Global Affairs Expert Webinar: The New Landscape of U.S. Public Diplomacy

Nicholas J. Cull, professor of communication and global communication policy fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Naima Green-Riley, assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, colead a conversation on the new landscape of U.S. public diplomacy.

These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation. 

Speakers
Nicholas J. Cull
Professor of Communication and Global Communication Policy Fellow
University of Southern California

Naima Green-Riley
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Princeton University

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

Transcript

FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2026 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. This webinar series provides a forum for students and educators to interact with CFR experts and other thought leaders, and participate in foreign policy discussions. So thank you for joining us.

Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on CFR.org/education if you would like to share the materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Nicholas Cull and Naima Green-Riley with us to talk about the new landscape of public diplomacy.

Dr. Cull is a professor of public diplomacy and global communication policy fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. He was the founding director of USC’s master’s program in public diplomacy and has advised foreign ministries and cultural agencies around the world, including those of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. He’s the author of Reputational Security: Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World, published by Polity in 2024.

And Dr. Green-Riley is an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, where she specializes in Chinese foreign policy, public diplomacy, and the global information space. She was formerly a Wilson China fellow, an Aspen Strategy Group member, a public intellectual fellow with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a U.S. diplomat in China and Egypt. Dr. Green-Riley’s upcoming book about U.S. and Chinese public diplomacy strategy is under contract with Princeton University Press. So thank you both for being with us today.

Nick, I thought we would begin with you to give us the global picture of public diplomacy and the reputational security that you see.

CULL: Thanks. Thank you. So this is my sense of the public diplomacy landscape. And thank you very much for having me. I want to start by talking about our world crisis, which I think gives the backdrop to public diplomacy worldwide right now, then to proceed to the domestic crisis within the United States that is heavily marking public diplomacy, and finish up with the concept of reputational security that I’ve developed and how I think it relates to the current landscape of public diplomacy.

So, first of all, our world crisis. Worldwide politics is in crisis, I think for the simple reason that the problems are now too big for single actors. And before this is acknowledged and we get on to collaborating, we have leaders blaming other people and offering or proposing to solve it all themselves, and trading on resentment and frustration. At the same time, diplomacy is in crisis. I think that the whole idea of a nation-state speaking credibly on an issue with authority has been lost. The whole institution of the nation-state seems less credible. And so this is always going to be a challenge for old-style public diplomacy.

And then on top of this, we see how media has been weaponized, and disinformation has become a major part of the global information space. And I think this is made worse by the fact that we’re at a moment of technological transition. And my home discipline is history. And, you know, I’m very aware that when a new communication technology becomes available and that coincides with an economic crisis, tremendous tensions are developed within the—or, develop within the international system. And these tend to be the moments where things boil over.

So I would see technological transition and media disruption as being part of the origins of the First World War, part of the world that the Second World War breaks out in, and also something that makes the Cold War a lot worse. So I think it’s very troubling that we’re at a moment when publics are trying to find their feet with a new medium, which is hard to—being social media—which seems to generate an unprecedented volatility in global perceptions. I think that it takes a while for the media-specific skepticism that audiences need to resist being stirred up by media—it needs a while for that to develop. And that was developing with social media, and I think has been further disrupted. So we’ve been knocked back by artificial intelligence coming in, and sort of supercharging the disinformation environment.

The long-term trend is that publics are becoming even more an important factor in international relations. And we have a sort of a twenty-year trend of more attention being given to media in general and questions of soft power as countries seek to present themselves to the world. And one of the indications that reputation is now central to international affairs is the extent to which reputation is under attack. And adversaries spend a lot of energy trying to detract from the reputation of states they don’t like. Specifically, in the U.S. we have a number of consensus points about America’s problems. And these are points that the president himself would share.

The first is that the U.S. is now deeply divided. And it seems impossible to talk about a single American point of view on any subject. Secondly, there is a consensus that the U.S. political system is now suboptimal. When the president himself talks about elections being stolen, the old public diplomacy reliable theme of going out and talking about how wonderful an American election was is really hard to do. The polls I rely on, Pew and Anholt’s work show and document an international loss of faith in the United States and a loss of confidence in the United States as an exemplar of democracy.

We’re seeing the U.S. dropping from being in the top ten most admired countries to being in the top twenty. Now, the good news is nobody admires Russia more, and admiration for China is still in the low twenties. But it’s common for international audiences to say that they have more admiration for Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy. One of the problems is that public diplomacy, you know, a mechanism to push back against this, was severely targeted by the DOGE cuts, and then has also been subjected to the Trump two political vendetta with the shocking attacks on Voice of America and the international broadcasting of the United States in general, which has reduced it to a skeleton service only.

