With the U.S. Government’s public diplomacy generally adrift since the end of the Cold War, and a host of new security challenges emerging, the Foreign Policy Project (FPP) believes the U.S. needs to transform its public diplomacy strategies and capabilities to meet 21st century policy challenges. Its new Strategic Public Diplomacy Initiative will focus on ways to modernize and integrate diplomacy with principal U.S. foreign policy strategies, while embracing new and emerging technologies, such as the Internet and social media.
Co-chaired by Secretary Dan Glickman and Ambassador James Glassman, the initiative will look at how the U.S. Government should conduct public diplomacy around the globe, specifically toward countries with Muslim majorities, while leveraging new media opportunities.
Over the course of 2011, the initiative will examine lessons learned from prior public diplomacy efforts; define the strategic uses and dimensions of public diplomacy; determine pressing short- and medium-term strategic challenges that public diplomacy can help address; and recommend specific proposals on how public diplomacy programming can be better targeted to audiences in particular countries, such as Pakistan, advance U.S. interests, and how best to engage the private sector for maximum impact around the world.
The goal of the initiative is to create the framework for a modern public diplomacy strategy that is technologically savvy, that leverages the potential of the private sector, and that is tightly coordinated with U.S. national security goals. In addition, it will demonstrate that such diplomacy is vital to our reputation around the world and to undermining the ideology behind violent extremism. FPP hopes to convince policymakers that public diplomacy is an important part of our foreign policy toolbox -- as valuable as military power and intelligence.
Dan Glickman
Former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (D); Senior Fellow, BPC
James Glassman
Executive Director, George W. Bush Institute; former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
