Apr. 29, 2014
A book street vendor passes the time on her smartphone as she waits for customers in Havana, Cuba. The Obama administration secretly financed a social network in Cuba to stir political unrest and undermine the country's communist government, according to an Associated Press investigation. / AP file photo
Written by
Lionel Beehner
I had to laugh when I heard about the U.S. Agency for International Development's botched effort to create a Twitter-like platform for Cuba intended to undermine the communist regime. Even the name -- ZunZuneo -- to the State Department's credit, sounded like something cooked up in Silicon Valley, not Foggy Bottom.
But it sparks the question: Why are we dumping millions of taxpayer dollars on such dumb programs in the first place?
To be sure, there is a need for outside-of-the-box thinking when it comes to diplomacy, which has always involved overt and covert tactics. And, as anybody who has seen the movie Argo knows, not all hare-brained schemes fail.
But our dependence on covert forms of public diplomacy can feel like an admission that our normal diplomacy has failed (see the past five decades of U.S.-Cuban relations).
It also implies we can do diplomacy on the cheap and painless. There is this dogma within the U.S. government that throwing a few million dollars at social media programs can topple nasty regimes -- just look at Tunisia or Egypt.
That the new undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, Richard Stengel, was the managing editor of Time when the magazine declared its 2006 Person of the Year was "You" -- implying the tweeting masses -- does not bode well for reform.
Cultural warriors
"The State Department's fascination with social media reflects a view that its job is to speak over the heads of governments, or under their heads, or something," as Laurence Pope, a former ambassador, put it in a recent interview. "That is a dangerous illusion."
Sure, spending millions on programs aimed at winning hearts and minds is better than, say, invading a country. And there is obvious value in squashing news stories -- say, an American pastor burning Qurans -- before they spread virally.
ut we can do better when it comes to selling our values and promoting democracy abroad.
During the Cold War, such information campaigns were an embedded part of our national security apparatus. Voice of America reached more than 94 million people during its heyday. We sent jazz impresarios like Duke Ellington to Eastern bloc countries to showcase American culture.
But such kinds of diplomacy got downgraded after the Berlin Wall fell. When democracy promotion came back into vogue after 9/11, we saw a string of failed propaganda efforts to win over the Arab world.
My first freelance job out of graduate school in 2002 was to write copy for Hi!! magazine, a U.S. government-funded glossy magazine in Arabic meant to portray us in a positive light to the Muslim world. The trouble is I was told not to write about religion, sex or politics, which left me writing puff pieces. No wonder the magazine folded a few years later.
We also set up Alhurra, a pro-U.S. network alternative to Al Jazeera. But the channel's legitimacy took a hit after refusing to interview anyone, including members of Hezbollah, whose views Washington found offensive.
Hip-hop diplomacy
Or consider our use of "hip-hop diplomacy," whereby Washington dispatches hip-hop artists to talk up American inclusiveness to disaffected Muslim youths as a way to prevent future 9/11s. But our cultural diplomacy only ticked off our European allies, who felt we were downplaying the musical genre's role in stoking radical Islam, and sparked a backlash within the hip-hop community itself, according to Columbia University's Hisham Aidi.
With a new kind of Cold War with Russia, there are renewed calls for revitalizing public diplomacy. One ambassador, Brian Carlson, proposed grants for Ukrainians to study politics here and call them "Putin Scholarships." Instead the U.S. government has busied itself with online trolling and tweeting Buzzfeed-like listicles such as "President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims about Ukraine."
It's not that we should do away with public diplomacy or even that we should do away with covert public diplomacy, but rather we should do away with dumb public diplomacy, especially one enraptured by the magic of tweeting ambassadors and other quick technological fixes.
If we couldn't dislodge the Castro regime after 50 years, how will we dislodge it in 140 characters or less?
Lionel Beehner, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
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