And I think we also see problems with the public elements of President Trump’s diplomacy, where diplomatic events are staged as a kind of domestic spectacle. Things are said overseas to encourage and affirm the prejudice of the MAGA base. And, you know, we’re now in the era of staged events in the Oval Office designed to showcase the power of the president and the supplicatory positioning of foreign leaders. I think there’s a significant problem going forward of the systemic challenge of China and the need for mutual understanding with China. And to me, this is made worse by the fact that there is such an asymmetry between what we know about China and what China knows about us. And I see that as a very unstable condition of public understanding, and one which we need public diplomacy to try and address.

So I want to wrap up by putting forward this idea of reputational security. And at its heart, it’s a recognition that public diplomacy is not just an optional extra for a nation-state. It’s part of its security. So neglecting public diplomacy and neglecting concerns around reputation is endangering the security of an international actor. Of course, nations need to accentuate positive images, but I think that reputational security extends to addressing negative realities and trying to deal with the things that are happening in national life that detract from the reputation of a place. So, for the United States, historically this has meant when the world thinks you’re racist, don’t just say, but the Grand Canyon’s a great thing to visit. Actually work to be less racist. That was the response to Soviet propaganda about race in the eras of Eisenhower and of Kennedy.

I see a positive reputation as being like the golden egg that’s laid by the magic goose. And so part of reputational security has to include keeping your magic geese healthy for the United States. That includes the university system. That includes the judicial jurisdiction. I think that, as you will have read if you read the report that I worked on with Stuart MacDonald and Hendrik Ohnesorge, it’s important to build trust if we’re going to be able to cooperate going forward. Public diplomacy is one of the mechanisms through which trust can be constructed. We can build trust through citizen-to-citizen contact.

Now, when the—when the nation is backing away from this kind of contact, it has to be done elsewhere. And one of the things that encourages me right now in the United States is the possibility for cities to step up. And that’s why the lower picture there, I never thought when I agreed to do this talk that I would include a picture of an Algerian waving a flag. But the power of city diplomacy was shown during the World Cup, when Lawrence, Kansas did such an amazing job of making the Algerian fans welcome. And at a time when everybody was expecting there’d be terrible reports of how miserable it is to visit Trump’s America, the fans were reporting a wonderful time, that American citizens stepped up, were so generous and kind to them, and that America has wonderful things like air conditioning, bottomless Cokes, and ranch dressing.

I think that there’s a conceptual problem with the way that public diplomacy has operated in the post-Cold War period. And that’s that it tended to be conceptualized as unilateral. And this was the underside of soft power as a concept. Soft power set us up as participants in a battle royale, a war of all against all for popularity in the world. But when reputations are under attack, the reputations aren’t being assaulted individually. They’re being assaulted based on philosophy, based on international allegiance, and even regional alignment. So, if the attacks aren’t unilateral, the solution can’t be unilateral either. We have to work together in our public diplomacy. And I think that good policy in public diplomacy involves the empowerment of others.

To me, the old public diplomacy was all about thinking, what can I say to convert my foreign audience? Today we need to think, who can I empower who can do that job? And it might be someone in a—you know, probably will be someone in a different country. This is what worked in the fight against al-Qaida, empowering voices in the Middle East who were more similar to the audiences we needed to reach. Collective reputation is at risk. If we want a good reputation, we haven’t just got to talk a good game. We’ve got to actually deliver. And the best thing that we can do collectively is deliver good deeds that are relevant to an international audience.

And this is where I would connect to the points in the reading about climate. The first step, as ever in public diplomacy, we begin by listening. We are never going to have a conversation with the world if we don’t listen to the world. We are never going to understand and exchange with the world if we don’t listen to their priorities and what they are saying about us. So thank you all for listening. I look forward to the discussion. And what a wonderful event to organize. Thank you very much.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Nick.

And, Naima, we’ll go to you to talk about U.S. public diplomacy, the changes that you’ve seen in the in the past few years and what you see going forward.

GREEN-RILEY: Sure. I’d be happy to do that.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

GREEN-RILEY: I want to talk today about changes that we’ve seen recently in the U.S. public diplomacy landscape. And I’m going to start sort of basic, and then just talk about some changes in programming, some changes in funding that have affected what public diplomats who work for the U.S. government can do today. And so I think the first thing that is important to establish is that public diplomacy is simply another type of diplomacy. So when we talk about diplomacy, we talk about representation of a country’s politics and policies overseas, right? But the difference between public diplomacy and traditional diplomacy is who’s at the other end of the diplomacy, right? So while in traditional diplomacy a diplomat might be messaging, or speaking, or engaging with the head of state of another country or its ambassador or another diplomat, in public diplomacy we’re talking about some aspect of a public in a different country that the U.S. government is interacting with.

