Strengthening U.S. Public Diplomacy Requires Organization, Coordination, and Strategy

The final report of the National Commission on Ter­rorist Attacks Upon the United States said that Amer­ica’s biggest failure leading to the events of September 11, 2001, was a lack of imagination.[1] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, terrorist dangers were hardly men­tioned as priorities in America’s policy debates. Like­wise, leaders in both the legislative and executive branches considered public diplomacy (PD) a Cold-War relic in the absence of a powerful adversary.

In 1999, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) was merged into the U.S. Department of State, where senior managers carved up its functions and dispersed them among the State Department’s geographic and func­tional bureaus. Foreign broadcasting was placed under a new, independent Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Thus, public diplomacy lost its leadership and organizational integrity just before the…