By John Brown, Huffington Post, May 25, 2011
[JB 3/9/2019: Today, the State Department does not have an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (as it did in the past) — not even an “acting one.”]
Public diplomacy — defined by the State Department as “engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences” — has become increasingly passé among American officials, scholars, and NGOs as a term and activity used to define how America should communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, the governments of other countries — notably China and India — are enthusiastically embracing public diplomacy as a new and essential part of their foreign policy. Who’s the winner in such a situation — the USA or the rest of the world? Hard to say.I. Public Diplomacy: Passé for the U.S.?Public diplomacy was coined by Dean Edmund Gullion and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in the mid-1960’s. He and his colleagues wanted to find a way to characterize the many informational,..