Vital Interests:  Thanks very much for participating in the Vital Interest Forum. You have been studying public diplomacy for quite a while - your most recent book is Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age.

Nick, our readers are savvy about many things, but the terminology used in international relations can be confusing - soft power, hard power. Could you sort it out for us?

Nick Cull: I'll start with the definition of diplomacy, which I speak of as the ways in which an international actor seeks to manage the international environment through external engagement. Historically, this external engagement has been with other nation state actors.

With public diplomacy, the actor is conducting this management by engaging with a foreign public, sometimes engaging with their own public too, but most often it's with a foreign public. The term has only been around since 1965 with its current package of meanings. Once you start thinking about, "Well, how do actors seek to engage with foreign publics for foreign policy ends?" I found that there are some pretty ancient practices that go way back.

One of my early contributions to public diplomacy theory was to point out that there are five key elements and that the most important one is listening. Before you start engaging with a foreign public, you have to listen carefully and try to understand where they're coming from. To me, it's a simple insight, but it's so neglected. People, international actors, forget to pay attention to the realities of public opinion they are attempting to influence.

The other approaches are advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchanges, and the facilitating of international broadcasting. Dissemination of news used to be done longhand and is now done through various forms of electronic journalism. Those are the big five areas of public diplomacy. In the past, it was an optional extra for the most sophisticated nation-states. But in today's world, it's essential for anyone operating in the international space. You have to pay attention to public opinion. It's the imperative in foreign policy now. 

You asked about soft power, that’s also something that you can find in the past, how certain international actors have been able to do more in the world because they have an attractive culture or attractive values. Since Joseph Nye articulated this concept in the late '80s, early nineties '90s, it's become the most important element in public diplomacy theory. The idea is not that public diplomacy and soft power are the same thing, but rather if you play public diplomacy cards right, you then will maximize your soft power in the world.

The problem now is that all the major countries have focused on soft power. It's seen as  the area for the strongest states. For the country that has everything, why not have a little soft power this Christmas? We also see conflicting views among the largest players.  There is a Chinese approach to soft power, a Russian approach to soft power and, of course, an American approach to soft power. Everybody has their own way of appealing to world opinion in order to advance their national agendas. 

My sense is that this idea of soft power as a simple bonus for the big boys is over. I think that that was the feeling in the '90s and early 2000s. We're in a much more competitive environment now, and I find it better to conceptualize what's going on as what I call reputational security. This really goes to the urgency of public diplomacy when it comes to issues of image - the idea that a state that has a vulnerability in its reputation. It's not just about having a positive image, but if you have something bad in your image it actually limits what you're able to do.

Rather than thinking about the most successful countries, if we think about the countries that are weakest in terms of soft power, the countries that have the smallest reputation, that aren't known for anything, then they are in a precarious situation. They may even have a narrative which favors their enemies. The event that tipped me off to this really was in Ukraine, where really all Ukraine was known for was being a post-Soviet state. When Russia moved into Crimea and a couple of Ukrainian provinces, there was some international outcry but other than imposing some sanctions, no one was going to take any direct action against Russia. Ukraine hadn't developed a reputational security that put the country outside the Russian sphere.

You could go back in history and say that Czechoslovakia had the same problem when it was threatened by Hitler in 1938.  It wasn't an existential threat that anybody else felt compelled to counter. People felt differently about Poland.

VI: Let’s go back a bit in history to look at the role of public diplomacy. Joseph Nye also has talked about how nations used to win by hard power - military might - but the winners these days also have the best story. If we go back to the imperialism epoch of the 19th century, wasn't cultural imperialism a form of public diplomacy - that Western nations had an obligation to bring their concepts of a civilized society to the underdeveloped regions of the world?

Nick Cull: Yes, certainly. You also see a kind of competitive cultural imperialism where states would see themselves not in competition with some imaginative emptiness or ignorance in the rest of the world, but rather "Oh, if we don't tell the French story in this location, then the Italians will come and they'll tell their story.”

In fact, there's an old joke about an American diplomat who'd opened a cultural center in a provincial city in Lebanon. He used to tell people that he'd opened two cultural centers in Lebanon. People would say, "Well, what do you mean? You opened the American Cultural center but where is the other one?" He said, "Oh, well when I opened mine, the French had to open one there as well so I'm responsible for two." There has been this competitive element in cultural outreach from the 19th century onwards.

VI: The United States got into public diplomacy in a serious way after the Second World War. How did the start of the Cold War and the struggle against the perceived Communist takeover of the world incentivize American public diplomacy?

