Putting faith in public diplomacy
G. K. Chesterton once called the U.S. the “nation with the soul of a church.” The Pakistanis now find us the nation with the soul of a Predator drone. The French and Germans called; they just want their privacy back. Meanwhile, Americans don’t know what or whom to believe about their country’s misconduct in the world.
Of course, foreign affairs has always been the least democratic field of national government—the least transparent and the most immune to popular pressure. Not that people haven’t tried to grow U.S. statecraft from the grassroots. Early-20th-century educators and social reformers envisioned a nationwide network of local “social centers” where citizens could deliberate, among other things, their nation’s role in the world. World War I rapidly transformed existing social centers into vehicles for anti-German and pro-American propaganda. The passage of the National Security Act of 1947—which created the Department of Defense, the CIA, and Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency—similarly betrayed the values conflict between efficient execution of war and civilian control of the military.
To be sure, the national security state was accompanied by new attention to “public diplomacy,” as historian Justin Hart puts it. The Cold War “public” was never intended to be the source of superpower decision-making, however. The American people instead would be subject to all the latest advances in state manipulation of majority sentiment.