There’s been a lot of talk about U.S. soft power in the past few years. A lot of talk about sort of U.S. public diplomacy being demolished. I’ve read a lot of think-pieces about this. And I do a great deal of research on public diplomacy and sort of the metrics of how to determine whether or not public diplomacy is, sort of, succeeding or failing at its goals. But what I’m going to offer you all today is a perspective that U.S. public diplomacy actually hasn’t been eliminated. It’s just been changed significantly. And those changes have followed after the priorities of the current administration. And so, much of the country’s public diplomacy today is really focused on forwarding the vision of the Trump administration so that it has resonance and works to support the policy goals of the Trump administration overseas. And so all the elements of this administration’s foreign policy have affected public diplomacy practice. And here are some of the main elements that I think have made a difference to the way that the U.S. is doing public diplomacy.

So, first of all, we see a very sort of transactional form of diplomacy happening today. Sort of telling other countries to ante up or get out of the way, right? So in other words, you see diplomacy being used towards a goal that is very, very, very specifically and obviously meant to sort of improve the U.S. standing in some way. There’s been a refocus on different elements of American history, and sort of a redefinition of what might make America outstanding or great. And so there’s been a focus on a very particular version of history that reifies founding principles, founding fathers, and might also look disparagingly on any mention of the discriminatory factors of American history that have been, you know, present in American government or society. Certainly, a move away from talking about progressive politics, or progressive legislation, or efforts to make America more equitable. This attack on DEI has permeated through foreign policy as well.

There’s been a change in some of the priorities, the political priorities of foreign policy, which means that this government is less focused on, for example, giving foreign aid and more focused on things like promoting trade internationally. Less focused on environmental protectionism, more focused on energy. And the administration is more focused on what it would call “border security.” And so that means that it’s been harder for many people to come and experience the U.S., which is, of course, a key element of what public diplomacy encourages. So all that shows up in how U.S. public diplomacy looks today.

So traditionally when we talk about public diplomacy, we’re talking about a number of different things that people in the U.S. government have done to facilitate conversation with, engagement with people in other parts of the world. And so that includes things like doing exchange programs. The Fulbright is a very popular one that many have heard of, but there are lots of exchanges that have traditionally been run by the U.S. government. Opening up American spaces. So, like, American libraries, or little reading corners, or sometimes even at embassies or consulates having a space where people can come and check out books by American authors, or learn more about American culture. Doing different types of cultural engagement, bringing in speakers or artists or musicians to bring American cultures to people in different parts of the world.

English language programs, doing press outreach, things like facilitating, you know, contacts with local press in different parts of the world so that the ambassador, or one of those speakers who’s visiting, or someone else can do interviews on TV and radio and with journalists, in order to make sure that those voices are being heard internationally. Broadcasting. So Professor Cull spoke a little bit about Voice of America and other broadcasters from the United States and how they have traditionally been able to access different parts of the world, and so people can tune into those stations and listen to sort of American reporting on different issues.

And here’s a contested element of public diplomacy. Some would say that foreign aid is not a form of public diplomacy. It sort of fits into another category, because if you look at the budget lines often those are not the same. But in many ways, you might think that receiving foreign aid is also a form of public diplomacy, in that you’re reaching publics where they are and you’re giving sort of representation of the U.S. to these people who are in different parts of the world.

And so in recent years there have been both cuts to programming and also changes in the focus of programming that have radically shifted the U.S. public diplomacy landscape. So I’m just going to point out a few, and then we’ll get to your questions—which I think is really going to make this conversation more lively. So, first of all, when we think about cuts I think some of the biggest ones are cuts to funding and cuts in staff of U.S. broadcasters—Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, MBN. So Alhurra is a television station in the Middle East. All of these stations have been embroiled in legal battles. And there have been major cuts, RIFs to their staffing, that make it very difficult for them to continue to push out programming, to the extent that they still are. So that’s one area that has hugely impacted the way that America has shown up in different parts of the world.

