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CIAO DATE: 12/03
America Loses Its Voice
On The Issues
June 2003
Public opinion polls show that disturbingly large numbers of Arabs and Europeans view America unfavorably. To combat this trend, the United States must redevelop its once mighty weapons of public diplomacy, which served it so well during the Cold War. America needs to conduct a war of ideas as successfully as it can conduct a war of arms.
In laying out his battle plan for the war against terrorism in his National Security Strategy issued last September, President George W. Bush emphasized two key elements, military force and waging "a war of ideas." The second is less tangible than the first, but no less important. Our victory in the Cold War owed at least as much to our ideological arsenal as to our military deterrent. The war on terror, in contrast, has thus far been one-dimensional. Our military efforts have been prodigious, but our work in the realm of ideas has been negligible.
The need for some kind of campaign for "hearts and minds" could scarcely be more obvious. Never has the United States confronted so much hostility and distrust. A Gallup poll conducted in Muslim countries a few months after the attacks of September 11 showed that in Kuwait, only 11 percent said they had a "very favorable" opinion of our country, while more than twice as many, 23 percent, said they had a "very unfavorable" one. In Saudi Arabia, only 7 percent were very favorable, while 49 percent were very unfavorable. And in the case of Pakistan, Gallup was reduced to putting an asterisk next to "very favorable," meaning a percentage too low to measure. These results came before the war in Iraq, which is unlikely to have boosted our standing.
Nor is the problem limited to the Islamic world. According to a Pew poll this March, only 6 percent of the French said their opinion of the United States was very favorable, while 22 percent said theirs was very unfavorable. The numbers were even worse in Germany (4 percent to 30 percent) and in Spain (3 percent to 39 percent). Even among the British, our stalwart friends, only 14 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of us, while 16 percent said the opposite. And in Turkey, which is both Muslim and European, those in the "very unfavorable" camp dwarfed their "very favorable" brethren by a whopping 67 percent to 3 percent.
America's Response
Why are we are doing little about this? Because in the 1990s we unilaterally disarmed ourselves of the weapons of ideological warfare. In the early days of the Cold War, much of this arsenal reposed with the CIA, which created Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, underwrote the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and sustained the efforts of anticommunists of many stripes in the realm of politics and culture. While such covert activities eventually became controversial, there is ample evidence that many of them were effective. After exposis drove the CIA from this field, some other agencies found ways to accomplish similar goals. The National Endowment for Democracy, for example, gives to democratic groups abroad overt support of a kind that might have been furnished covertly in an earlier day. The principal burden of cultivating goodwill toward America among publics overseas was left to the U.S. Information Agency. Once the Cold War was won, USIA funding was slashed repeatedly, as conservative isolationists and budget hawks teamed up with liberal cultural relativists averse to American "propaganda." The coup de grace came when Jesse Helms, taking his cue from Secretary of State Warren Christopher, persuaded the Senate to abolish USIA, folding its functions into the State Department, which was, however, more eager to absorb the agency's resources than to carry forward its mission.
Since September 11, lacking an agency or office equipped to prosecute a war of ideas, we have been flailing. An advertising executive was brought in as an undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in order to, in Secretary of State Colin Powell's words, "rebrand America," just as she had done for Uncle Ben's rice. As a start, she organized a campaign publicizing the "mosques of America," apparently to make the Muslim world aware of how many Americans practice Islam. Of course, a far greater number of Americans practice Christianity, yet it has done nothing for our standing with the French, Spanish, and Germans.
Meanwhile, the Broadcasting Board of Governors launched "Radio Sawa," which aims to attract a large, youthful audience in the Arab world by broadcasting pop music, with only brief interruptions for news and occasional interviews.
The war of ideas, however, cannot be won by seduction. It must be primarily a work of persuasion. Of course heavy-handed propaganda is useless, and in the Cold War the Voice of America used jazz to draw listeners. But our approach today is out of balance. When Sawa was launched, the Arabic service of Voice of America was abolished, with the inexplicable result that we are today broadcasting less news, commentary, and discourse to the Arab world than at any time in memory.
Agenda of Persuasion
The agenda of persuasion should contain three objectives. The first is to anathematize terrorism, which is still widely accepted in the Islamic world. In the wake of September 11, Kofi Annan was forced to abandon a draft treaty against terrorism because the Islamic Conference insisted that it contain an exception for terrorism on behalf of worthy causes. And, according to Gallup, more people in Muslim countries found the September 11 attacks somewhat justifiable than found them completely unjustifiable.
The second objective is to strengthen those Muslims, from the secular to the most devout, who share Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya's view that "the substitution of jihad for worship" is a "travesty" of Islam. We need to give them platforms and encouragement and material support wherever they feel they can accept it without compromising their message.
Third, we must carry out a campaign of explanation aimed at Europe and the rest of the world about our view of the uses of American power. Rarely has one power been so little balanced by others. No wonder the rest are uneasy. To allay their concerns, we must say much more about how we intend to use our power and the limits we accept.
Addressing this agenda will require new resources. Funding for the war of ideas should be restored to Cold War levels, which would still amount to a pittance compared with military expenditures. We also need to develop a new cadre of spokesmen and activists both within the government and outside. Our greatest assets in the Cold War were excommunists like intellectuals Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook, who could best the communists in the world of letters, and laborites like Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, who could battle them in the political trenches. Alas, there is no comparable group of ex-Islamists; but there are eloquent Muslims who are pro-American and prodemocracy with and through whom we can work.
Finally, we need to reinvent USIA. The State Department, whose vocation is the soft sell, is unsuited to the task. As much as we need the Pentagon, we also need an agency dedicated to the mission of waging the war of ideas.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at AEI.
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