Public Diplomacy: America Is Job No. 1

The Bush administration is about to launch yet another campaign of public diplomacy, at least its third since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Later this summer, President Bush's public relations guru, Karen Hughes, will ride back into town from her brief sabbatical in Texas armed with a mandate to finally get the selling of America right.

Hughes's task, as the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, is to bridge the yawning divide between Americans' view of the world and that held by foreigners. Her goal is to convince people overseas of the inherent merit of the U.S. point of view on a range of international issues. But what if the problem is not that the world is out of sync with America, but that the United States is out of sync with the world? What if our problems abroad are caused not by Americans' failure to communicate, but by their failure to learn about and comprehend the world around them? Maybe our national objective should not be to explain the United States to the world, but to explain the world to Americans.

That Americans and foreigners don't see eye to eye on global affairs is hardly news. But the stark contrast in perspectives is nevertheless striking, and it is persistent. A BBC poll taken late last year found that seven in 10 Americans thought the United States was having a positive influence around the world. But pluralities in the 21 other countries surveyed saw American influence as mostly negative. These results confirmed a spring 2004 report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which found that an overwhelming majority of Americans thought Washington took the interests of other nations into account when making U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, overwhelming majorities in France, Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Russia, and Turkey thought Washington acted unilaterally.

Americans and Europeans also hold contrasting views on substantive international issues.

Overwhelming majorities of the French and the Germans, for instance, believe that the West should provide Iran with economic incentives to keep that country from acquiring nuclear weapons, according to a 2004 German Marshall Fund poll. Only a slim majority of Americans, however, agree. Even more telling, nearly one in three Americans believe that the West should threaten Tehran with military action to curb its nuclear ambitions. Only one in eight Frenchmen and one in 16 Germans support such an approach.

Similarly, Americans differ with much of the rest of the world on how to deal with China. While a plurality of Americans believe that China's influence around the globe is mainly negative, a plurality or majority of people in 15 of 22 nations surveyed by the BBC saw Beijing's role as positive. And while Americans were evenly divided about whether China's emergence as an economic powerhouse was good or bad, people in 13 of the 22 countries polled saw China's entry into world markets more positively.

Americans are similarly at odds with foreigners over U.S. responsibility for global poverty. In 2003, Pew found that a plurality of Americans believed that U.S. actions abroad either lessened the gap between rich and poor around the world or had no effect. But majorities in 24 of the 43 other nations Pew surveyed that year thought U.S. actions actually worsened global income disparities.

These are not nuanced differences on trivial matters. They reflect fundamentally contrasting perspectives on critical issues. The Bush administration's response has been to try to persuade others to embrace the American point of view through more-aggressive public diplomacy. The failure of this endeavor to date has led, in typical Madison Avenue style, to repeated efforts to recast the marketing campaign. But what if the problem lies not with the message, and not with those for whom the message is intended, but, at least in part, with those sending the message?

Americans see the world through red-white-and-blue glasses. Such an outlook could be chalked up to hubris. But it may also simply reflect a lack of understanding. When it comes to international affairs, many Americans just aren't paying as much attention as people in other lands.

Despite the tumult of the last few years, the portion of the American public that watches TV news on a typical day, reads the newspaper, or listens to radio news decreased significantly from 1994 to 2004, according to Pew.

Thanks to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war in Iraq, there's been a recent up-tick in the numbers of Americans who say they closely follow international news most of the time, and not just during a crisis.

But the daily carnage in Iraq and the ups and downs of the war on terror absorb nearly all of that renewed interest in current events. Evening TV news segments or newspaper features that portray the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, the turmoil in Haiti, or the political instability in Venezuela – stories that do not immediately affect Americans or the United States – draw little public attention.

Americans also fare poorly compared with Europeans both in following the news and in understanding it, according to a 1994 survey by Pew's predecessor, the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. No identical survey has been done since the 1994 study, but in that study, Americans were less likely than the Germans or the British to have read a newspaper the day before the survey was taken and were less likely than the Germans, the Italians, or the British to have listened to television news.

And when asked five current-events questions based on items then in the news, Americans scored next to last among the eight nationalities polled, ahead only of the Spanish. More disturbingly, young Americans trailed British, Spanish, Italian, and German members of their generation in reading a newspaper and were the group least likely to understand international news. That inattentive and uninformed generation of Americans is now 10 years older, and it would appear, based on the more recent Pew survey, that they are even less engaged with the world today than they were a decade ago.

This relative lack of interest in anything more than headline-grabbing international news items may partly explain why so many Americans have a perspective on the U.S. role in the world and on specific global issues that is so much at odds with the sentiments held by many foreigners.

Moreover, Americans' factual misunderstanding of current events may also help explain why they so often hold what is, in fact, a distorted view of their country's worldly burdens.

The U.S. public, for example, grossly overestimates how many of its tax dollars are spent on foreign aid. Seven in 10 Americans think that more than 3 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign economic and humanitarian assistance, according to a 2005 survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. In fact, foreign aid accounted for less than 1 percent of the 2005 federal budget.

Finally, and possibly most important, Americans' failure to inform themselves about the world around them has political impact at home.

In the run-up to the presidential election last year, Pew found that half of the voters they surveyed who said they were certain to vote for President Bush thought the United States was as respected abroad as much as – or even more than – it was in the past. They held that belief despite two years of steady and widely publicized international polling results from a variety of organizations showing just the opposite. Maybe that's why John Kerry's campaign promise to restore America's good name abroad fell on so many deaf ears.

Similarly, surveys done by the University of Maryland program in the months immediately before the 2004 voting found that a large majority of Bush supporters believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for building them, and that numerous post-Iraq war U.S. government inquiries had said so. The fact that investigators had found no Iraqi WMD program somehow hadn't penetrated the consciousness of many voters, even though Americans were supposedly paying more attention to Iraq-related news.

In addition, a large majority of Bush supporters believed that Iraq had provided substantial support to Al Qaeda, that clear evidence of this support had been found, and that the widely respected and independent 9/11 commission had reached this conclusion. The fact that none of this was true had not registered.

It also seems clear that while the rest of the world vilified Bush foreign policy as American unilateralism, many U.S. voters thought that their government was acting multilaterally. Before the 2004 election, only three in 10 Bush supporters believed that the majority of people in the world opposed the Iraq war, at a time when Gallup, Pew, and an ad hoc coalition of international newspaper polls were all reporting widespread condemnation of the conflict. A majority of Bush supporters also thought that most people in the Islamic world favored U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism, despite widespread press coverage of opposition to such American endeavors in most Islamic societies.

Americans and non-Americans are like two ships passing in the night: They may be on the same ocean, but Americans seem not to realize that the other vessel exists, let alone that it is headed in another direction.

Karen Hughes's job will be to bring those ships closer together. It is a formidable challenge. Her task could be much easier if Americans would meet foreigners halfway, by better understanding and informing themselves about the world around them.

But the public can't follow international news if such information gets crowded out by Michael Jackson stories. Television and newspapers need to explain the world better to their viewers and readers.

A lifelong interest in the world can start in the classroom. But how many American children read a newspaper every day as part of their curriculum? For a quarter or 50 cents, it is still the cheapest education in the world.

Finally, parents who follow world news and discuss it with their children at the dinner table are still providing the next generation with the best possible preparation for the global society they will live in.

Americans' different take on the world has often been attributed to their unique history, to the relative geographic isolation of the United States, even to the arrogance of a superpower. As such, it may be unavoidable. But, to the extent the out-of-step "American perspective" on the world is caused by indifference and ignorance, it is something that is correctable, and it is worth correcting.