Nick Cull: The first thing I'd say is that the U.S. approach to public diplomacy is a strange one, because the U.S. believes in public diplomacy, particularly at times of crisis. You can go back through history and see these spikes of American public diplomacy that are tied to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the First World War, and some other crises at other moments. The problem is that there is an instinct in the United States that the business of storytelling is best done by the private sector, that news belongs in private hands.

There is sort of an instinctual mistrust of a government role in communications - particularly overseas. What this has led to is what I call public diplomacy hokey pokey. The United States is putting itself in and pulling itself out.

The only reason that, after World War II, the United States sustained public diplomacy in the world is really because the crisis was sustained. Would you believe it? As soon as the crisis seemed to end in the 1990s, the old instinct to stand back from public diplomacy kicked in and the U.S. backed off from this area of engagement. There was this attitude that CNN can do this, or Disney can do this, and a decline in investment in American public diplomacy followed. What's interesting to me is that one of the senators who really cared about this work was Joseph Biden, in part because of his constituency. He’s from Delaware, home to one of the major Cold War institutions, Radio Free Europe. It was incorporated in Delaware.

Biden was always pushing for Radio Free Europe to be preserved, to be maintained. Then at the very end of the Clinton years, Biden actually put forward a bill to revive American cultural diplomacy too. As a senator this was something that he really cared about and argued for. It will be interesting to see if he returns to those kinds of positions.

VI: Would you say that American use of public diplomacy during the Cold War was to fight an ideology - that its content was to deliver an anti-communist, an anti-Soviet message?

Nick Cull: That's correct, yes, but it was also about promoting the United States and shaping a vision of what America stood for. I would also say that I see an element of reputational security in the U.S. response. Particularly Eisenhower understood that the U.S. was reputationally insecure because of its racism. If you look into the decision-making around American civil rights in the Eisenhower years and the early Kennedy years, the government is very concerned about what the Russians are saying around the world about race relations in the United States. Eisenhower, I’d even say, was more concerned about Khrushchev than he was about Martin Luther King Jr.

Khrushchev makes a tremendous difference. When he turns up the heat on American race relations, Eisenhower has to respond. I think that's actually a pretty good case for showing the value of listening in international relations, and the wisdom in understanding places where you're reputationally insecure.

The point in those years was not to defend America's racism, to say, "Oh, it's just one of our folk ways," which might have been the way it was defended in the 1930s, but to understand that the world had values and if the United States was out of step with those values, then its ability to act as it would wish would be impaired.

VI: Given the American emphasis on the values of liberty and freedom for all, wasn’t its treatment of Black citizens seen as hypocritical?

Nick Cull: Sure, but there's a lot of hypocrisy out there. I think that many countries are able to live with hypocrisy. It's drawing attention to it and motivating change that’s important.

VI: During the ‘50s and ‘60s, as the United States was engaged in the Cold War, there were government entities like the United States Information Agency, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe that had considerable outreach. At the same time, American cinema, American television, and certainly American music were being vigorously exported around the world. Didn’t this present another avenue for the dissemination of American culture? 

Nick Cull: Yes, sure, but you know what? The export of American films was not distinct from government activity. In the late ‘40s there was this program called The International Media Guarantee Program, which was associated with the Marshall Plan. The U.S. government would guarantee payments on American media exports. The U.S. government would make it possible for, say, Disney movies to get into Germany, and would guarantee that Disney got paid for them. Because currency wasn't automatically convertible at that point. It gave U.S. companies an advantage that other countries didn't have.

I know the United States likes to think of the success of its media as a great example of private enterprise, but as with so much, that private enterprise got a nice little helping hand from Uncle Sam, to positive effect.

VI: You've written a lot about the United States Information Agency, how it was formed, its role in public diplomacy. and its demise. One of your recent books was The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency. Can you give us that narrative?

Nick Cull: The short story is that when Eisenhower won the election in 1952, he saw America's vulnerability in terms of its global communications. He was aware of the threat from Stalin and he could see the need for America to do a better job of telling its story to the world. He started a number of inquiries. There were three separate task forces running in the early weeks of the Eisenhower administration looking into ways of improving America's foreign policy and image.

What he decided to do was to create, effectively, a one-stop-shop for American public diplomacy. He didn't call it that though, he called it the psychological factor in foreign policy. All the agencies that had survived the Second World War and the agencies that had been created in the immediate post-war period to help Germany and Japan in reconstruction and reeducation, were pulled together to form an early Cold War initiative.

