job of measuring the effectiveness of our efforts, and, as a direct result, the feedback and adjustment/correction part of our messaging process – an important part of any communications campaign – is virtually non-existent. As a result of these deficiencies, we generally don’t know if we’re succeeding or failing in our communications efforts; we’re flailing. For these reasons, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in our messaging process.
Third, I think our Nation would be well served to adopt a more modest and humble tenor in our communications with foreign publics. As we all know, and as myriad recent studies of global public opinion have clearly established, our Nation’s standing in the world has declined significantly in recent years. What I think is sometimes overlooked in this discussion is that style has probably accounted for a significant percentage of this decline. In other words, it’s not just what we do, it’s how we talk about what we’re doing. Too often, we articulate and justify our policies to the world as if we were speaking to voters in Iowa. But, of course, audiences in India, Iraq and Iran hear and process information very differently than audiences in Iowa. What might sound “decisive” and “strong” to a domestic ear, can sound “stubborn” and “heavy-handed” overseas. A greater sense of humility in our diplomacy – diplomacy which will continue to be backed by our extraordinary strength and resolve, of course – can go a long way toward restoring America’s standing as a nation among nations. This is something the new Administration ought to consider and explore.
for Ambassador Elizabeth F. Bagley
from Senator Daniel K. Akaka
Q1: In the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy’s June 2008 report, it recommended that the State Department needs to improve how it recruits candidates for the public diplomacy career track, based on a candidate’s skills and experiences. Could you please elaborate on how this would differ from the current practice?
A1: We start with the basic construct that undergirds the Foreign Service personnel system, and that is the “generalist” construct. The system seeks to bring in “generalists” who will, over the course of a 25- or 30-year career, be able to serve effectively in a number of geographic regions and in a number of functions. And thus, no one at State ever sits down and says, “Hey, public diplomacy is the most important thing we’re doing now, so let’s figure out a way to get people with that particular skill-set into our ranks”; the same is true vis-à-vis the political, economic and other career tracks. Basically, the State Department wants to bring in people who are intelligent, who know something about America and the world, who can write well, and who have good judgment and common sense. That’s fine, as far at it goes, and for the most part, we are accomplishing that objective. But the problem is that the Department makes no special effort, according to recruiting officials themselves, to go out and target in its recruiting efforts people who have particularly strong backgrounds in the relevant field – in our case, public diplomacy. And so we bring in generalists, but then express surprise when those generalists do not achieve experts’ results. The problem is not with the people, per se. We do, in fact, have some very bright, talented and capable people serving in the ranks of the Foreign Service, and in the PD career track – there’s no question about that. The problem is with our system, which places an institutional premium on “generalism” over specialized expertise. The Commission recognizes that this problem – and, in fairness, I should add that not everyone would necessarily view it as a problem – is rooted in the entire intake system, and it affects not only PD officers, but all Foreign Service officers (“FSOs”). Philosophically, the Commission believes we need to be going after more specialized expertise, particularly in as sensitive a field as PD – an area in which most graduate students and young professionals rarely have much grounding prior to joining State. We understand, however, that this will be hard to do absent a significant reform of the current intake system. But we raised the issue because we think it is important. The State Department doesn’t just need “smart people” – it needs, and our Nation needs, the right smart people.
Q2: If the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is not training public diplomacy officers in what the Commission terms “the science of communication,” then what, exactly, is FSI training them in?
A2: That is exactly the question the Commission asked at the outset of our exploration of this issue. As a preface, let me reiterate a point that our report made and that I made in my opening statement. The fact is, public diplomacy training is much stronger today than it was even a few years ago. There are more courses, and better courses, on the books today than was the case in the years right after the 1999 consolidation of USIA into the State Department. So, in fairness, I think FSI deserves a lot of credit – and, in particular, Secretary of State Powell deserves a lot of credit – for realizing that we needed to do a better job of training our PD officers and getting those courses on the books. Having said that, however, the fact remains, FSI PD training continues to focus almost exclusively on administration, rather than substantive communication. There are precious few courses offered at FSI on such substantive communications-related disciplines as communication science, political communication, advertising, marketing, the use of public opinion polling in the development of message campaigns, the management of message campaigns more generally, and so on. Instead, to get back to your question, we train our outgoing PD officers on such matters as how to administer programs and grants, run press conferences, or, perhaps, how to give an interview. But the bigger-picture knowledge sets are unaccounted for. The fact is, communications is a serious discipline, with an enormous literature and a host of well-understood principles and best practices. There are proven ways of communicating more effectively, just as there are proven ways of doing so less effectively. The multi-billion-dollar-a-year advertising industry – and, indeed, the political advertising industry – wouldn’t exist, or be so profitable, if that weren’t the case. But rather than train our people and arm them with this body of knowledge as they go out to communicate with the world on behalf of our Nation, we essentially say to them, in effect, “Just wing it!” The Commission knows we can do better than that, and we genuinely hope that the Department will act on our proposals in this area. We believe that PD, like politics and economics, is a discipline that has associated with it a significant corpus of knowledge, and we need to do a better job of instilling this knowledge in our Nation’s professional communicators.
