Ripken Diplomacy

Our illustrious public diplomacy guru at the State Department, Karen Hughes, is at it again. This time, she plans on sending Cal Ripken Jr. around the world (first stop: China) to act as a cultural liaison for the United States. The video sort of tells it all, but I have a few comments which I’ll include below.

Honestly, it’s not that this latest initiative is that absurd, per say; it’s more the incredibly naive way in which Hughes and Rice act as though this will somehow transform America’s image in the world. Spending taxpayer money for Ripken to go romping around the globe teaching baseball tips is not, I’d venture, going to help our poor international reputation.

Here’s another way to conduct public diplomacy, and a much better one too:

Look, if we were at all serious about public diplomacy, we’d have had all our regional experts who speak Arabic flooding the airwaves apologizing for Condi’s immensely tone-deaf “birth pangs” comment during the Lebanon-Israeli war the summer before last, when the entire Islamic world was enraged by images of cluster munitions being littered willy-nilly through south Lebanon, not to mention the horrific incident at Qana. Or she would follow her predecessor Colin Powell’s recommendation to close Guantanamo without delay, by having a come to Jesus w/ the Decider about how the Cuban penal colony (along with the hooded man at Abu Ghraib) was overshadowing the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of America among many around the world.

These would be the makings of a serious public diplomacy effort, not this breezy, palsy-walsy festiveness with Cal.

The first idea is a particularly good one, since defenders of American policy have been badly lacking in the Arab press. For awhile we had Alberto Fernandez, but he got fired. Now, we have few Arabic speakers to explain America’s viewpoint, a problem compounded by the fact that we keep firing translators because of allegations that they might be gay. I kid you not.