Two Award-Winning Authors Explain Cultural Diplomacy, by Deborah Cohn

PDCA and the Lois Roth Foundation Honor Co-Winners of the Inaugural Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy


On August 19, The Lois Roth Foundation (LRF) and The Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA) celebrated Nicholas John Cull and Pete Millwood as the co-winners of the inaugural Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy. This biennial award honors Dr. Richard T. Arndt — a distinguished former Foreign Service Officer and founder of the Lois Roth Foundation — for his pioneering role in the nascent field of cultural diplomacy research. In addition to his articles and edited volumes, Dick’s influential history The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (2007) has itself become the first resort of many scholars and practitioners in the field of cultural diplomacy.

The Dick Arndt Prize is jointly awarded by the Lois Roth Foundation and the Public Diplomacy Council of America and carries a cash stipend of $1,000. The inaugural jury was co-chaired by Pauline Yang and Dr. Deborah Cohn. The other jury members were Michael Schneider, Cynthia Efird and LRF Board Chair Skyler Arndt-Briggs. The jury was impressed and heartened to see the important work being done on cultural diplomacy during these fraught times. The two co-winners of the award stood out even in a very distinguished cohort, and their books truly reflect the legacy of Dick Arndt’s own scholarship.
 
At the August 19 event, moderated by Prof. Cohn (recording HERE), Nick spoke about his terrific book, Reputational Security: Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World (2024, Polity Press). This brief quote shows how eloquently he depicts the power and importance of cultural diplomacy:

Culture is a terrain upon which nations can meet; it is language they can speak; it is a tool that they can use to build cooperation. Cultural work can help deepen relations with friends as a component of alliance building; it can build trust with neutrals providing a safe space to develop habits of collaboration before the heavy lifting implicit in joint responses to the great policy issues of our age” (p. 138).


Pete, joining virtually from Melbourne, Australia, in turn, discussed his book, Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations (2023, Cambridge Univ. Press), and showed how it speaks to the present moment. The book itself attests to how exchanges “were at the vanguard of negotiating China and America’s transition from their mutual isolation … to the cooperation of the 1970s and the decades that followed” (6). And, as Pete observed in 2024,

“...the lessons of the Sino-American relations of the 1970s—especially societal relations—are more relevant now than they have ever been and may be instructive as to how to maintain a constructive relationship even in the face of fundamental, widening differences in values and interests” (https://hdiplo.org/to/RT25-21).

These are all lessons we would do well to consider today.

Thanks to Ambassador (ret.) Earl Anthony (Tony) Wayne and Karl Stoltz (PDCA co-president) for their remarks, and to Dr. Skyler Arndt-Briggs for speaking about Dick Arndt and the power of his work. Thanks, too, to the USC Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership & Policy, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, GWU Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, and GWU Elliott School of International Affairs for their co-sponsorship of the event, and to Bruce Guthrie for the photo.

Photo caption: Speakers at the event: left to right, PDCA Co-President Karl Stoltz, LRF Chair Skyler Arndt-Briggs, Co-Winners Prof. Pete Millwood (image on screen), Prof. Nick Cull, LRF Board Member Deborah Cohn, and PDCA Board Member Tony Wayne.
Deborah Cohn is Provost Professor, Indiana University Bloomington.