Q3: What should the Public Affairs Officer’s role at embassies overseas be, if not management?
A3: The job title, “public affairs officer,” would itself seem to imply that the person encumbering that position has, as a principal task, the responsibility of interacting with the public. But when we looked at PAO position descriptions and spoke with PAOs and former PAOs, we found that, in fact, PAOs spend the overwhelming majority of their time on internal tasks, such as, “supporting” or “managing” the ambassador, “running interference” vis-à-vis Washington, and so on. We were, frankly, very surprised to learn how little public engagement is built into these positions. As we noted in the report – and I made allusion to this in my opening statement, as well – there are PAOs out there whose formal job requirements are exclusively inwardly oriented. Indeed, there was no inherent requirement for these officers even to use the foreign language facility that, in many cases, the Department had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars training them to develop. Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, what struck the Commission was this basic fact: with the possible exception of a small number of “American Presence Post” (APP) officers, there is virtually no one in the State Department whose primary job it is to directly engage foreign publics on matters salient to U.S. policy. And to the extent some officers do have some responsibilities in this area – for example, information officers – those officers are not the PAOs. We understand that management is important, but we see the balance between internal and external exertion as being very out-of-kilter at present. I should note that Department officials generally agree with our assessment of the issue, and rather than rebut the point, they tend to explain why this is so – with one common explanation being that the old USIA-era “executive officers” who handled a lot of the administration went the way of the dinosaur with the 1999 consolidation. But the question remains: does the Department – and does Congress – believe that, say, “managing the ambassador” is the kind of thing that highly-paid PAOs should be spending the great majority of their time doing? If so, then the system is working well. If not – and if, instead, we’d like to have these capable, and often foreign language-proficient, senior officers engaging foreign publics in support of our top foreign policy objectives – then, the system isn’t working. This is the issue that we wanted to flag.
Q4: What, specifically, would the Commission suggest by way of building greater public diplomacy content into the Foreign Service exam?
A4: First of all, let me say that the Foreign Service examination process is generally well-regarded. The Commission, too, regards the examination – and, in particular, the Oral Assessment – as a “best practice,” and we made that clear in our 2008 report. The problem with the examination process, from the standpoint of public diplomacy, is that there really is very little PD content in the exam, and thus, we have a situation in which 1) we recruit generalists, as we have noted; and then 2) we fail to test those generalists on the skills that, presumably, lie at the heart of effective public diplomacy. Of course, this begs the question, “Well, what skills do lie at the core of effective public diplomacy?” That’s a big topic, but let me just observe that, frankly, I’m not sure the Department has thought through that question with the rigor it deserves. If one takes the Commission’s basic position – that a PD officer ought to have proven aptitude in persuasive communication, a penchant for creative and effective outreach, an understanding of how message campaigns are crafted and run, and so on – then it is clear that we are not testing for these things on the exam as the exam is currently constituted. One might take issue with the premise – that PD officers ought to have these skills, though, frankly, I think it would be hard to defend that position – but if one grants that premise, then the question arises, how do we build these types of skills into the exam process? The Commission believes that it is most appropriate to build them into the Oral Assessment, and that is what we have recommended. We have a negotiating exercise in the Oral Assessment, and we have other exercises in there, but we don’t, at present, have a straight PD component to the exam. Why not have the candidate deliver a speech, or respond to tough questions from a hostile media, and so on? This is doable. The State Department could modify the exam process to bring PD into it to a much greater degree, and we think it should. Otherwise, we’ll continue to have a situation in which people are able to join the PD career track, and the Foreign Service itself, without ever having had to prove that they can deliver the a policy-related message effectively. And that does not make a lot of sense to us.
Q5: What changes would the Commission want to see made to the employee evaluation report form?
