America's tough sell

The office of undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs has become a reliable generator of exactly two news stories. There's the appointment of a new public diplomacy chief, when the media note how tough a job it will be to correct the United States' historically low standing in global public opinion. Then there's the resignation of that public diplomacy chief a few months or years later, when the media note how she failed to halt historically sharp drops in global public opinion about the United States.

Karen Hughes, the fourth woman to hold the public diplomacy post since it was created in 1999, worked some interesting variations on that cycle. From a purely process-oriented standpoint, she is probably the most successful public diplomacy czarina so far, having increased the office's budget by more than a third to almost $1 billion a year. Hughes also departed radically from the "brand America" strategy instituted by her two post-9/11 predecessors, pulling the plug on Hi Magazine (a glossy, misguided attempt to draw mindshare among Arab teenyboppers) and generally leaving pop concepts such as the never-popular Radio Sawa station and Al Hurra television network to fend for themselves.

Instead, Hughes applied pressure on problems that were both damaging to America's image and potentially fixable: the security-mad post-9/11 practice of holding up student visas; a dearth of overseas-study scholarships for American students looking to learn Arabic, Farsi and Chinese; and institutional rigidity that was preventing U.S. ambassadors from maintaining higher public profiles in their assigned countries.

Even those achievements seem fairly modest for a position Hughes has called an umbrella for "the many ways that our government reaches out to engage and inform people around the world about our country, our values and our policies." Reports of Hughes' resignation this week gleefully pointed to a recent Pew Research Center report that found opinions about the United States at frighteningly low levels throughout the Muslim world. But Hughes' inability to solve anti-Americanism was less a reflection on her talents than on the impossibility of her job.

The public diplomacy office was created after Congress abolished the U.S. Information Agency and devolved its duties to the State Department and the nominally independent Broadcast Board of Governors (which runs the radio and TV efforts mentioned above, and Voice of America).