Public Diplomacy Must Be Made Great Again: Unilateral Disarmament Is Not an Option
A civil war has broken out at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Trump-appointed senior advisor Kari Lake’s DOGE-powered investigations uncovered enough waste, fraud, and abuse to declare the agency unsalvageable and move to depopulate the entities it oversees, like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
Entrenched Biden-era holdovers are suing to save their shops and keep their jobs. They imagine themselves as noble defenders of American public diplomacy, and that shutting them down is a gift to the dictators of the world. Bear in mind, these are the same journalists who refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization. (RELATED: Shut Down the Voice of America — It’s a Relic We Don’t Need)
Public information is critically important, but the system as it exists today is a pale shadow of what it was when information warriors helped win the Cold War.
Our public information agencies used to be jewels in the crown of a full-spectrum national security strategy. Look at the storied history of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). (RELATED: Mend Don’t End the VOA)
These were critical engines of strategic messaging that shaped global pro-American narratives. They told America’s story and gave hope to captive peoples that there could be a future of freedom. When Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa was asked in 1989 if Radio Free Europe’s Polish Service played an important role in Poland’s struggle for freedom, he replied, “Would there be an earth without the sun?”
Within the U.S. government, the importance of these agencies was reflected in their access to power. When Edward R. Murrow headed USIA he was a cabinet-level official with direct access to President John F. Kennedy. Murrow was not just a broadcaster; he was involved in helping craft and execute strategy for some of the most important national security issues of his day.
Likewise, with President Ronald Reagan’s USIA Director Charles Wick. He was a personal friend of the Gipper who served with him all eight years. He knew Reagan’s mind and crafted innovative information strategies, harnessed new technologies, and even served as a covert diplomatic liaison for the president. When Wick encountered bureaucratic pushback, he would say dismissively, “Go tell the president.”
Unfortunately, America’s victory in the Cold War spelled the end of this golden age of U.S. public diplomacy. A series of legislative reforms in the optimistic and, in retrospect, foolhardy 1990s spirit of the “end of history,” eviscerated the power, influence, and strategic purpose of our public diplomacy agencies. A new firewall detached staff from strategy, reducing output to echoes of what the mainstream media was already doing. Indeed, much of VOA’s recent output has been news reports copied and pasted from expensive wire services.
Far from their intended role as top-level executive instruments of public diplomacy, the new agencies became bureaucratic backwaters, increasingly ineffective and wracked with low morale, waste, corruption, and security violations. Previous attempts at reform were vigorously resisted, which makes Lake’s current sledgehammer approach seem necessary.
But in no way does that mean that the United States should abandon the work of public diplomacy. Our global adversaries continue to be masterful at shaping anti-American messaging, both for consumption abroad and inside our borders. Our country cannot unilaterally disarm in the face of the onslaught of false narratives and propaganda.
Instead, the United States requires a serious and effective suite of information agencies that are mission-focused and employ the latest information technologies. The current system is so broken that only a major legislative overhaul will fix it. The misbegotten legislative reforms of the 1990s have to be thrown out, and the public diplomacy agencies reconstituted to their former structure and importance.
Congress should immediately begin crafting a comprehensive, mission- and metrics-based legislative overhaul of our public information agencies. The current model has proved to be ineffective and even harmful to our national interest. Lacking Congressional action, USAGM will be left in an endless back-and-forth struggle between the few presidential appointees and hundreds of entitled bureaucrats and grantees.
It is ironic and troubling that the United States, where the modern Internet-based information age was born, has fallen so far behind its adversaries in conducting operations in the global public information space. Our country can regain primacy and once again tell its own story while shaping narratives promoting freedom and opportunity. Congress, working with the president, must take urgent action to make this a reality.
James S. Robbins is the dean of academics at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and served on the Trump–Vance transition team for the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
READ MORE from James S. Robbins:
To Reconstruct Gaza, First Deconstruct Gaza
Reagan’s 9 Lessons for Trump in Pursuing Peace Through Strength
The post Public Diplomacy Must Be Made Great Again: Unilateral Disarmament Is Not an Option appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.