A5: The Commission believes that, all things being equal, employees work to their evaluations. That is, they spend the most time and effort trying to achieve the objectives laid out, in agreement with their supervisors, in their work requirements. In fact, when you think about it, that fact is exactly what the entire performance evaluation process is predicated upon. In the Foreign Service EER, there is no section specifically devoted to public diplomacy outreach – even for PD officers. Indeed, the form itself is standardized; the same form is used for PD officers, political officers, consular officers and everyone else. Thus, at present, there is no requirement inherent to the form itself that says, “You have to reach out to foreign audiences.” So the issue becomes, “What do the individual officer’s work requirements say?” And what we found was that, too often, these individualized work requirements, even for PD officers, gave short shrift to public outreach and substantive communication with foreign publics. And, in terms of the rubber meeting the road, what that means is that, for the PD officers, or any officers, who genuinely want to undertake outreach, they are really swimming upstream, because they are going to be held to account for – and evaluated on the basis of – the administrative tasks they are required to complete, and in a sense, they have to “carve out” time to undertake PD outreach, if they are able to do it at all. In a sense, it is not their “real job.” The result of all this is that there is an institutional, or at least corporate cultural, bias against outreach and in favor of administration. And the result of that is, predictably, we do less outreach than we otherwise might. That is what the Commission is attempting to change. We want to see the form itself require outreach of every officer; and we also want to see PD officers’ work requirements statements mandating at least one ongoing outreach objective per rating period. These proposed fixes are neither complex, nor costly – in fact, they’re essentially no-cost – but they would result in a dramatic increase in outreach events literally overnight. That’s because officers would know they are being evaluated on their performance in this area. Right now, the most underutilized resource in our PD arsenal is the PD officer himself – our proposal would go a long way toward rectifying this and generating greater value out of our Nation’s investment in cultural and language training in that officer.
Q6: Given the perennial resource constraints, what would you say are your top priorities – in other words, if the Commission could pick just two or three of its recommendations for “fast-tracking,” which ones would they be?
A6: Let me begin with a general point. The Commission sees the seven issues we identified and focused on in our report as being very directly inter-related. In fact, we would argue that all seven issues need to be addressed concurrently, as part of a holistic approach to “getting the people part right.” Each issue we identified has an impact on the others, often in very direct ways. For example, merely recruiting the right people, but then not testing them or training them on the right substance solves part of the problem, but obviously, not all of it. Eliminating the PD area offices, if management were to want to go that route – and, as a Commission, we are not necessarily recommending that it should – would have a major impact on the ability of PD officers to rise to the top, because there would no longer be a senior-level outlet for PD Senior Foreign Service officers as there is now; and thus, the best PD officers would be forced to compete for country desk officer director positions and other senior jobs, a point we made in our report. Revising the EER form to mandate outreach would ensure that these officers then bring an outreach mentality to the Department’s senior decision-making. And so on. So, again, the Commission advocates a holistic approach to these problems. That said, let me nonetheless try to answer your question. I think the three top priorities of the Commission would be: 1) beefing up our PD training and, in particular, adding a multi-month intensive long-term training course that focuses on substantive communication strategies and skills; 2) revising the EER form and work requirement statements, as we have described, so that they are better aligned with the Secretary’s vision of PD outreach, which they are not at present; and 3) taking a fresh, and intellectually honest, look at the PD area office structure to determine if real value is being added – and then going where the answers take us, rather than viewing the matter through the prism of parochial bureaucratic interests or simply continuing to do what we’ve been doing “because that’s how we’ve always done it.” With a few tweaks to our system, along the lines of what the Commission has recommended, we can significantly enhance the quality of our PD outreach within a relatively short period of time. In the end, that is what the Commission wants to see.
Q7: Looking ahead to the 2008-2009 period, on what issues does the Commission plan to focus?
A7: We have a very full agenda. First, we plan to work closely with the State Department on implementation of our report recommendations. We sense that senior State leaders recognize that we have raised some serious issues and they seem to be keen to do what can be done to deal with those issues – particularly those that might be characterized as the “low-hanging fruit.” Second, we are working on a “Memorandum to the President-Elect,” which will lay out the Commission’s perspective on the key PD-related issues of the day. We also have meetings scheduled for October and November, at Yale University and the University of Texas, respectively, where we’ll hear from a wide range of distinguished interlocutors on transition-related issues, as well as other topics. These meetings follow on successful meetings we have held over the last year at two of the country’s top centers of academic expertise in public diplomacy, the University of Southern California and George Washington University. In terms of longer-term projects, we have three main priorities: 1) we want to play a significant role, in collaboration with the State Department and academia, in developing the substantive PD training course that we are calling for; 2) we are developing a “Country Music Initiative” designed to leverage the power of America’s most popular genre of pop music – 60 million daily listeners! – and the desire of the country music industry to get more involved in public diplomacy; and 3) we would like to host a “National Public Diplomacy Summit” in the summer of 2009 that would bring together many of the country’s top minds and produce a proceedings paper that can serve as a useful reference for the new Administration. Without a doubt, this is an ambitious agenda, and we will work with Congress to try to ensure that the Commission has the resources it needs to undertake these and other projects, but for now, let me just say that the Commission is excited about the year ahead and very much looking forward to working closely with Congress to ensure that U.S. public diplomacy is as strong and effective as it can be.
Q8: What are your top three recommendations for improving the effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy?
