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CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
American Public Diplomacy in the Cold War
Review by John H. Brown
Wilson P. Dizard, Jr. Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004, 255 pp., $49.95.
Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, 249 pp., $37.95.
Public diplomacy—the art of engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences—is back on Washington’s radar screen. Gone is public diplomacy’s post-Cold War obscurity, when many considered it irrelevant after the dissolution of the USSR. Today, with a so-called war on terror, government officials, media pundits, and commentators from both left and right have revived public diplomacy as a tool to win the U.S. gov ernment’s battle for the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world. There are calls, in Congress and elsewhere, for increased funding for public diplomacy programs, as well as numerous proposals to make it a more effective tool of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 world.
The two books under review shed light on the role of U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War, a global conflict during which military strength was only one of many ways to overcome forces hostile to the United States. These works do not pretend to be the definitive studies on the topic, but they are nonetheless timely and significant contributions to an understanding of the past and the lessons it can give for the future. Wilson Dizard’s Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency and Yale Richmond’s Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain are must-reads for policymakers, scholars, and general readers concerned with the United States’s international role today.
Apart from their choice of subject matter, the books have much in com mon. Both were written by distinguished Foreign Service officers who have spent a total of nearly sixty years carrying out U.S. educational, cultural, and informational programs aimed at overseas audiences. They are based on the authors’ personal experiences, observations by public diplomacy practitioners and program participants, secondary sources, and some primary sources. The authors avoid theory and write in clear, jargonfree prose.
The differences between the books stem from the authors’ divergent view points. Dizard is most concerned with the information side of public diploma cy, although he does not overlook its educational and cultural aspects. He deals with his subject chronologically, globally, and institutionally and focuses on how the United States Information Agency (USIA), created in 1953 as an anti-Soviet propaganda agency, evolved by gradually increasing its activities in the Third World and adapting its programs to changing global circumstances. He ends USIA’s story in 1999, when it was consolidated into the State Department, but considers “The Future of Public Diplomacy” in the final chapter.
Conversely, Richmond focuses solely on cultural and educational exchanges with the Soviet Union. He discusses vari ous governmental and non-governmen tal programs—many of them not handled by USIA—that had an impact on the USSR. He does not use the term “public diplomacy” to describe these programs, preferring “cultural exchange.” His treatment of information programs is limited to a two-page chapter on foreign broadcasts to the Soviet Union.