Connection Technologies in U.S. Foreign Policy

Laudatory would be a better characterization of the New Policy Institute's report.  It contains many unquestioned assumptions about precisely what Secretary Clinton and the former Obama campaign veterans, now civil servants, were thinking when they coined the "21st Century Statecraft" slogan and its "Internet Freedom" concomitant.  It provides little or no genuine insights in that regard and so we can't assess whether 21st Century Statecraft, which seems to be losing adherents left and right -- I refrain from using the metaphors, "rats" and "sinking ships," as most of this activity has taken place in arid lands -- is a success even on its own terms, let alone in terms of a genuine public diplomacy.

On this matter of public diplomacy:  commenting on "Internet Freedom," etc. without a more thorough framing of the public diplomacy dilemma ignores at least two decades of contention between critics of American public diplomacy and the State Department's plans for public diplomacy under Presidents Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and now Obama.  The State Department has been unrelenting in its attempt to privatize American public diplomacy, most violently under Bush II, when there was no Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy for the longest time -- but most cleverly under Obama. 

The unprecedented privatization of the $100-milliion USA Pavilion at this year's Shanghai World Expo, for which Secretary Clinton personally horsetraded with 60 Chinese and American multinationals, asking each to pony up a million or so to be part of the six-month-long corporate lovefest/infomercial, has been rightly criticized in the US press as a boondoggle.  It misused the US tax code to create a 501(c)(3) "charity" whose entire purpose has been to promote (with tax-exempt contributions) the multinational agenda in Shanghai.  (I won't get into the allegations of insider deals and sweetheart contracts involved in dolling out the $100 million. These are inherent to US Government overseas activity and are no longer scandalous, merely SOP.) 

By any measure, the Pavilion has been an utter failure in public diplomacy if by that term we mean genuine people-to-people communication in the service of intercultural understanding. 

(Of specific interest to the readers of this blog: The online component of the USA Pavilion, its "Virtual USA Pavilion" visited by X millions via the net, was delegated to a Chinese firm answerable only to the Expo Host.  It's rich with yet more corporate advertising.  No American input other than the corporations' was invited, from developers or content providers, professional or grassroot.  So much for "Internet Freedom," which evidently does not begin at home.)

The Pavilion, however, is only the tip of the looming privatization iceberg. Raising the initial nut for the USA Pavilion was used as a rationale for creating the Global Partnership Initiative, led by Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, a former Georgetown professor of law.  The GPI, otherwise a clone of the Clinton Global Initiative, deals in public funds supposedly above board rather than with private contributions administered in backrooms.  Except that the Administration has faced some obstacles since the Inauguration -- and now must deal with the outcome of the forthcoming midterm election -- it's likely that GPI would have further pumped up 21st Century Statecraft. It would have turned even more to the Googles, Microsofts, and IBMs, etc., to manage the business of getting everyone on our side regarding issues of technology and freedom, "our side" being concidentally identical to the positions of the global ITC industry.  The Administration after the election, especially if its public resources are further curtailed (or as has too often been the case, been given away), may become even more reliant on these giant self-serving entities to carry out public diplomacy. Of course, there will be  considerations expected on both sides.

The NPI report is presented as "an overview that is neither comprehensive nor critical," but its goal is less clear.  Where is the "platform" it purportedly provides for future debates?  These debates will evidently not involve the individuals who promoted 21st Century Statecraft and "Internet Freedom" within government, although we may hear from them in their new corporate identities.  So how meaningful these debates will be remains to be seen, if and when they take place.

However, this does not answer the most basic question: How can technologies created by and for, and ultimately controlled by a single segment of American society possibly be a positive force in history unless that history is solely a corporate one?  If the US Government is completely symbiotic?  This question cannot be answered by pointing to 400,000 iPhone apps and suggesting that the problem is merely one of social technique.  I didn't expect a whitewash like this from the NPI, but that's the beauty of American life:  everything's negotiable.