Telling America's Story to the World

U.S. propaganda is hardly a new scholarly topic. Americanists have long written about information, culture, and U.S. diplomacy.¹ And with good reason: from George Creel's Committee on Public Information to the Good Neighbor Policy, from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. state and its various private affiliates or "fronts" have provided scholars with ample material.² The end of the cold war and the subsequent downsizing of U.S. public diplomacy seemed to augur an end to this trend, but the Bush administration's largely ham-fisted approach to international relations had the inadvertent effect of provoking new academic and lay interest in these issues. Thanks in large part to Dubya's public relations fiascoes, the past ten years has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of posts, articles, and books on the subject of U.S. propaganda. The war on terror has proved something of a boon for those who study soft power.³ With the exception of Andrew Falk (more on him in a moment), each of the authors under review has played a long-standing role in the making of propaganda studies within and without the academy. Nicholas Cull has authored an award-winning study of British propaganda and runs the Public Diplomacy Center at the University of Southern California. Yale Richmond, a retired cultural affairs officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, has published several books on the topic, the best known being Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (2000). And finally, Syracuse University professor Nancy Snow has engaged with the challenge of propaganda in two well-known books and currently blogs on public diplomacy for the Huffington Post.⁴ Linked through their official or unofficial advisory capacities to various arms of the state, these figures and their confreres—Joseph Nye, Martha Bayles, John Brown, Cynthia Schneider, and Richard Arndt—have proved influential in setting the public terms of the debate about U.S. propaganda during the Bush and the Obama eras.⁵

Their work tends to promote three main objectives: one, to teach policymakers and American citizens that the U.S. history of public diplomacy offers us valuable lessons for the present; two, to insist that effective public diplomacy can never take a unilateral form; and three, to emphasize that public diplomacy should not be seen as a relatively insignificant supplement to foreign policy but instead be understood as integral to the nation's relations with the rest of the globe. Given that these new millennium arguments emerged partly as outraged liberal responses to the Bush administration's "cowboy" foreign policy, it may seem that these contentions warrant approval. Who would deny, after all, that the United States could work harder to establish connections with Muslims around the world and especially in the Middle East? And who would not hope that both scholars and ordinary citizens might play an important role in forging such connections in an equitable and multilateral manner? There is little doubt we need to spend less time "telling America's story to the world"—as the old USIA tagline had it—and more time listening to what foreign publics have to say.⁶

Yet revisionist patriotism is hardly the only way to engage with the challenging issue of U.S. propaganda. Other contemporary scholars have examined U.S. information activities with a more jaundiced eye, critiquing not only the Bush administration's contemporary failures but also the long history of U...