These would be grouped in a single agency, that single agency was also going to save money. It was designed to have economies of scale. USIA starts out as this favored project of President Eisenhower. It then prospers under President Kennedy who pays a lot of attention to international opinion. In fact, one of the issues in the famous Kennedy-Nixon TV debate is a USIA report that the U.S. is losing ground internationally in terms of its reputation. Kennedy promises to close the reputation gap and there's nothing that Nixon can say to rebut it. 

USIA expanded during the Vietnam War but it underwent a lot of institutional division at that time, as many foreign service officers were not comfortable with being expected to sell American involvement in Vietnam when it was seen as being a bad policy by the rest of the world.

USIA did okay in the '70s but it really comes back in the '80s. During Ronald Reagan's confrontation with the Soviet Union, he could see the considerable value in public diplomacy. His close friend, Charles Wick, was put in charge of the agency, and it goes on to have a second golden age. If the period of the '50s and the early '60s was the first golden age for the agency, then the Reagan years was the second golden age. However, once the Cold War was over, people were looking for a peace dividend. USIA did very well in the First Gulf War - it was one of the best examples of the advantage of listening and having an outreach that is based on regional knowledge.

But the agency was cut back in the 1990s, and eventually lost its autonomy in 1999 when it was folded into the State Department. It was an unholy alliance between Senator Jesse Helms, the Republican from North Carolina, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. President Clinton really wanted to get the Senate to agree to the Chemical Warfare Treaty and pay UN dues, both of which helped America's international reputation. In order to get there, he traded the agency responsible for telling America's story. In some ways American public diplomacy has been recovering ever since. I don't believe that better public diplomacy would have prevented 9/11, but I do believe it would've really helped on 9/12.

VI: What was the situation with the USIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks? Was it an up and running functional group that had a Middle East presence?

Nick Cull: USIA had been folded into the State Department. Many of their experts had resigned, taken early retirement. The State Department was still well equipped to deal with a crisis in the Russian speaking world but had very few people with knowledge of the Arab street. I was once told there were only six people in the entire State Department capable of being interviewed in colloquial Arabic. There are people who could read and speak Arabic but not up to the standard of doing a live interview on air. The State Department, in 2001, had 250 people who spoke Russian that well. The problem was that Russians hadn't crashed the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were facing an enemy they were institutionally not equipped to deal with, and there were reasons for this.

Following the Middle East crisis, the Six-Day War and so forth, a lot of American posts were closed in the Middle East. There were fewer government jobs in that region and expertise hadn't developed. There were more opportunities elsewhere in the world. There was this mismatch. The United States developed that expertise as quickly as they could and learned to rethink their approach to that region. One of the problems with American public diplomacy has always been political control. Governments come in and they are more interested in telling a story than listening to world opinion.

You could see this kind of mistake in the early Bush period.  A very elaborate public diplomacy program was put together called “Shared Values” directed at populations in the Middle East. The program explained all the things that people needed to know about American multiculturalism, the integration of Muslims into American life, opportunities for Muslims, and how happy Muslims are in American society. That was great. It was a high-quality campaign. The problem was that nobody was angry with the United States because it was hard to be a teacher in Dearborn, Michigan.

They were angry with the United States because of the American presence on Arab land, because of American support for the so-called upper-state regimes - Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - and because of American support for Israel and complicity in the mistreatment of Palestinians. Those were the issues that were energizing the Arab street. Talking about how great it is to live in Anaheim or Dearborn, Michigan was irrelevant and didn't do any good. In terms of public diplomacy it was a failure.

VI: Given the Global War on Terror, which was a great focus of the Bush administration, did they ever succeed in developing an effective public diplomacy program to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world?

Nick Cull: I would say that, in fact, later in the Bush administration they started to learn to play the game. After initial failures and missteps, there was an accumulation of experience. One of the insights that was revealed was that this is not just America's problem. This is a problem of Western countries who share the threats from violent extremism and a coordinated response was needed. 

To me the great insight as we move into an online world is not what can we say, but who can we empower. The Bush administration was thinking "What can we say? What's the magic words that will cure us of Osama Bin Laden?" But the real question is not "What can I say," but "Who can I empower?" Who can I work with in the region in such a way as to amplify their voice, partner with them to tell a local story, which bears out the strategic objectives that we share? That's the way things work.

