Ignorance: The benign version. A third school of thought locates anti-American views abroad in failures of American public diplomacy arising from insufficient resources. In its 2003 report, Changing Minds, Winning Peace, the U.S. Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy, chaired by Edward Djerejian, compared the present situation with the "Golden Age" of public diplomacy when Edward R. Murrow headed the United States Information Agency. A Republican-led reorganization folded the USIA into the State Department in 1999, and reduced its personnel by 40 percent. The Djerejian committee came up with the "startling figure" that the State Department includes only five persons who can speak Arabic sufficiently well to appear on Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabaiyya, or other television networks. Their reports also identified needs for fluent speakers of Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa, Indonesian, Pashto, and other key languages.
A focus on public diplomacy offers some guidelines and a starting point for coping with the problem. Cold War efforts at presenting the American case-including USIA libraries and Radio Free Europe-indicate that effective public diplomacy is not beyond Washington's capabilities, but such efforts in the Middle East and South Asia face stiffer cultural and linguistic challenges than did targets within the Soviet sphere during the Cold War. Moreover, legitimate homeland security concerns may constrain exchange programs.
U.S. policies and actions. Whereas the first two positions on the implications of declining public support abroad hold that the United States need not rethink any major aspects of its foreign policy, some assert that this is precisely the proper course for Washington to take. Indeed, at the previously cited briefing at the Foreign Press Center, Edward Djerejian concluded that anti-American views abroad are primarily the result of policies and only secondarily of poor public relations efforts: "Let's say policy forms 80 percent of people's perceptions about us. There is that other 20 percent, which is the message." A November 2004 Defense Science Board report on terrorism similarly stated, "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies." The same conclusion emerges from a brilliant analysis, Rogue Nation, by Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade representative.
Others have gone further. An anonymous C.I.A. officer wrote in Imperial Hubris that because Osama bin Laden hates the United States not because of its values but because of its policies, nothing short of an end to American aid to Israel, support for such repressive regimes as Saudi Arabia, withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, and a cessation of American pressure to keep oil prices low will suffice to undercut the appeals of terrorist organizations. However, the prescription that the United States should undertake a 180-degree turn in longstanding policies such as supporting Israel is out of touch with political realities.
The war against Iraq has been a prime source of anti-American sentiments; the fact that the rationales for the U.S. invasion-Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and intimate ties to al-Qaeda-have proved to be fictions appears to have trumped the almost universal pleasure that Saddam Hussein has been overthrown. Extended discussions of reactions abroad to the Iraq war and the disastrous postwar occupation are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that repeated assertions by administration leaders that, "You are with us or you are with the terrorists" are more likely to have alienated others without appreciably expanding the roster of those who would jump on Washington's bandwagon. Some low-cost or no-cost steps that administration officials might have undertaken or avoided include:
• Public expressions of gratitude. The 2002 State of the Union address could have thanked the many countries that provided invaluable assistance in the military campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Linking Germany to Cuba and Libya as the "most unhelpful" countries in the fight against terrorists at a time when German troops were fighting in Afghanistan was, understandably, resented by Germans.
• A determination to avoid gratuitous public insults. "Old Europe," "chocolate-makers," "itty-bitty summit" and similar references to recalcitrant NATO allies may have been emotionally satisfying, but they were hardly likely to rally public support abroad.
• A greater sensitivity to the fact that leaders in democratic countries abroad are no less motivated than those in Washington to gain electoral advantages by paying attention to domestic interest groups and constituencies, even if doing so puts them at odds with some American policies.
While these acts of omission and commission have contributed to anti-Americanism abroad, it is important to reiterate that the sources of those views are often to be found in Washington's policies. |