USAID cuts also have impacted the degree to which people in their local communities can experience some element of what the United States is messaging to a different part of the world. Because if you don’t have access to, you know, a clinic that provided antiretrovirals to keep you healthy if you got AIDS, or if you don’t have access to a program that focused on empowering people who were in a slum that didn’t have access to economic resources, then maybe that’s a message from the U.S. in itself, right? And so these changes that have come as a result of cuts are one element of the change to public diplomacy.

But there’s also been a change to some of the topics of U.S. public diplomacy programming. So promoting women and women’s empowerment was a huge element of many public diplomacy programs for many years sort of prior to, say, 2025. But with some of the executive orders that arose in the second Trump administration related to things like DEI, there also seemed to have been a shift away from that type of programming on the ground in many countries. And so what that would look like is instead of seeing opportunities for scholarships or opportunities for women’s empowerment programs, you don’t see that type of programming cropping up at U.S. embassies anymore.

There used to be on one of the U.S. broadcasting channels, Alhurra, this reality TV show. It was called A Woman is Worth 100 Men. And its whole purpose was just to document the lives of Egyptian women who were in male-dominated, you know, areas and careers, and sort of show how difficult their life was. But if people tuned into that show, they would get sort of a perspective on maybe the challenges they otherwise were unaware of for women in society. So things like that you don’t see today. And it’s also very hard to even get that kind of broadcasting today, because of the limited capacity of these broadcasters.

One more thing that I’ll bring up. So because of the enhanced border security efforts that we’re seeing right now, it is much more difficult for people to get to the United States. It’s harder to get a visa. So even if somebody theoretically were selected for one of these exchange programs that are running, it might be difficult for them to actually get here. They might have a visa that’s denied, or they might end up facing a lot more challenges to even getting to that visa appointment. And so that impacts, of course, the degree to which we can have exchange with different types of people.

And so we’re seeing differences to the focus of programs. We’re seeing differences in the policy priorities. We’re also seeing differences in the way that America, just what America is, the image of America is projected. And so, by focusing on a very specific view of the administration—that the administration has of the country, we see different priorities, right? So more of a—more of a focus on the United States that looks at history, that looks at foundational principles, that looks at, you know, celebrating America and American founding principles and documents has been forefronted. And while that was always something that you might see in public diplomacy, that with the absence—and also considering the absence of some of the other focus on, you know, communities of color, women, other marginalized groups in the United States, sends a very particular message about what America is today overseas.

And so I’m going to leave it there. And I’m happy to discuss more as we get into Q&A.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you so much to both of you. We’re going to go to all of you now for your questions.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

All right. I’m going to go first to Shahakr Mehdi.

Q: Yes. I’m Shahakr Mehdi. I’m student of PhD in University of Antwerp.

But my question is, how do asymmetries in economics, technological, and media power affect whose narrative becomes dominant in global public diplomacy? And this question from Nicholas, I think your comment on public diplomacy and soft power. Additionally, how much soft power plays a role in public diplomacy? That’s my second question. And first question is, how do asymmetries in economics, technological, and media power affect whose narrative becomes dominant in public diplomacy? That’s my first question. Thank you so much.

FASKIANOS: Who wants to start. Nick, do you want to go first?

CULL: Well, what I would say about that is public diplomacy has always relied on narratives, on energizing narratives. And a narrative is a wonderful thing to have on your side, because it not only is rooted in the past; it has a present and a future. (Laughs.) So people really feel that they know what to expect when they are perceiving and reacting to a narrative. And one of the great assets of U.S. public diplomacy has been the availability of Western-origin media and the power of the U.S. in motion pictures, in television, and the power of the West in terms of the news infrastructure. The kind of power that was identified in the seventies in the famous UNESCO report.

But I think that part of the crisis of our moment is that we’re seeing different sources of media power in the world. And the inordinate power of the U.S. is now being challenged—regionally, internationally. And the future is not going to look like the past. And that’s going to take some getting used to for the United States.

FASKIANOS: Naima.

GREEN-RILEY: Yeah, I’ll just add—I mean, to the first question about, I guess, funding, really, and the ability to get your voice out there. Certainly, if there’s an effort to do broadcasting to different parts of the world money affects those efforts. (Laughs.) One of the reasons that some of these broadcasters in the United States have been more unable to do their work is because of a lack of funding, or decreases in funding. But that would also mean that in other countries, where maybe there weren’t as many resources to be able to do huge—to make huge efforts to do broadcasting internationally, then it might be more difficult to do so.

I will say though that I think that money is not the end of the story, right? And so, in addition to needing funding to be able to get a message out there, you actually also have a message that’s going to make people keep their TVs or radios on, right? So, like, people have a choice on whether they’re going to listen to you or watch you. And so it’s not necessarily, you know, set in stone that really ritzy, beautiful broadcast will be listened to or watched by millions, if it’s not of interest to them.

