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How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world’s leading communications society?
Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations.

Anti-Americanism is deeper and broader than at any time in modern history. It is most acute in the Muslim world, but the phenomenon spans the globe – from Europe to Asia, from South America to Africa.

The deterioration in America’s image abroad has confounded the nation that invented the public relations industry. The US appears to have lost the power to persuade, except at the barrel of a gun.

As the Pew Center’s Global Opinion Survey reported in March: “In the eyes of others, the US is a worrisome colossus, too quick to act unilaterally, too slow to solve the world’s problems, too prone to widening the global gulf between rich and poor.”

US power has long been a source of envy and resentment. What is new is that US motives have become a source of mistrust. “Brand America” is in trouble. So what is to be done?

Today we will hear from the new face of soft American power: Karen Hughes, President George W. Bush’s close political adviser and nominee undersecretary for public diplomacy. Ms Hughes will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee. She has been a long time coming.

Ms Hughes was first nominated last March, but she insisted on first seeing her son through high school. That prompted muttering among State Department diplomats already sceptical about her foreign policy credentials.

But to paraphrase her mentor, Ms Hughes should not be misunder­estimated. She is a gifted wordsmith, and unlike her two predecessors, she enjoys a direct line to the president.

The question is whether one person – or one agency – is capable of reversing the tide of anti-American­ism. Traditionalists will argue that policy – whether the war of choice against Iraq or the US stand on the Israel-Palestinian conflict – trumps perception. But maybe they have it wrong, at least in terms of the struggle against radical Islam, which means engaging the enemy in the realm of ideas as well as on the battlefield.

Marketers define a brand as a promise kept. During the cold war, the US brand was strong as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe spread the message of freedom to a receptive audience. Today, says Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, the US is not only losing the battle in public diplomacy, “it is barely in the game”.

Roughly $1 out of every $100 of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid; only five cents goes to public diplomacy, defined as governments communicating with the citizens of other countries. Other tools to encourage goodwill towards the US have been woefully neglected. Educational exchanges have fallen away, partly because of the tight visa policy enforced after September 11.

The Fortress America mentality has spread to US embassies, too. The lack of contact with ordinary people is a recipe for propagating ignorance and prejudice. A former US ambassador in the Middle East recalls being asked why American women slept with six men every lunchtime. Then came the explanation: the Arab inquisitor was a devotee of Baywatch and other US TV soaps.

Ms Hughes faces three challenges. The first is bureaucratic, the second technological and the third political.

On the bureaucratic front, she needs to win more resources from an inward-looking Congress, and she must tackle the legacy of the 1999 reorganisation that placed the previously independent United States Information Agency within the State Department and cut loose the international broadcasting parts of USIA.

The result is an unholy mess: the traditional diplomats are at odds with the public diplomacy people. The old VoA and new Arab language services such as Radio Sawa and al-Hurra, the satellite TV channel, now report to the broadcasting board of governors, which jealously guards its independence (even though the secretary of state sits on the board).

In terms of technology, the US has been slow to understand the role of the internet, the lowest cost, most open medium in the world for spreading information and disinformation. The State Department is still sending out old-style pamphlets and films, rather than using the web as a tool to promote US interests. As one official says: “We have to identify what our target audience is.”

The final challenge for Ms Hughes is to nudge Mr Bush into a more balanced approach to the war on terrorism. This means supplementing the armed struggle and the pledge to make America safe with a preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political as it is military.

In the short term, the London bombings may make that pitch harder to sell. But without a balanced approach and a renewed effort at public diplomacy, the US risks losing the war on terror. Ms Hughes might care to re-read the October 2003 memo sent by Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary.

Mr Rumsfeld considered whether the US was killing, capturing, deterring or dissuading more terrorists than the radical clerics were recruiting, training and deploying.

“The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions.”

The writer is the FT’s US managing editor

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