Fixing a Communications Deficit, by Bill Wanlund
When Robert Gates was Secretary of Defense, he famously made the point that the military bands under his command had more musicians than the State Department had diplomats. And he wasn’t trash talking his Cabinet colleagues. But more about that later.
Gates’s remark was more of a parable, the point of which being that presidential administrations are too ready to seek military solutions to resolve international conflicts than diplomatic ones. In his 2020 book, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World, Gates discusses the tragic, 18-year U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the opening decades of this century – including 2006-11, when he was Defense Secretary, first under President George W. Bush and then under Barak Obama. He observed that, “I believe we — and the Afghans — would have been better served had our military departed in 2002 and had thereafter relied on non-military instruments of national power."
It's a theme Gates, now out of government, continues to emphasize, and he believes the stakes are higher today, as he told an Oct. 31 PDCA webinar. “I don’t think we have faced more challenges in many, many decades [than we do now],” he said. “We face an alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, all with the same narrative: That the West and the U.S. are in decline. This is their moment, and they want to change the international order to suit their interests.”
“We have not been nearly aggressive enough in carrying our message [about human rights and democracy] either to citizens in Russia or in China,” he continued. “Look how aggressive the Russians have been with their disinformation programs here in the U.S.; probably the Chinese as well. We don’t need to do disinformation; we differentiate ourselves from Russia and China” by staying truthful.
Asked by webinar moderator [and PDCA member] Mike McCarry how American public diplomacy should respond to these challenges, Gates replied that we need “a strategy, coherent coordination, and additional resources.” He pointed out that the U.S. has “19 departments of government and 48 agencies” with international communications responsibilities – and “no evidence of coordination.”
To achieve coherency, he warned, will take some bureaucratic heavy lifting. “There’s no appetite on [Capitol] Hill, or in the administration, for creation of a major new federal agency” in the likeness of the former U.S. Information Agency, Gates said. However, he added, one possibility would be to create within the State Department a coordinator of public diplomacy and strategic communications – something akin to the PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Program for Aids Relief] coordinator established in State during the George W. Bush Administration. That person controlled the AIDS budgets of all the agencies, Gates said, and was successful despite the various constituencies represented. Each agency has a part of it, but the message will be clear and consistent.
The State Department is the logical home for such an office, he went on, because it’s where educational and cultural exchanges and other PD functions are housed. However, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs wouldn’t have the necessary juice outside the State Department. We need an independent authority with the White House’s blessing: “When you have control of their personnel and their budgets,” he said, “their hearts and minds will follow.”
Former Senator Gordon Humphrey [R-NH], a PDCA member, asked the key question: “How can we get the President or head of the National Security Council or the Secretary of State to focus on this communications deficiency?” Gates admitted, “I don’t have the answer. I had hoped through the report [the Gates Global Policy Center] did last December and the op-ed in The Washington Post [on April 16], we could get them to understand the need for this approach. The irony is, the more complicated the world becomes, and the more necessary this effort is, the harder it is to get the attention of these two or three people.”
PDCA members Ambassador Greta Morris and Matthew Wallin both asked about another challenge U.S. PD faces: Defending democracy in times of our own country’s severe social discord.
“Start by acknowledging our own divisions,” Gates said. “No one is more critical of the United States than people in the United States. America’s founders established principles that we will always aspire to but will fall short of. We’ve always recognized our shortcomings, and no country has worked harder to overcome those shortcomings and to achieve our aspirations.”
Oh, yeah – about those military bands and diplomats: First, Secretary Gates never said it – never, that is, without crediting the person who said it to him in the first place: Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State in the G.W. Bush Administration, as Gates mentioned in our webinar. Second, it wasn’t true: In 2016 those pesky nitpickers at Politifact looked into it and found there were about 8100 FSOs at State vs. some 6500 military band members. [Now, for what it’s worth, bear in mind that, in its report, Polifact managed to misspell the surname of John Philip Sousa, the March King himself. Just sayin’.]
Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears in the PDCA Weekly Update and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address topics of interest to PDCA members.