CULL: No, it all goes to relevance. And, Irina, regarding the soft power point, I think it’s important to say that soft power and public diplomacy are not the same thing. A country either has soft power or it doesn’t. That’s about being admired. It’s about having an ability to lead, and to lead through attraction. And so it’s a sort of a terrain on which a state can operate, whereas—it either has the high ground or it doesn’t. Whereas public diplomacy is a policy. That’s something that a state can do. And so if you don’t have soft power, you might try to use public diplomacy to make people aware of the good things about your state to accumulate soft power.

Sometimes people talk about soft power tools, and would argue that public diplomacy is one of the soft power tools at the disposal of a state. And, you know, I think it’s interesting that we have states that have a lot of—attempt soft power tools, or attempt outreach, but have no soft power, like North Korea. And you have states that spend nothing on soft power but have a lot of soft power, like Ireland. (Laughs.) Where, you know, they don’t have an equivalent of the British Council or the Goethe Institute to speak of, but, you know, once a year the Chicago River gets dyed green and you have celebrations of Irish culture all over the world.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question, written question, from Vance Gray, who’s the associate dean of academic affairs at Pennsylvania Institute of Technology: When you say diplomacy is being improved measurably—sorry—or specifically, are you saying that in the past the United States public diplomacy was weak or just not as measurable? How do we teach public diplomacy if we are only to focus on a really specific goal?

CULL: I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t think we made a claim about measurability, did we?

GREEN-RILEY: No.

FASKIANOS: OK. (Laughs.)

CULL: Maybe it’s the—maybe—was it in the report? Is this going to the report?

FASKIANOS: I think he directed it to you, Naima, but—

GREEN-RILEY: OK. Well, I was—yeah, I would say, basically, I don’t necessarily think that diplomacy has been improved measurably. So the premise, I think, of the question, I would dispute. (Laughs.) But to some of the question—the part of the question that came after, which has to do with, you know, the ways that we measure public diplomacy, I think that there has been a quest by governments for a long time to try to figure out whether or not their public diplomacy is working, you know, if it’s working. And so at different points in history I guess countries might have said that their public diplomacy was becoming better, even if that’s not the claim that I’m making right now.

And I agree with those efforts to try and figure out how you measure whether or not public diplomacy is working. So I loved the way that Nick put it, that soft power is not the same thing as public diplomacy. It’s something that’s, like, a sort of core premise of the book that I’m working on right now. And I would just say that, you know, if you want to know if public diplomacy is working then you’ve got to figure out what the goals were, and whether or not those goals actually were met. (Laughs.)

CULL: Yeah. That’s right. And when we’re teaching public diplomacy, we tell—you know, I teach students that they have to set part of their budget aside for evaluation. And you should expect, as part of the discipline of public diplomacy, to evaluate what you’re doing and to determine what your performance indicators are. And one of the problems with public diplomacy in the past has been a sort of a laxness conceptually as to what they were trying to do. Now students are told, you know, there’s no such thing as just improving relations between two countries. You have to know your audience and work to cultivate a particular end result from a particular audience for a particular reason. Otherwise, why would the federal money be spent on it?

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Hillary Knepper, who’s a professor at Pace University.

Q: Thanks, everybody. And I’m really enjoying this workshop today.

My question has to do with, as a professor of graduate students only who are planning to go out and do the work, they were planning on careers with USAID, the Peace Corps, international NGOs. So doing the boots on the ground work, federal government, applying for presidential management fellowships. You know, a lot of these are dramatically altered, if not gone. So I think what I would love from each of you is maybe a little something to carry with me to the classroom that’s hopeful. I mean, I psych myself up for class, and I am trying very hard, but I’m really looking for something maybe a little more substantive—beyond the midterms, which, you know, holding my breath for. But I’m just looking for some of this, because these are passionate and highly gifted individuals. And they planned on this for so long. And now when I’m looking at this, it’s—you know, there’s a lot of fear. And I do have, being based in New York City, a lot of international students as well. So just curious. Thank you.

GREEN-RILEY: I can—yeah. I have a lot of students too who are very similar to yours, and envisioned themselves going into those careers, but maybe now we’re questioning that. So, first, I mean, I think I have to say it at the outset, that there are still opportunities in government at the federal level. There are still—you know, there’s hiring happening at places like the State Department. State Department is now responsible for aid and also for the diplomacy that it has always done. But certain students who have a different political outlook and a different foreign policy, you know, vision might not feel comfortable going into, you know, government at a time when perhaps the way that they see the U.S. engaging in the world is not the actual way that the U.S. is engaging in the world.

