Joseph Nye, writing in The Ripon Society journal, looks at the challenge facing Karen Hughes in terms of “soft power.”
Karen Hughes, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has a daunting task. The United States spends only a little over a billion dollars a year on public diplomacy to get our message out, about the same as Britain or France though we are five times larger. We spend nearly 500 times more than that on our hard military power.
The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) was abolished during the Clinton Administration. Proponents argued that giving its functions to an undersecretary in the State Department would integrate them more closely with overall diplomacy. But this change neglected the low value attributed to public diplomacy in the traditional culture of the State Department. The job Hughes now occupies was left vacant for nearly half of the four years of the first Bush Administration. The priorities in Bush’s first term were on America’s hard power, not its soft or attractive power.
Read the whole thing to learn more about one view of the problems and challenges…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.