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June
19, 2003
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June
19, 2003
A Former Foreign Service
Officer on the Future of Diplomacy in the Age of Bush
A
Serious Conversation
By MARK JACOBS
It was an SRO crowd in the huge, stark lecture
hall at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. The UCAD campus
is like the Senegalese capital itself--most of the wealth you
see is human. There were no windows in the lecture hall, and
the doors were closed to block the sounds of hallway traffic.
It was before noon, but the heat was intense in the big, airless
room. It seemed not to matter. You can tell when students listen;
you can tell when they care. The questions they asked, in English--their
third language, after Wolof and French--removed any doubt I might
have had. "You've talked about diversity in American writing,
but aren't there things that American writers share? What do
they have in common?"
I was in Senegal in connection with a
collection of essays published by the State Department. At the
end of the session at UCAD, students mobbed me. Everyone who
had a copy of Writers
on America wanted it signed. Those who didn't have a copy
asked me to sign their notebooks, or even loose pieces of paper.
The questions about writing, and about the United States, did
not quit coming until I got into a car and left campus.
It was an extraordinary experience. The
intellectual curiosity, the hunger for contact, the high spirits
and humor of several hundred students would be invigorating anywhere,
at any time. In a 96%-Muslim country in West Africa, in the wake
of a U.S. war in Iraq that just about all of them opposed, it
seemed to me nothing short of amazing. Despite an unpopular foreign
policy, despite a near universal perception of American heavy-handedness,
people still want to talk. It's too bad that Americans seem incapable
of carrying on a serious conversation.
In his rich and moving new book, Terror
and Liberalism, Paul Berman takes note of President Bush's
inability to make himself understood when he speaks to the world.
The communication gap is more than a question of oblique syntax.
Bush's ideological shell, Berman points out, works both ways:
political discourse outside his conservative frame of reference
doesn't penetrate, and when he tries to articulate the motivation
for his foreign policy his vocabulary is inadequate. There's
nothing wrong with evoking words like freedom and democracy,
but without the right verbs they come off sounding like slogans.
Who's not for freedom and democracy? The result is an imbalance
in the projection of U.S. power. Militarily we are unchallengeable,
except through terror's asymmetric tactics. In terms of ideas,
though, right now we are scarcely engaged.
Berman talks about the importance of
what he calls a "war of ideas" to address the deficit.
Although the term is problematic, the need he identifies is not.
Actors such as the unions, which kept up a vigorous international
presence during the Cold War, may not be equipped to respond
this time around. Of the likely possible players Berman mentions,
wealthy American foundations are the most novel and the most
promising.
Berman's sad but safe assumption is that,
whoever else may get involved, the U.S. government won't be mounting
much of an effort in the war of ideas. Since the September 11th
attacks, a torrent of talk has been loosed on the subject of
public diplomacy, an ungainly term to describe the State Department's
public outreach work. Edward R. Murrow's classic formulation,
"telling America's story to the world, warts and all,"
is still a useful evocation of the work despite the fact that
both the story and the telling of it have become more complicated
since the 1950s. Is the federal government attempting to tell
America's story--more precisely, America's stories--today?
The preponderance of what gets labeled
as public diplomacy is in fact press and information work, and
the State Department does an unimpeachable job of communicating
U.S. policy messages around the world. At another extreme, State
makes a minuscule attempt to project American culture with enterprises
like the Jazz Ambassadors, a handful of groups that tour under
State Department auspices to countries with limited exposure
to American culture. Such so-called cultural diplomacy is the
thinnest vestige of more muscular attempts to convey American
values and influence foreign public opinion through the arts
in the early years of the Cold War. Today, between press work
and State's risible cultural effort lies a big hole, into which
Berman's war of ideas fits nicely.
So who gets to tell our stories? Who
should be holding that serious conversation about ideas with
foreign audiences? Who has the right, and the credibility, to
speak for our fractious and ebullient polity? Not the neocons.
Their red-meat rhetoric falls on deaf ears outside the U.S. Its
appeal is distinctly narrow. And not the traditional left, either.
The left's ethic of vegan virtue scarcely qualifies as politics;
its horror of dirty hands represents an aesthetic choice more
than a coherent political alternative. The gap between the conservatives'
unappealing triumphalism and the reactionary left's "I'd
rather not" is as big as the one between State's press work
and its cultural diplomacy.
Berman calls for "a new radicalism"
to provide the voices we need to talk with the world. Well, maybe.
And inshallah. More likely than any sort of radical politics,
and more likely to succeed with foreign audiences, is the emergence
of what could be called a new progressive center. This is the
neighborhood where the Democratic Party would hang out, if there
were any intellectual force left in the party. Absent such force,
the kind of decentralized, diffuse effort Berman evokes--foundations
and NGOs and human rights organizations--a network looser, even
than Al Qaeda's, holds the most hope for America to pick up its
conversation with the world.
If we're going to talk, what shall our
medium be? Technology's smooth appeal makes the case easy for
radio and television, and certainly efforts like Radio Sawa have
their place, and it's an important place. At the same time, the
limits of technology were on painful display in State's abortive
attempt to convey "shared values" through the placement
of slick TV spots, which proved nearly unplaceable in the Muslim
countries that were their target.
The conversation we need to have will
not be an easy one to sustain. It calls for complete sentences,
coherent paragraphs, thoughts that connect one to the next. In
that kind of conversation, in a war of ideas, books may still
be the most potent weapon we have. Books, libraries, and American
speakers will do more to advance the conversation than radio
or television or the Internet.
I share Berman's doubts about the U.S.
government's ability to make a serious contribution to that conversation,
but it's still worth agitating for one. Is it unrealistic to
think that the Bush administration would endorse and fund a major
push by American thinkers, American ideas, whose convictions
went beyond neocon narrowness? Probably. Still, Nixon did go
to China. Maybe someone who works for the President will recognize
the need for a serious conversation and recognize, at the same
time, that neoconservative ideas simply won't play.
Bush is frequently portrayed as something
of a risk taker. Maybe someone who works for him will remind
him that political capital is like Monopoly money--it only spends
while you're playing the game. At this point, it seems deadly
clear that it is in the national interest to give a satisfactory
answer to the Senegalese university student who asked me: "I
understand what you've said about your national diversity. Now
tell me: what is that Americans have in common?"
Mark Jacobs
is a writer and former foreign service officer. His fourth book,
a novel called A Handful of Kings, is forthcoming from
Simon and Schuster. His other books include A Cast of Spaniards
(Talisman House, 1994); Stone
Cowboy, (Soho Press, 1997); and The
Liberation of Little Heaven, (Soho Press, 1998). He currently
plays lead guitar and sings in The Last Chance Garage Band, a
rock & roll band with no commercial potential whatsoever.
He can be reached at: jacobs@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's Features
Wendell
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