I really loved Nick’s discussion of city diplomacy. I think it’s really interesting that cities like L.A. and New York now have a robust set of initiatives of their own that focus on a lot of these things, that focus on things like people-to-people relations, or exchange programs, or, you know, sending delegations to different parts of the world to learn about, you know, best practices, and also sharing their best advice. And so, in that way, some of the functions of the federal government that were called public diplomacy have been translated to the city level. Los Angeles was one of the first cities to do this. And they just did a great job with it. They’ve continued to do it. But their first sort of international advisor to the mayor was previously a U.S. ambassador who had been responsible for doing this in Southeast Asia. And so there are some interconnections even in the career trajectories of people who have worked previously doing this kind of work at State.

CULL: And just to jump in on this, so, yeah, cities offer a way ahead. And also, I think the cities offer something that contributes to the soft power positives of the United States. That there are great initiatives, even initiatives around climate, happening in American cities. So it may be that as federal decisions undermine America’s reputation, there are things happening in cities that rebuild that and show that there is more to the United States than just one person.

The other thing I’d say is that a lot is happening in American corporations now. And your students, Hillary, might find that corporations are interested in developing public diplomatic capacity and understanding global audiences in a way that they just weren’t. We have a report coming out from one of my colleagues, Jerry Giaquinta, in the next month or so, where he’s talking about the public diplomacy capacity developing in C-suites in top American corporations. And that’s a really interesting development. And I think part of that is about trying to manage the artificial intelligence, and how that is giving—changing the information environment, is something that has to be understood by corporations for the reason of their bottom line.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you.

I’m going to go next to a written question from Patrick Duddy, who’s the director of the Center for Latin America and Caribbean Studies at Duke University: I’m a retired FSO, former ambassador, and I was a public diplomacy officer. Arguably, the U.S.’ ability to practice public diplomacy has been deteriorating since USAID was merged with the State Department. Do either of you think reestablishing—

CULL: USIA.

FASKIANOS: Sorry, USAI—USIA, my goodness. USIA. (Laughter.)

CULL: That’s all right.

FASKIANOS: Do either of you think reestablishing an independent agency to coordinate and conduct public diplomacy is realistic?

GREEN-RILEY: I thought the end of that sentence was going to be, is a good idea, and I would have answered differently. (Laughs.) You know, in the near term, in this administration, certainly not, I think. I think that, you know, like putting—DOGE really did a number on a lot of the types of programming that, you know, historically USAID would have done. I don’t think we have the political will to be able to do that in this climate. But just thinking a little bit more long term, I’m still not sure that that would be the direction that a number of policymakers would want to pursue. I think that there is certainly support for things like exchanges. And parts of the government, like Congress, have shown huge support for things like exchanges, even when the Trump administration wanted to really minimize or get rid of them.

But creating a whole agency is politically costly, I think, for any administration to pursue. It becomes a question of big or small government, which is, you know, like a domestic political issue between the Dems and Republicans that will continue to exist. Now we see that it could, you know, bring attention and create new, sort of, animosities just by doing that. And so I’m not sure that right now creating a new agency to do that work would be the best use of time, because it might actually just set up a target for, you know.

CULL: Well, I agree with—I agree with that. What I would say is, historically the only reason the U.S. has ever set up big agencies for public diplomacy purposes is when there is a tremendous crisis—World War I, World War II, the Cold War. The only reason USIA lasted as long as it did is because the Cold War lasted a long time. And as soon as the Cold War came to an end, Congress was looking to close USIA down. I’m not sure—having written the principal history of the agency, I don’t think it worked terribly well. I think that it had great people working for it, but they were always being limited by congressional doubts about the mission of public diplomacy. What I would like to see, I think, why not look at what America’s allies do?

One of the weird things about American public diplomacy is that historically it hasn’t mirrored what the allies are doing. It’s mirrored what the enemies are doing—lumping everything together, pumping in money to particular kinds of work. So we used to mirror the Soviet Union. Then we started mirroring China, or comparing ourselves to China. What Germany does, what Britain does, what Spain does, what France does is set up a specific cultural agency that is distant from the government, that can be ringfenced in its approach, and can operate without political questions to share the culture and to connect the people of the country.

