To win without war, State Department reform is necessary

When the US government says it seeks to improve relations with countries like China, it is usually referring to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese state. This is because the US State Department is biased toward relationships with the government rather than the people. And our very form of diplomacy effectively declares the government to be the legitimate representative of the people.

However, some governments do not actually represent the people. They rule without the consent of the ruled, or some variation of the consent embodied in such cultural traditions, such as respect for the hierarchical authority of kings and tribal chieftains. Therefore, when our diplomacy effectively lends legitimacy to totalitarian tyranny, a regime that oppresses its people, we undermine our relationship with the people it targets. We demoralize them. We will intensify efforts to force the regime into a state of futile resignation and a fatalistic acceptance that political change is impossible.

Some presidents have made public diplomacy, or relations with foreigners, a top priority. For example, President Reagan gave moral witness to the suffering of people under communism. He connected with them so they no longer felt alone and without moral support to oppose communist tyranny. He elevated the United States Intelligence Agency (USIA) to the hierarchy of foreign policy agencies. He strengthened the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty with an injection of $2.5 billion ($8.17 billion in today’s dollars). He gave speeches and interviews to people in countries where he was a prisoner of war. He told the truth about communist tyranny and showed his captors that the power of communism was no longer great enough to force the president of the United States to censor it. Public diplomacy and its associated anti-communist politics and ideology provide much of the explanation for why a million people were able to demonstrate in Moscow demanding fundamental political change. It was a war strategy.

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Today, President Trump has a great opportunity to reconnect with those who have suffered under communist tyranny. But whatever efforts he makes will not last as long as he is president unless he and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio reform the State Department.

Those reforms include creating a U.S. Public Diplomacy Service in the state, similar to but not identical to the former U.S. Intelligence Agency (USIA), whose director will include the deputy director of the National Security Council and a statutory observer. needs to take office. Other public diplomacy agencies, such as the Voice of America (VOA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), should also operate under its umbrella. This structure works in the long run because career incentives allow diplomats to excel in public diplomacy and its “cousins” such as political warfare, ideological competition, and non-military psychological strategies. Only if we encourage them to become “full-spectrum diplomats.” Conflicts that allow us to “win without war”. Enabling legislation should therefore specify that 50 percent of all ambassadorial and assistant secretary positions held by career bureaucrats go to individuals who have spent the majority of their careers in public diplomacy.

After placing responsibility for U.S. foreign policy on all government global messaging platforms, messaging must change. The content of VOA broadcasts and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center is influenced by left-wing ideologies that fail to uphold the American constitutional order as a truly positive and humane alternative to the narratives of modern totalitarian powers such as Communist China and China. It’s here. worldwide jihad movement.

(Alexei Druzhnin, Sputnik, Kremlin pool photo, via AP, File)

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To that end, VOA’s mission cannot simply remain “good journalism.” Good public diplomacy must be beneficial to our nation’s security. We don’t need another version of publicly funded media like NPR. Instead, we need to tell the American story to the world and counter the massive narrative war that Communist China is waging against us. For all the sins of our ancestors, we have learned how America’s unprecedented civilizational capacity for self-improvement has made our nation the freest, most innovative, prosperous, and generous nation in history. , and we must show how collaboration with America can create these gifts for other countries. , too.

While conventional wisdom holds that President-elect Donald Trump owes a duty of nonintervention to war-weary voters, the truth is that if we choose to ignore the world’s problems as they are, If the problem appears before our eyes, it will be even worse than them. There used to be. A holistic approach to foreign policy that prioritizes persuading and empowering the peoples of other countries rather than placating corrupt or hostile governments has already proven effective. This was clearly evident in the 20th century. With a quarter of the way until the 21st, it’s time to do what we know works.

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