In 1946, Senator J. William Fulbright had a simple idea: send Americans abroad, bring the world to America, and you will never need to explain yourself with a gun. Years later, the country that built this idea is burning it down.

Public diplomacy is often confused with propaganda. However, it is the government’s organized efforts aimed at communicating directly with the foreign public outside the conventional state-to-state diplomacy. Its institutions include educational exchange programs, cultural engagement initiatives, and international broadcasting. To put it simply, it is to inform and influence the opinions of a foreign audience in order to shape the international environment that is conducive to the country’s foreign policy interests.

The United States understood this aspect of diplomacy earlier and more systematically than any other country at the time. During the Cold War, Washington recognized that its contest with the Soviet Union was fundamentally ideological. It was the struggle over the legitimacy of two competing ideological systems rather than a conventional rivalry between two military blocs. So, programs such as Fulbright exchanges, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the United States Information Agency were developed to inform the foreign public about American life and culture and how it is better than any other system out there in the world.

The acts were not simply a display of cultural philanthropy, but they were the strategic instruments designed to give the foreign public an exposure to American values, lifestyle, and institutions. The effectiveness of these investments is well documented in the historical record and academia. A substantial proportion of political leaders who guided the democratic shift in Eastern Europe after the Cold War had studied in American universities or participated in the US-sponsored exchange........

© Paradigm Shift