And, you know, British Council is able to do that. The Goethe Institute is able to do that. I think it’s one of America’s tragedies that that is so unthinkable in the U.S., because of the way in which American politicians react to the concept of culture. And right now, the furor over the Kennedy Center is just one more symptom of a problem that has been going on for a very, very long time in American public life.

FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to Roy Pettis. If you can unmute yourself and tell us who you are, that would be great. Thank you.

Q: Yeah. I’m Roy Pettis. I teach at George Washington University, and also have many of those students whose careers have been upended.

But the real reason I wanted to ask was I’m intrigued by the idea, as you proposed it, of reputational security. While the last thing in the world I want to do is add something more to the toolkit list of DOT PLMS, I find myself thinking, is that—is that a framework through which we can explain the need for new initiatives? I’m not even really thinking about new funding. But soft power has always been something that’s never fit into the toolkit. We just had it. And now that we’re not going to have it, is there a—is this a framework that we could build something new off of?

CULL: Well, reputational security, to me, is a promotion for public diplomacy, because it moves public diplomacy from the nice-to-have to the essential-to-have. And what turned me onto the concept was the experience of Ukraine. I could see that in 2014 Ukraine was lacking something. It didn’t have a reputation. Or the stories that people around the world knew about Ukraine were the same stories that the Russian Federation was saying, that it was just a breakaway republic of—a former Soviet—a former Soviet republic. And I think that because Ukraine spent so much time and energy telling its story between 2014 and 2022, it gained something in world affairs. It was more secure. And the knowledge of Ukraine translated directly into assistance, into the making weapons available, and into it being completely unacceptable to trade with Russia. One thousand American companies had to pull out of Russia, according to a Yale study, in the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

That’s remarkable, because that feeling didn’t exist in 2014. It was impossible to persuade companies to change how they dealt with Russia on the back of Russian misbehavior in Ukraine at that stage. And so I have no doubt that reputation is part of security. But I think part of securing that reputation is not only—as I said in my talk—not only communicating, telling your story in a dramatic way, in a powerful way, but also removing the negatives. So part of Ukraine’s turnaround in terms of its reputation was being seen to push back against its—the reality of corruption within Ukraine, to actually move the position of the country on the international corruption index so that it is a fairer, better country, which we see as similar to Europe in the rest of Europe in a way that we didn’t see it as similar in 2014. Does that help, Roy? Can you see where I’m going with it?

FASKIANOS: If we could unmute Roy.

Q: Yeah. No, thanks. I think that fits with what I would—a useful way to reframe some of the material. I keep looking for—I don’t believe we’re ever going to go back. I think we’re going to have to build something new. I’m looking for ways to—

CULL: No, that’s right. That’s right. Build something new. Build something better. And, I must say, the places where reputational security has taken off as a concept, where I have a lot of conversation about it, in places that are feeling endangered right now. So, you know, it’s taken seriously in Finland, Czech Republic, in Germany, places that are closer to Russian Federation. And they can see that reputation—absolutely reputation is part of security. And they can use it to justify a budget.

Q: I was thinking that too. (Laughs.)

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question, written question, from Felicity Vabulas’s class at Pepperdine University.

Is U.S. public diplomacy likely to be affected by President Trump’s current war with the media? If public diplomacy needs a multifaceted approach in the future, could the U.S. address public diplomacy abroad by, counterintuitively, investing in domestic infrastructure/policy to strengthen our image? Who wants to start? Nick, do you want to start, and we’ll go to Naima, or?

CULL: Sure. Well, to take the second part first, yeah, it’s always—you know, you have to walk the walk at home. And I think the world watches American domestic policy. And it’s important that Americans understand what the world sees when it looks at the United States. Very often it sees good things, but it also sees bad things too. It sees the racism and it sees the violence. A senior person in U.S. public diplomacy in the Biden years shared that they were having a problem with the uptake in Fulbrights, because people were worried about violence in American education. And I said, were these people from Europe, New Zealand? And they said, no, Israel and Palestine. People from Israel and Palestine thought the U.S. was too violent and they wouldn’t risk coming here for a scholarship. A reputation is a difficult thing.

On the positive side about reputation is it takes a reputation a long time to build and a long time to dispel. So I think that reputations are eroded slowly. But for the United States, it has a particular problem in that it is so well known around the world, and people carry an image of the United States inside themselves, so some of the things that happen in the United States, when the United States violates its best image, it’s very damaging. The thing I looked most closely at was when the U.S. began torturing people during the early days of the war on terror. There was a tremendous reaction against that around the world, not because people didn’t know the United States, but because they did. And they felt that that was not what the country was about. So, as they say on the London Underground, you have to mind the gap. Mind the gap between the image people have and the reality you’re delivering. And that’s where reputation for the United States—where it’s at risk.

