NPR: Former U.S. Diplomats Worried About U.S. Image

Former U.S. Diplomats Worried About U.S. Image

One of the issues sure to come up during this year's presidential election campaign is the image of the U.S. in the rest of the world. There is surprising consensus among the three remaining candidates about the issue; Democrats have been saying for a while that the Bush administration policies have hurt America's image in the world and Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain also recently said that Bush had not paid enough attention to this issue.

Recent international surveys have confirmed this problem. Nearly two-thirds of more than 4,000 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said they held a "very unfavourable" attitude of the United States, up from 57 percent in late 2006. In a recent Global Attitudes Poll, favorable opinions of the U.S. were up slightly, primarily because many people around the world were looking forward to the end of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, a study by Quinnipiac University professor of public relations Kathy Fitzpatrick (Fitzpatrick released the study in late March) indicates that there is concern about this issue among American diplomats as well.

An overwhelming majority (88 percent) of more than 200 former high-ranking officers in the United States Information Agency who participated in the study said the U.S. is not diplomatically prepared to address ideological threats to U.S. interests in the 21st century ...
More than 80 percent of the former USIA officers rated American public diplomacy efforts today as either "poor" or "marginal." In contrast, more than 80 percent of the former USIA officers rated America's public diplomacy efforts during the Cold War as "good" or "excellent."

"The responses of these diplomatic experts were both passionate and emphatic," said Fitzpatrick, a professor of public relations who conducted the study. "They clearly believe that much needs to be done to rebuild America's public diplomacy."

Do you think "America's image" will become a campaign image in the fall? Or does the relative agreement of the three candidates on the issue mean it will play a minor role?

8:56 AM ET | 04-15-2008 | permalink

Comments

Whether it becomes more or less a campaign issue does not matter, given all three candidates are in agreement. What matters is holding the next President to those sentiments and correcting our recent disastrous 'diplomacy'.

Sent by Michael W. May | 9:28 AM ET | 04-15-2008

LOL, what else would we expect from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

The center's of Jihad are supposed to like us?

Sent by deek | 11:01 AM ET | 04-15-2008

I guess we have to hope that the rest of the world likes us enough or that it is worth their while to keep their money here.

Sent by Mike Fleissner | 12:42 PM ET | 04-15-2008

Boy comments like deek's show the ignorance and impudence of the neo-conservative's school yard adolescent bully mindset. You may recall that we actually won the cold war, resoundingly in fact. If the Bushies were in office at the time we would have certainly started WWW3 and none of us would be alive because of it. Even during (failed) shows of force like the Bay of Pigs and crises like the cuban missle crisis among others, diplomacy shows its deftness of in being able to obtain the net result desired, in spite of these failings. If we took a similar tact in the current terrorism threat, we perhaps could win the war of ideas necessary to ultimately make us safer and ultimately prevail; the current strategy (or lack thereof) is not only ineffective, it does quite the opposite, further fomenting "jihadism."

It is becoming increasingly clear to me how collectively immature the Bush neocon ideology is. The pre-pubescent school yard bully is an appropriate metaphor. Do you actually want to accomplish greatness in your life and truly lead or is your ego so frail you have to constantly show everyone how bad ass you are? The true leader is one who can show force but never does. Ultimately the bully always ends up at the short end of the stick later in life. Let's do our best to put the dark days of W behind us and have some intelligent, enlightened leaders do what's necessary to actually protect our interests rather than continuing our current weak, pathetic, and insipid "war on terror."

Sent by Sean | 3:38 PM ET | 04-15-2008

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