WASHINGTON — Karen Hughes, a presidential confidant entrusted with the arduous job of reversing America's plummeting image abroad, announced Wednesday that she would resign from the administration and return to Texas.
Hughes, 50, one of the last members of President Bush's Texas inner circle still in government, said she would leave her post as head of the State Department's public diplomacy programs at the end of the year.
Her departure closes out a two-year effort that gave a high profile to the administration's efforts to improve America's reputation overseas but did not reverse a continuing decline that was caused in large part by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and other Bush foreign policy decisions.
She was the third prominent woman tapped by Bush to arrest the slide of the U.S. image, following failed tries in the years after Sept. 11 by ad executive Charlotte Beers and former ambassador Margaret Tutwiler.
The resignation of Hughes, a former TV reporter whose earliest Mideast mission in 2005 was marred by missteps, leaves the future of the public diplomacy effort in doubt. Once seen by Bush as the way to spread "the universal principle of human liberty," the outreach campaign quickly began to founder in a rising anti-American tide. A key 2007 survey showed a continued decline in U.S. standing among other countries.
At the same time, the administration's push for democracy in Arab countries also has flagged. But Hughes cited forward progress of the image effort during a State Department appearance with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"I feel that I have done what Secretary Rice and President Bush have asked of me by transforming public diplomacy and making it a national security issue," she said.
Under her leadership, the U.S. budget for public diplomacy nearly doubled, to $900 million a year. The State Department focused on trying to reverse the hostility toward America in the Muslim world, assigning more Arabic speakers to talk to the Arabic news media and setting up "rapid-response units" to try to counter negative commentary on U.S. foreign policy.
But some experts contend that the approach of Hughes, a political media expert, was too focused on defending the Bush administration's assertive foreign policy and not enough on selling American values and culture more broadly.
Public diplomacy "can be about selling the policies of the moment, or about selling the American brand abroad," said Tamara Wittes of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