I've seen this at close quarters in the UK; the creation of a network to counter Islamic extremism, which was up and running by 2017. It did a really, really aggressive job in countering ISIS. The British government did a very effective job with their public diplomacy to confront ISIS messaging, but it was about partnership. 

The problem is if you want your public diplomacy not really to deal with foreign policy threats, but to show how fantastic you are to your own people, then partnering effectively with foreigners is not sufficient. You also want everybody to see that it's you who is doing it, how much you're loved in the world, and the grandstanding element can get in the way of public diplomacy.  I see this as a problem, not only at some moments in U.S. public diplomacy, but it's a problem for China, a problem for Russia. All the biggest players are expected to deliver something for domestic political agendas as well as international ones.

VI: Let's discuss the last four years and the impact of the Trump administration’s public diplomacy. Trump’s “Make America Great” mantra sent the message that the U.S. would follow its own interests regardless of international obligations and relationships. What has been the impact of that message?

Nick Cull: Well, my feeling is that you don't judge world opinion by reading a couple of editorials, or comment pieces in The Guardian. There are annual polls that are done, detailed pieces of social science. I'm thinking of the Ipsos Anholt Index, I’m thinking of Pew, I'm thinking of the Soft Power 30 report that Portland Communications puts out. If you look at these, the first thing you see is solid evidence that the United States has slipped. Under Obama, it was generally number one, and evidence that came out last week from IPSOS polls taken this summer put the United States at number 10. Earlier it had been number seven.

The slip happened during the election in 2016. It wasn't actually the election of Trump that started a major slip in international opinion towards the U.S. It was the spectacle of the election and the counterproductive partisanship as the sides go at each other like a Punch and Judy show.

VI: So the global community was reacting to apparent failures of American democracy?

Nick Cull: Yes. If you ask people, "Here are five factors, what do you admire in the United States?" People admire U.S. culture, people admire U.S. products, more than anybody else's products, people admire the U.S. as a place of investment, and a place for migration. But the one thing in 2016 that slipped the most was American politics. 

Now, Americans like to think their system of government is the most admired in the world. This is no longer the case. Nobody is admiring Chinese or Russian politics either, which is good news, but pretty much everybody admires Canadian, Swiss, Swedish, German and Australian governance more than the United States. In that category, the U.S. is number 18. 

This year, the slip to number 10 has been powered not just by a decline in the admiration of American politics, it's been joined by a decline in admiration of American people. This is down to the absurdities of the coronavirus behavior. At the time the polls were taken in June-July, it was already obvious that Americans considered themselves too “free” to follow directives to wear masks. I think that the ISPOS Anholt results suggest that many countries in the world have been appalled by the refusal of Americans to take care of each other’s public health. 

It's really significant that we're switching from just criticism of American politics to criticism of American people. If Americans are thought to be obnoxious to each other, then they are unlikely to be welcoming to a foreigner. Unless this sentiment is reversed you could then see the United States rejected as a tourist destination. I don't want to come to the United States and be condescended to by an obnoxious American. I can go someplace else - I'll go to Canada instead. That's what you're going to run into. I think it's very alarming that opinions about the American people have declined.

The U.S. is still number 10, but it should be better. It will bounce back, I think, with a Biden administration, but I would doubt that the U.S. will go back immediately to number 1.

VI: What about the social unrest that recently took place in the United States? After George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter protests in the streets, that resonated around the world.

Nick Cull: I think that some of that resonates positively. We know that during the ‘60s the Civil Rights movement was very inspirational to the world and the USIA learned to integrate Dr. King into their public diplomacy. It's more of a problem when the federal government is not seen as a partner in civil rights development. This is something the Biden administration has to address very quickly, very carefully. He has to be seen as a partner in American civil rights progress. I suspect that he will position himself like that. It was impossible for Trump to play it positively and the behavior of counter-demonstrators was very scary to people in the world. This is a significant factor as to why people are feeling that Americans won't be hospitable to them. It's a very strong and surprising finding.

VI: China and Russia use public diplomacy as a kind of information warfare. Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig coined the term sharp power that critiques democracies and causes people to be skeptical of the rhetoric disseminated by the United States. Can you explain how sharp power counters well-intentioned public diplomacy?

Nick Cull: The way I see it, sharp power is the way in which states try and make another state reputationally insecure. You create and spread rumors about that place, you point a finger at their faults. So sharp power is really the missing arm on the square, if you like. It's the mechanism being used by revisionist states to widen and exploit reputational insecurities.

