Glassman brings new opportunity for public diplomacy

The naming of James Glassman to replace Karen Hughes as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is a great opportunity finally to get something accomplished.

We don't need to recount the horror show of feckless ineptitude that has plagued the administration's public diplomacy for nearly seven years.

Glassman has the potential to fix it. Not for the next thirteen months by any means, but to fix things for the long term. He should use his very short tenure at the State Department to clean up the wreckage by designing a new public diplomacy agency that will really do what the nation needs it to do.

That means creating a modern analogue to the former United States Information Agency (USIA) - an independent organization answerable to the president and the secretary of state, with its own mission and bureaucratic culture.

The forced marriage between the public diplomats and the traditional foreign service - producing a Quasimodo-like love child of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her nemesis-turned-dancing partner, former Senator Jesse Helms - is the number one reason why the US was caught with its pants down after 9/11, when the world saw that the US no longer had a functioning public diplomacy instrument or information strategy.

Glassman gets it. As the new head of the other unloved bastard child of Albright-Helms - the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) - Glassman knows what a lot of the problems are. He hasn't been in office long enough to fix many of them, but he knows the deal. As Undersecretary of State, he will remain on the BBG board and ideally should arrange for a successor who answers to him and not to the majority of schemers who dominate the board.

Here's the bottom line: Jim Glassman should spend the next six months designing a new, separate public diplomacy agency infused with a real culture of influence, and work with Congress to establish the organization by statute, with full funding, so that the next president can get moving.

The president and secretary of state should support such an initiative, both for the good of the country and to turn the public diplomacy horror show into a positive legacy.

Comments

[mpolman]

Nice thought, but the reality is that the GOP is doing its best to see that this Congress doesn't achieve anything. Even if they were successful in creating it years worth of bureaucratic infighting and logistical problems would render such an agency ineffective. Witness the Department of Homeland Security. I am involved with one PD program at State that last year finally began contracting out critical logistical operations years after USIA's demise. It would take still more years to rip it all up and get integrated into a new agency. I don't think re-inventing the wheel will do any good nor is it necessary. What's really needed is a large boost in funding for the programs that we already have in place and the creation of still other new public diplomacy programs. That will happen when shrimps learn to whistle.