The American Challenge of Winning Hearts and Minds in the 21st Century
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2017-06-15
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en
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The United States has a long history of using soft power as a foreign policy tool to secure American interests. In the post-Cold War period, several developments within the international system significantly altered the conditions for successful deployment of soft power. 21st century U.S. public diplomacy has been shaped by three particular factors: the substantial shifts occurring within the global world order, the rise of the Information Age, and the Bush administration’s approach to foreign policy. While its relevance was growing, the U.S. government did not sufficiently adapt its public diplomacy strategies. U.S. administrations clung to the idea of an enduring liberal world order dominated militarily and ideologically by the United States, and continued to use the framework of the United States as the global guardian of freedom, democracy, peace, and liberalism as the core message of U.S. public diplomacy. However, these two concepts became significantly less relevant in the post-Cold War era. Therefore, public diplomacy initiatives were badly targeted and hypocritical in relation to hard power use. This resulted in discrepancies between words and deeds, a decline in credibility, and a deteriorating image of the United States abroad. To improve public diplomacy achievements, the U.S. government could practice a smarter balance of hard and soft power, target strategies well by critically analyzing the audiences they tend to influence, and reconstruct the core message of U.S. public diplomacy to make it match foreign policy actions.
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