A constant refrain of the Russians is, "Hey, everyone's corrupt. Sure, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else." Alliances don't really mean anything. No government is honest with its people, that kind of position. During the Cold War the Russians were making war on American ideas - it was an ideological battle. Right now, Russia is making war on the idea of truth. Their ambition is to instill distrust of any media. Why waste your time with the media? Some of the same is true in China.

If you work for the strongest man in the room why bother putting together an argument because the strength of the strongest man in the room is the only argument you need. If the world is insecure, then people look to the strongest guy in the room. For Russia, it's best interest is in promoting uncertainty, insecurity and then Putin's position is enhanced, Xi's position is enhanced. It's all part of the same mindset.

VI: In your recent book Global Engagement in the Digital Age you go into how social media, chat rooms, troll farms and bots are used to disseminate disinformation and distrust. So, are these perfect tools for sharp power?

Nick Cull: Absolutely. It's quite sad that the technologies we thought were going to make things better, turned out to be making things worse. One of the ways I think about it as a historian is that every time that a new technology becomes available, we go through a phase of collective learning and collective rebalancing. You could think of it as like a new virus where we don't have the antibodies. In fact, I would tie a crisis moment in international relations to the imbalance that comes from a new media technology.

The problem is that people being people, we think of the geography of conflicts and the personalities of conflict more than we think of the technology causing the conflict. What you could call the war of popular press or war of the nationalist popular press, people prefer to call World War I. What we could call the war of radio and newsreel, people prefer to call World War II. What we could call the war of national television, people prefer to call the Cold War. Yet politicians vying for audiences using these technologies made those three crises much worse.

You could also see how politicians and populations learning to cope with those technologies in the long run helped to rebuild the world. Communications technology can be part of the solution, can bring people together, can be part of a collective partnership turned to make the world a better place. The faster we can re-establish standards and see a shared interest in creating stable communications in the world, the better, but it has to work for everybody. You can't expect somebody to surrender unilaterally.

One of the things that I'm thinking about with all this material is the idea that I call information disarmament. You can open any newspaper and find a pundit saying, "Information has been weaponized," but we know from the physical world that when something is weaponized and you don't like it, you have a process to limit it. This is the case with information. Now is the time for an information disarmament process. You might ask, when has that ever worked in the past?

It turns out, this was part of what the Reagan administration was doing during the 1980s. There was a series of negotiations with the Russians that took the heat out of mutual representations and set up a hotline just for dealing with errors in the media. So long as it was believed that Russia was somehow an equivalent, asymmetrical power in the world this process worked. I think with the adversaries that we see as most threatening right now, with China and again with Russia, we need to have this kind of dialogue to talk about ways of taking the heat out of the relationship and using conventional diplomacy to talk about the media. It's a fallacy that a media problem needs a media solution.

Much as I think it might impinge on my work, sometimes what you need is two diplomats getting together behind closed doors and saying, "What are we going to do about this problem?" It's the way that things were done in the 1650s and I believe there is a place for this kind of direct dialogue today. 

VI: Let’s look at the prospects for improved international dialogue. As the Biden-Harris administration takes over they will inherit institutions and agencies that have been transformed during the Trump era. One is the U.S. Agency for Global Media where Trump has installed Michael Pack as director. Pack has extreme partisan views and has fired senior staff deemed at odds with Trump’s view of the world.

Nick Cull: Pack is not planning to go. He sees himself as having been appointed for a four-year term and I think he's going to attempt to stay in control even though there's a change of administration. How that's going to work, I don't know. There's a lawsuit to block his attempt to politicize control of Voice of America and other media outlets. I think it's very dangerous and goes against the accumulated history of U.S Global Media. 

There are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to government supported media. There is the BBC model where there is a media firewall, where journalists have complete credibility and where the government stays well away. You find the same model at Deutsche Welle. Then there is a model of media in a dictatorship where the government can micromanage information. This is the model that you use to see at Radio Moscow, the model of Radio Beijing, the model of Radio Pyongyang.

Intervening in journalists’ politics is a step away from credibility. I don't see how that can possibly be acceptable in a competitive international environment. I think it endangers the reputation of the media and it endangers the reputation of the country. It makes the country look like a meddling, politically interventionist country that doesn't trust the truth. The truth must always be America's ally, otherwise it needs to change the facts. If the truth is harmful to the United States it needs to address that situation, not to cover it up.

With this in mind, I’m delighted that the judge just has ruled to protect the freedom of VOA journalists, but we need to pay attention to this going forward.

