TWQ: Educational and Cultural Exchanges to Restore America's Image - Summer 2008

Whoever wins the presidential race in 2008 will be faced with the challenge of restoring the U.S. image in the rest of the world. A June 2007 study by the Pew Foundation documented negative perceptions of the United States in just about every part of the globe. Over the last five years, the percentage of people with a favorable image of the United States has decreased 11 percent in Japan, 18 percent in Argentina, 30 percent in Germany, and 32 percent in Indonesia. Even in the United Kingdom, the number of people with favorable U.S. views is a meager 51 percent.

Enhancing the U.S. reputation will require a multipronged strategy, at the center of which must be a carefully crafted public diplomacy component. Public diplomacy can be defined for the purposes of  this article as coordinated attempts to shape perceptions and views of the United States in the rest of the world. Creating a successful strategy for public diplomacy will require rethinking some fundamental assumptions that have driven efforts over the last two presidential administrations.

The exercise of public diplomacy has changed in an environment where technology moves information quickly and the U.S. government is less trusted. A new strategy must rely less on traditional media, and the messengers cannot be people who are perceived  as spokespersons for U.S. foreign policy. Crafting this strategy requires a thorough understanding of the role of cultural and educational exchanges, or what is commonly called citizen diplomacy. Exchanges as well as citizen diplomacy more generally have typically been perceived as important but limited due to the small number of participants. This perception ignores the tremendous infrastructure that  exists and the many ways it could be leveraged. Large-scale and influential public diplomacy could be achieved with a modest increase in  federal dollars directed at partnerships between the federal government  and a vast network of cultural and educational organizations that already exist.