ABSTRACT
In the wake of 9/11, the United States government set out to clarify the values it stood for in the world. The second section of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, which outlined the aim to ‘Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity,’ spelled out a series of ‘nonnegotiable demands’: the rule of law, free speech, freedom of worship, equal justice, and respect for private property. The intention was to direct US actions and resources towards ‘expanding liberty’ and ‘the development of democratic institutions’ around the world. This chapter will focus on US public diplomacy efforts to realize this agenda. Public diplomacy covers an array of government-sponsored activities that aim to
influence opinion abroad, thereby creating a more positive, supportive environment within which foreign policies can be conducted. It therefore covers everything from government information programs and news broadcasting to the active role of the private sector in running exchange programs and in cultural diplomacy projects covering the arts. From 1953 to 1999 the main body responsible for this was the United States Information Agency (USIA), which conducted and coordinated its activities with the State Department (Dizard 2004). In 1999, the Foreign Affairs Restructuring Act dissolved USIA and transferred its information and exchange activities to the State Department, whereas broadcasting was placed under the supervision of the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors. The need to respond rapidly to the shock of 9/11 exposed the fact that public diplomacy
had been seriously neglected during the 1990s. As the independent Public Diplomacy Council stated in 2005:
Buffeted by a decade of budget cuts, hampered by bureaucratic structures that marginalize it and call on its expertise too late in the policy process, public diplomacy as currently constituted is inadequate to perform the urgent national security tasks required of it – to inform, to understand and to influence world publics.
