An Opportunity In Bangladesh

I’ve commented before (here and here) about what I see as the ineffectiveness of traditional public diplomacy. Real public diplomacy is accomplished through actions, not words. Sending Cal Ripken Jr. off to China to teach baseball skills to youngsters is not going to transform our image in the world; nor, for that matter, are lame assurances by Karen Hughes (the head of public diplomacy at the State Department) that America is indeed a force for good.

John Burgess, a former FSO who writes at Crossroads Arabia, has challenged me about my pessimistic attitude, arguing that public diplomacy programs are necessary and that they “take a long time to reach fruition.” In an interesting exchange we had, Burgess indicated successes like ping-pong diplomacy and cited the importance of international exchange programs and music concerts.

I agree: there is a place for traditional public diplomacy. Exchange programs, foreign broadcasting, and other tools of PD are helpful. But I would argue that they are only useful in a very limited way. Simply put, a smart foreign policy that emphasizes human rights and international law is the absolute best form of public diplomacy. The rest is just details.

As the Bush administration has shown, you can’t use slick public diplomacy to cancel out an atrocious foreign policy. But this is what they’ve tried to do over and over again — hollow words about American values are supplemented for humane actions and just policies. It’s as though they think that Abu Ghraib will be forgotten if we increase our funding for Al-Hurra or send Hughes to go talk about American values with a rug on her head.

Unfortunately, when this administration has had the opportunity to act in a way that would really change the way the world thinks of us, they’ve repeatedly ignored it. Where was the American assistance when that terrible earthquake hit Pakistan in 2005? There wasn’t much of it, that’s for sure. Instead, it was groups like Lashkar e-Toiba and other radicals who did the majority of the grunt work to provide food and help people find shelter during the winter. By failing to take a lead role in the rebuilding, we lost the option of boosting our image in the region and we inadvertently increased support for radical groups.

Or where has the United States been in aiding the 3 million Iraqi refugees that now languish in Syria and Jordan? Heck, where was the United States after the recent Israeli-Lebanese war? Nowhere to be found. It was Hezbollah’s Jihad al-Bina, not international or American NGOs, that did the majority of the rebuilding. Sending aid and numerous highly-trained American volunteers to get people back on their feet would be the kind of real, effective, on-the-ground public diplomacy that actually makes a difference.

Now, once again, we have the opportunity to engage in some smart public diplomacy. Bangladesh has been hit by a tremendous cyclone — 3,000 people have been killed and over 3 million are likely to need food and housing. Roughly 90% of the Bangladeshi population is Muslim, I should add, which (putting aside for a moment the obvious moral imperatives for getting involved) makes this an important opportunity to start chipping away at anti-Americanism in the Islamic world. Will the Bush administration stand by, as they have so often in the past, and let others take the lead in aiding the Bangladeshi people? Or will they stand up and present our country as the major international force behind reconstruction? Two US Navy ships are already on the way to Bangladesh which raises hopes that we’ll finally get smart about public diplomacy by playing a central role in the rebuilding.

Note – Make no mistake: by no means am I suggesting that we should be involved in international crises, like the one in Bangladesh, merely in order to improve America’s image. Nothing could be further from what I believe. We need to be involved simply because it’s the right thing to do — people need our help, and that should be good enough to warrant our involvement. That this is also good public diplomacy is just a perk.