Public diplomacy

Cornelia Meyer, arabnews.com, January 26, 2019 Image from article, with caption: French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AFP) The Treaty of Aachen signed on Jan. 22 by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has little day-to-day practical relevance — but considerable historic and political significance. On the same day 56 years before, two titans of postwar Europe, French President Charles de Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, signed the Elysee Treaty. It covered the areas of defense, education and youth relations and was designed to turn centuries of rivalry between France and Germany into peaceful coexistence. This was probably one of the most successful examples of public diplomacy [JB emphasis]. Generations of young French and German students went on exchange programs to each other’s countries. Indeed, if you now ask educated German or French citizens about their neighbors, their feelings are warm in memory of ..

Bola A. Akinterinwa [JB -- see], thisdaylive.com Akinterinwa image from Excerpt: The current global World Order, put in place by the Western World, is gradually giving way to a new one that is yet to be clearly delineated in terms of principles and rules. The leading superpower status of the United States, for instance, is particularly now under threat to the extent that President Donald Trump now has to ensure ‘America First’ through a manu militari foreign policy. As Donald Trump has brought private business mentality to public diplomacy [JB emphasis] in such a way that he is always bastardising the principle of sanctity of agreements, and thus strengthening opposition to whatever the United States represents in international relations, other countries are also emphasising their own order of precedence: Russia first, China first, France first, etc. ...

publicdiplomacycouncil.org, January 25, 2019 Sometimes old speeches help shine light on current issues. From twenty years ago, here are some words for today’s Public Diplomacy. [JB emphasis] 2015 portrait of Rep. Chris Smith, in the conference room of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.On October 4, 1999, a few days after the U.S. Information Agency became part of the Department of State, Representative Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey entered remarks on Public Diplomacy [JB emphasis] in the Congressional Record. So quickly had USIA’s front office and its Congressional relations shop closed that his tribute to USIA, “Milestone of U.S. Foreign Relations and Diplomacy,” was never communicated to embassies and consulates. His remarks concluded with a discussion of guiding principles for U.S. Public Diplomacy. Almost twenty years later, Public Diplomacy has been reshaped by the war on terrorism, by the internet revolution, and by the new disinformation. We might now want to update a..

robertalbro.com Albro image from Inauthenticity and the Tweet Tweet of Digital Diplomacy Most often associated with Alec Ross’s stint at the State Department as Senior Advisor for Innovation, diplomacy’s rush to better leverage the advantages of social media and mobile technologies by investing in ediplomacy and PD 2.0 is no secret. On his first day as new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs last February, Richard Stengel made his position clear: social media are “transformational tools” and the State Department needs to move toward a “digital-first strategy.” Ambassadors now tweet regularly. Out of a desire to “make foreign policy less foreign,” even Secretary of State John Kerry tweets. And the State Department is now running what a 2012 Brookings report described as a “global media empire.” But if digital diplomats extoll the reach and connectivity offered by social media platforms, less attention is given to what they think these advantages mean in practice, tha..

Paul Maryniak, ahwatukee.com La Petite Provence appears at various food truck rodeos and special events throughout the East Valley. Special to AFN With all the time she spends in the kitchen of her Ahwatukee home making more French dishes and pastries, it’s a miracle that Eve Visconti gets out at all. But the fact is, she does quite a bit on the weekends – tooling around to various places in the East Valley in the only all-French food truck in Arizona.She doesn’t just sell her crepes, quiches, lasagna and other items – along, of course, with a seemingly limitless variety of French pastries – from her specially designed truck with the bold moniker “La Petite Provence.” She also caters private gatherings big and small – most recently a 14-course gourmet Christmas dinner for 25 and, next month, 1,000 people for a Mesa church – and even makes dishes she delivers or arranges for pick-up.And she does it all herself, aided by a young woman who mainly handles paper work and takes orders, sinc..

books.telegraph.co.uk; see also (1) Excerpt: [New book] by Nicholas John Cull [JB - see] Part of the Contemporary Political Communication series Information Format: Paperback / softback Pages: 272 pages Publisher: Polity Press Publication Date: 08/03/2019 Category: Public opinion & polls ISBN: 9780745691206

Michael Edward Walsh, uscpublicdiplomacy.org uncaptioned image from article The field of public diplomacy [JB emphasis] should make greater use of the quantitative measures that have been developed by media critics to explore the representation of disadvantaged groups in societies. These qualitative measures not only provide public diplomacy practitioners with analytical tools for describing the representation of disadvantaged groups in a society, or between societies. They also provide public diplomacy practitioners with interactive engagement tools for raising foreign publics’ consciousness about structural violence in their own societies.Consider the Bechdel-Wallace Test. This test serves as a “cultural barometer” of the extent to which women are represented in fictional works. It simply asks whether there are at least two women who talk to one another about something besides a man. This quantitative measure not only provides an analytical tool for describing the extent to which wom..

intpolicydigest.org Excerpt: uncaptioned Bolton image from articleWhite House National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is back in the saddle after news reports broke the stories that he asked Pentagon officials to develop possible military strikes against Iran following a mortar attack by an Iranian-backed group on a massive diplomatic compound that houses the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in September 2018. Bolton is an Iran hawk who has promoted striking Iran over the years. His ultimate goal is regime change in Iran. He promotes the view that attacking Iran will benefit the U.S. non-proliferation goals, re-install a pro-American regime in Iran, as well as ensure its regional allies about America’s security commitment in the region. ... Bolton seems obsessed with changing Iran’s current political landscape and yet contradicts himself by claiming that Washington is not seeking regime change in Iran. Bolton’s request to strike Iran militarily is not new nor surprising. In 2009, Bolton wrote a..

breitbart.com image fromExcerpt: NewsGuard is a web browser extension app which has recently become a default extension in Microsoft’s mobile edge browser. Advised by individuals such as Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security for the George W. Bush administration; Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy [JB emphasis] for the Obama administration; and Don Baer, the chairman of Burson, Cohn & Wolfe and former White House Communications Director for the Clinton administration; Newsguard aims to apply rankings of “trustworthiness” to individual news websites in an attempt to fight “fake news.”

Public Diplomacy and Propaganda: Their Differences (2008) John Brown, from American Diplomacy (original article has evidently changed site) Is “public diplomacy” just a nice way of saying “propaganda”? There are common elements, but, this essay argues, there are also some very important differences. – Ed.Not long after 9/11, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, in a Washington Post article, “Get the Message Out” (October 28, 2001) asked a key question regarding the so-called “war on terror”: How could a mass murderer who publicly praised the terrorists of Sept. 11 be winning the hearts and minds of anyone? How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world's leading communications society?What was needed to offset terrorists, Holbrooke wrote, was “public diplomacy, or public affairs, or psychological warfare, or – if you really want to be blunt – propaganda.” Holbrooke is not the first person to equate public diplomacy [1] with propaganda [2]. Some public diplomac..