This term has been used in the United States since 1965 to describe transnational cultural propaganda and press management activities. In 1997 a State Department planning team defined the term as follows: “Public Diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest of the United States through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences.” It is therefore distinguished from private diplomacy, which aims to cultivate only professional diplomats. The term itself is in some ways propaganda, but the United States wished to avoid the negative connotations of “propaganda” to describe the activities of agencies like the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Voice of America (VOA). A well-known example of U.S. public diplomacy is the Fulbright Program, established at the end of World War II by Senator William Fulbright (1905-1995) of Arkansas to promote international educational exchanges.
The term is thought by some to have been coined by the American diplomat Edmund Gullion (1913-1998). Although Gullion denied this, he promoted its use as director of the most significant professional school connected with this type of work, namely, the Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, which was established in 1965.
Public diplomacy is not a one-way street. Jarol B. Manheim has charted the extensive public diplomacy activities of other nations seeking to influence the U.S. government. In so doing he has developed the concept of strategic public diplomacy, according to which the objectives of international communication are best served by a targeted application of the fruits of political and social science research—usually by highly paid public relations firms. The best known firm representing foreign nations within the United States is Hill and Knowlton Public Affairs Worldwide, whose clients included the Kuwaiti government during the Gulf War. Manheim called their image management “the real smart weapon of the Gulf Conflict.” In terms of targeted lobbying and public relations, top spenders within the United States include Japan and Israel. Individual success stories include the promotion of Pakistan as a “partner in democracy” in the late 1980s and Mexico’s lobbying for the passage of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) resolution. Such campaigns have prompted Man-heim’s preliminary conclusion that “when it comes to strategic public diplomacy the United States gives far less than it gets.”
Since 1999 and the dissolution of the USIA, responsibility for public diplomacy has passed to the undersecretary of state public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department. In the George W. Bush administration the post was first held by Charlotte Beers (1935- ), a former advertising executive. When asked about the incongruity of this past experience, Colin Powell (1937- ), the then secretary of state, replied: “She got me to buy Uncle Ben’s rice.” Charlotte Beers resigned in early 2003 after criticism of a high-profile campaign of television advertisements in the Middle East featuring Arab Americans. The cultural approach to international relations associated with public diplomacy is supported by the Public Diplomacy Foundation, which includes many USIA alumni. During the 2001 War on Terrorism public diplomacy in support of the war was overseen by a Coalition Information Center established under the auspices of the White House, which later coordinated a wider public diplomacy campaign against anti-Americanism worldwide.