I have laid out what the Commission views as our top three priorities in the context of the human resources dimension of U.S. public diplomacy. More broadly, I think there are a number of things that can be done to enhance the overall effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy. Before I delve into those recommendations, however, let me make a basic point at the outset. I think we can and should view our Nation’s public diplomacy as comprising two very distinct elements: cultural exchanges (writ-large) and policy advocacy. With respect to the exchanges part of the equation, I think our Nation is already doing a good job. We bring tens of thousands of foreign citizens to this country every year to learn about our values, culture, society and politics, and, in turn, we send thousands of Americans overseas to gain a better understanding of foreign countries. Though it is effectively impossible to measure the “bottom line” impact of these exchanges on our national interest, most of us in the public diplomacy world take as a matter of faith that exchanges further the important cause of mutual understanding and that the United States derives some unquantifiable, but real, benefit from this type of activity. This aspect of U.S. public diplomacy has very little to do, in a direct sense, with the U.S. policy initiatives of the day; for this reason, exchanges are often referred to as the “big wheels” of public diplomacy that continue to turn independently of what the United States is doing in the world, and that is as it should be. Presumably, the main way to “improve” on our work in the exchanges area would simply be to do more of it, and myriad reports on public diplomacy, including the American Academy of Diplomacy’s recently-released budget study, have called for increased resources for exchanges. In fairness, and in a spirit of intellectual honesty, since we don’t know for certain how these exchanges contribute to America’s national interest “bottom line,” it is not immediately self-evident that more is necessarily better; but that said, it probably is, albeit in some unquantifiable way.
Now, let me turn to the question of policy advocacy, which, I think, is the facet of U.S. public diplomacy at issue in your question. Here, I think there is considerable room for improvement.
First, at the most fundamental level, I think we need to do a much better job of taking public diplomacy considerations into account in our foreign policy deliberations. The American tradition of doing just that dates back literally to the Declaration of Independence itself, which articulates – in its first line – the “require[ment]” to show “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” At present, however, our basic model seems to be: “Let’s craft our foreign policies on the basis of our national interests, then bring in public diplomacy after-the-fact to clean up any mess that we might have made along the way.” The central premise of this approach is that global public opinion is somehow external to our national interest calculus, rather than an integral part of it. The Commission views that premise as fallacious. We have argued, as I have noted in my earlier comments and responses, that our bureaucratic apparatus seems, on its face, ill- (or at least, oddly) suited to ensuring the integration of PD considerations into the foreign policy-making process. In fact, though, the anomalous bureaucracy is probably just a symptom of the larger problem, which is the failure to conceive of favorable foreign public opinion toward the United States as a legitimate national interest unto itself. Somewhere in our decision-making process, the question needs to be asked: “If we pursue this policy, will the gain we realize by doing so merit the price we might pay in terms of diminished standing in the world, reduced moral credibility, etc.?” Conceptually, I believe the answer to that question can be either affirmative or negative, but my point here is that it is not clear that policy-makers are even asking the question, let alone answering it.
Second, we need to radically improve the quality of our messaging process – to the extent we can even speak of such a “process” in the first place. At present, there is a very ad hoc quality to our communications with the world. We are communicating as if there weren’t a bottom line. As I noted in my testimony, the Foreign Service – unlike, say, presidential campaigns or top-flight advertising firms – does not recruit for expertise in this particular discipline, and neither do we test or train for it. On top of these obvious flaws in our system, we don’t seem to have a mechanism whereby we bring public opinion polling, research and analysis into our message-crafting process in a methodical, systematic way. In fact, such data should be informing and even driving our communications efforts, just as they do in the “real worlds” of politics and business. We also continue to do a poor job of measuring the effectiveness of our efforts, and, as a direct result, the feedback and adjustment/correction part of our messaging process – an important part of any communications campaign – is virtually non-existent. As a result of these deficiencies, we generally don’t know if we’re succeeding or failing in our communications efforts; we’re flailing. For these reasons, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in our messaging process.
Third, I think our Nation would be well served to adopt a more modest and humble tenor in our communications with foreign publics. As we all know, and as myriad recent studies of global public opinion have clearly established, our Nation’s standing in the world has declined significantly in recent years. What I think is sometimes overlooked in this discussion is that style has probably accounted for a significant percentage of this decline. In other words, it’s not just what we do, it’s how we talk about what we’re doing. Too often, we articulate and justify our policies to the world as if we were speaking to voters in Iowa. But, of course, audiences in India, Iraq and Iran hear and process information very differently than audiences in Iowa. What might sound “decisive” and “strong” to a domestic ear, can sound “stubborn” and “heavy-handed” overseas. A greater sense of humility in our diplomacy – diplomacy which will continue to be backed by our extraordinary strength and resolve, of course – can go a long way toward restoring America’s standing as a nation among nations. This is something the new Administration ought to consider and explore.
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