VI: What kind of worldwide penetration do the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Middle East Broadcasting Network - agencies that are trying to get a message out to people around the world - have? Who is listening?

Nick Cull: The numbers are significant. especially during a crisis. You have standard listening figures, people who will listen week-after-week, and then you have listening figures during an emergency. Of course, when an emergency happens, you can't just set up a service in that language. You need to have ongoing media provisions for that place in that language. In some places, U.S. supported media has been absolutely critical for enabling a political situation to be visible to the world. I can think of one recent situation where the fact that Radio Free Europe was able to live-stream from this particular location meant that the press couldn't be repressed, that a level of global scrutiny was possible. People in the country could see what was going on. It was all being live-streamed and that had tremendous, tremendous significance for that particular situation. Excuse my lack of geographical specificity, but I don’t want to name names without permission or set up a target for hostile parties.  

VI: Is it important to have a government supported global media infrastructure in place that is useful in crisis situations?

Nick Cull: I think there are two things. There is your everyday reach, everyday media, your daily dose, if you like, and then there are emergency measures. You need both. The United States Agency for Global Media is highly significant in both. There are some stories that just don't get covered by commercial media, especially in the United States.  Look at the stories that USAGM has won prizes for this year, this amazing series they did on child marriage. It's unlikely that a commercial broadcast would've done an eight-part series on child marriage, but Voice of America did it and it was a terrific, amazing, thought-provoking effort. Maybe CNN would give Christiane Amanpour 50 minutes punctuated by insurance ads to talk about that but they're not going to give her an eight-part series.

That's what it takes to show this problem is all over the world, including in the United States by the way. They looked at mistreatment of children within American religious cults and rightly this work won a major prize. To me, public diplomacy is not just for crises. It goes right back to the American misunderstanding of public diplomacy, it’s not just for when something is wrong, it needs to be part of the regular engagement with the world, a dialogue with the world. What would you think of somebody who only spoke to their neighbor when the house was on fire or when there's ten feet of snow in the driveway?

You need to maintain relationships to be a part of a global dialogue, to listen as well as to speak. When the United States is able to do that, things go so much better.

VI: You spoke earlier about President-elect Biden being familiar with the advantages of global diplomacy. Do you think public diplomacy will increase and help America’s re-engagement with the global community?

Nick Cull: Yes. I think that the subject is not new to him. It isn't always great when somebody comes in and thinks they know what they're doing. I felt that John Kerry was not the best Secretary of State in public diplomacy terms. He seemed very caught up in the way things were done in the ‘50s. I liked Secretary Hillary Clinton's approach and so we'll see. The big point right now is to understand this business of how networked communications works.  The world does not need another prima donna. It doesn't need to be lectured to. What it needs is dialogue, what it needs is a facilitated conversation and a general movement away from, "What I can say?" towards, "Who can I empower?" It's not rocket science.

What worries me is that the Obama administration had this thing about pushing messages out. The people who were in senior positions in the Obama years have come of age in the ‘90s. They were still thinking that all media is a form of broadcasting. They weren’t thinking of it in terms of relationships. They wanted to push a message out and they wanted to win. If you want to win in a relationship, that is a definition of psychosis. That's what people voted against in the 2020 election, somebody who wants to win in his relationships.

The United States cannot behave that way internationally. It'll turn everyone off. It has to be an appropriate strategy and appropriate approach for a networked and relational world.

VI: Nick, I think those are good thoughts to end on. Let’s hope the incoming administration understands what effective public diplomacy is and how it can be implemented.

Nick Cull: I hope so. The bottomline is that they need to spend money on it and they need to listen. They need to really listen, not to what they think America is but they need to understand what the world wants America to be, and the issues with which the United States has to engage. I am encouraged that Biden wants to go straight back into the Paris Climate Accord. That's the sort of thing that we need. What we don't need is America rolling up like in the movie Independence Day, imagining that the whole world is sitting around waiting to be told what to do. That would not go down well. It would not really be appropriate in the changed world’s circumstances.

Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and was the Founding Director of the Master’s Program in Public Diplomacy at USC.  He is a Faculty Fellow of both the Center on Communication Leadership and the Center on Public Diplomacy. His research and teaching focus on the role of public engagement in foreign policy. An acknowledged pioneer in Public Diplomacy teaching and research and its best-known historian, he is the author of many books and articles including The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge, 2008); The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001 (Palgrave, 2012) and Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (Polity, 2019)