Larry D. Lauer

Events this week had me thinking once again about how immediate and urgent the need is for the US to significantly enhance its’ public diplomacy activities.

I was invited by the CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Lee Hamilton (also the former co-chair of the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group), to participate in his Center’s new project to design a business plan for an independent organization to conduct US public diplomacy.

The first meeting of the Wilson Center project took place this past week. Much of the discussion centered on the urgent need to harness more of the country’s strategic communication talent to utilize all the communication tools in the tool box (especially new and social media), and to call upon the human and financial resources of corporations, foundations, universities, nonprofits, and other organizations, to explain the “idea of America” around the world. 

The most compelling argument is that establishing such an organization independent of prevailing government policy is the only way to achieve genuine communication credibility. In other words, there is nothing more credible, or powerful, than people-to-people communication.

The turmoil at the United Nations this week (most especially the Iranian leader Ahmadinejad’s accusation that the US planned the 9/11 attack) further underscored the urgency of this need. With dangerous threats and active isolation coming from countries like Iran, North Korea, and the former Burma, with conflicts continuing in the middle east, parts of Africa, and even in China, it’s abundantly clear that as many Americans as possible must be called upon to tell our story to the rest of the world.

True, there are a number of organizations, agencies, and departments of government, currently performing some role in public diplomacy. But these efforts lack coordination, and therefore are failing to achieve the intensity necessary to be effective. In other words, they are failing to break through the paralyzing clutter and confusion of today’s information environment.

And so the Wilson Center project declared this week that the time is now to mobilize as many Americans as possible to use all means necessary, including all the new media tools available to us, to talk directly as possible to all the people of the world about what individual freedom in the United States really is like!  

I hear this as a “call to arms” for all of us in the strategic communication profession.