FASKIANOS: Naima.

GREEN-RILEY: Yeah. I think, so, public diplomacy, when you talk about it from, like, the government perspective and from funding, has often been really specifically defined as that type of programming that is targeted at impacting the way that we’re interacting with different publics, or we’re messaging different publics. And historically, there have been some, you know, I guess, impediments to doing things domestically, specifically with that pot of money. So there’s something called Smith-Mundt. It’s a provision within legislation that basically says that you can’t use that money to invest in messaging, for example, that would go to the U.S. public. But that’s because that money is really seen as the money that goes into the communication tools, right?

And what you’re talking about seems more to have to do with, well, what does the messenger look like, and what’s happening with the messenger? And so in political science we have a whole set of, you know, research, a literature that talks about political communication and who a messenger is. And the extent to which any political actor tries to get a message across—so you could be talking about, like, a domestic politician, you could be talking about the president, or we could think of a messenger as the United States—and sometimes people’s attitudes towards that messenger, what Nick is referring to as a reputation, impacts the effectiveness of the message. And so if America were to focus inwardly, then that could actually impact its ability to do public diplomacy and have that public diplomacy well received.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to try to squeeze in a couple more questions. Next we’ll go to Buba Misawa, professor at Washington and Jefferson College. If you can accept the unmute prompt. There you go.

Q: OK. Well, great job by our speakers. I think they did a wonderful job.

I wanted a quick question, which was really what happened to the Peace Corps in the middle of all this stuff, of this public diplomacy? For most of Africa, a young Peace Corps volunteer made more sense to them than any big policy debate on that. But the other question, since people were engaged on issues of measurement, a couple of years ago I had a student who is currently at State who really did—you know, the argument that you could measure public diplomacy in other areas. That perhaps the Middle East or in Africa or Europe was more accepting of America than it is. So from what you’re saying, are you saying that universally now it’s a change because of priority changes, or because of focus, and therefore America is viewed universally whatever way you want to put it? Whether it’s negative or positive, you think that there’s a universality in terms of the public perception of United States? Or there really—there are pockets of differences in that? And I think that it goes into the measurement argument.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

GREEN-RILEY: I’m happy to just take a quick stab at that. I know we want to get more questions, and so I’ll try to be brief. Thanks for your question.

So two things. I think the Peace Corps is still running. I think that there have been—for many years there’s been a question of where the Peace Corps operates, and what kinds of projects Peace Corps volunteers can do. I focus on China, and the Peace Corps was cut in the Biden administration, or before—I think in the Biden administration, maybe before, maybe the Trump one, I can’t remember. But before this administration. And so where the Peace Corps operates has been in question for a long time. The Peace Corps, I think, is an element of public diplomacy. It involves a U.S. government program that is targeted at, you know, sort of these rural areas, often, in different countries, and might impact the way that people see the U.S.

I don’t think that you can—just to the second part of your question—I don’t think that you can think about reactions to the U.S. as a monolith, I think that that’s, you know, like, something that a lot of public diplomacy scholars point out, is that different people within publics and different publics have very different reactions to the U.S. at any time. So while we can see systematic changes to maybe globally how many people have favorable attitudes towards the United States. There’s been a lot of furor recently about, you know, if you look at Pew global attitudes, which is a survey that’s done every year, China globally having sort of more favor—people having more favorable attitudes towards China than the United States. But any survey research sort of is never a monolith either. You’re looking at overall averages of certain types of people and what certain types of people prefer, and then on the whole, what does that mean about this community. And so at any time you’re never going to be able to say any one thing about everybody in the world.

FASKIANOS: We are at the end of the day.

CULL: No, I would agree—I would agree with that. I would agree with that, and point out that there are places in the world where President Trump, specifically, is admired. And he has quite good ratings in Nigeria and in Israel too, so.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. So with that, we are at the end of our hour. And I apologize to all of you for not being able to get to all the raised hands and questions, but this has been terrific. Nicholas Cull and Naima Green-Riley, thank you very much for being with us and sharing your expertise. We really appreciate it.

The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Thursday, October 8, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And we will be having a conversation on U.S.-Gulf relations and the Strait of Hormuz. And in the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/career-opportunities. And visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So thank you again, both of you, for today’s conversation. We really appreciate it.

CULL: Very welcome.

FASKIANOS: And to all of you.

GREEN-RILEY: Thank you.

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