Hone U.S. Message Of Freedom


By U.S. Senator John McCain, Orlando Sentinel
June 28, 2007

Article Excerpt

Across the political spectrum, Americans agree that the war on terror is not just a military struggle, but a battle of ideas. From left to right, Americans agree that our efforts to communicate our message are ineffectual, especially compared to the anti-American information operations of much of the Arab media, al-Qaeda and radical Islamists.

Yet if we are all in such firm agreement about the gravity of the problem, why do we have so few ideas about how to solve it? Although there are many facets in the struggle of ideas against violent Islamic extremism, there is one critical step we can take right now to improve our position. If elected president, I would establish a single, independent agency responsible for all of America's public diplomacy. And that agency would report directly to the president.

During the Cold War, the United States Information Agency, or USIA, was responsible for providing citizens across the globe with accurate information about what America stood for and enabling first-hand exposure to all things American. In 1999, I supported a plan to integrate USIA into the State Department. In theory, this reform was supposed to ensure the coordination of our public diplomacy with our government-to-government relationships. In practice, it made public diplomacy an orphan.

Dismantling an agency dedicated to promoting America and Americans amounted to unilateral disarmament in the struggle of ideas. Communicating our government's views on day-to-day issues is what the State Department does. But communicating the idea of America, our purpose, our past and our future is a different task. We need an independent agency with the sole purpose of getting America's message out in a factual and persuasive manner: managing radio and TV broadcasts to those in need of objective news; establishing American libraries with Internet access throughout the world; sending Americans overseas and sponsoring foreigners' visits to America for educational and cultural exchanges; and creating a professional corps of public-diplomacy experts who speak the local language and whose careers are spent promoting American values, ideas, culture and education. And it should recruit the best and brightest not just from the ranks of the Foreign Service but from business, academia and the media.

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