The Pragmatists

Last night I was thumbing through AU professor (and sometime consultant, advisor, director, fellow and diplomat) Robert Pastor's chapter on U.S. foreign policy in A Century's Journey. Full disclosure: This wasn't casual bedtime reading. I'm in his class.

Pastor argues that U.S. foreign policy is characterized by a sort of divided vision. Team Teddy leans toward strength, independence and unilateralism. Team Woody leans toward international institutions, universal norms and multilateralism. However, most U.S. foreign policy decisions have been decided by a third, pragmatic camp: Team Undecided, which tends to be swayed and directed by current events.

I haven't gotten far into the reading (although I will soon, as I'm co-leading a discussion on it), but thus far it seems that Pastor's emphasizing hard power (that is, economic and military) action. But how does this bi-/tri-polar foreign policy system influence soft power activities in the United States? After all, foreign policy is one of the most crucial factors in shaping foreign opinions about the United States--a major PD goal. So what does this mean for soft power?

For some reason, it's put a Kaiser Chief's song in my head: We are the angry mob. We read the papers every day. We like who we like, we hate who we hate, but we're also easily swayed.

Pastor suggests that the United States has frequently been more committed to Wilsonian rhetoric than Wilsonian action, an inconsistency that could undermine PD efforts abroad. In fact, the entire system, with its reliance on the pragmatic but variable Undecideds seems geared toward inconsistency in general. And that's a problem for an enterprise that relies on consistency.

Of course, I'm only a few pages in and I could be totally off-base on my assessment. Stay tuned for an update when I finish my reading!

Words, words, words: In Defense of IC

As in any graduate program, there are some friendly rivalries and vicious smack talk exchanges between the different concentrations at American's School of International Service, so I wasn't too offended when a fellow student made some disparaging remarks about International Communications at a party this past weekend.

The skeptic shall remain anonymous because a) the critique was mostly facetious, and b) it's not really fair to hold anyone accountable for comments made under the influence of jungle juice, and besides, he was kind of cute. But the exchange made me realize that I've defended public diplomacy in this space before, so today I'd like to focus on IC.

It's easy enough to dismiss IC as little more than fancy talk, an expendable addition, like cilantro, to the main course -- presumably foreign policy or international development or one of the "weightier" areas of concentration. But I object to that characterization, and not simply because cilantro is a vile spice that tastes like Palm Olive.

Communication, according to the formidable Christine Chin, professor of Cross-Cultural Communication, is about nothing less than the construction, maintenance and transformation of reality. It's a process. It's constant. And it matters.

I was an English major, so I know how to vivisect a statement, isolate the words and reshape it with my own emphasis, but international communication involves so much more than just words. There are words, of course -- both the words that are spoken and the words left unsaid. But there's also physical proximity, relationships with time, nonverbal communication, overt and covert expectations and, most important of all, context.

And that context is where the game gets interesting. Because now you've got an enormous threatening mass (an iceberg, to use a popular IC analogy) of unconscious processes just below your range of visibility, and any one of them could sink your foreign policy or development or other IR efforts before either party can articulate the danger.

Successful international communication requires humility, recognition of one's own ignorance, observation without judgment, empathy, awareness, and a constant desire to listen, to understand and to adapt.

International communication is the foundation on which IR must rest, because without the ability to understand and express our expectations, desires and beliefs, it is impossible for any international initiative to succeed.