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When the American government says it seeks Improve relationships With a country like China, it usually refers to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party state rather than with the Chinese state. This is because the US State Department is biased towards relations with governments and not with individuals. Through the very form of our diplomacy, governments are in effect declared as the legitimate representatives of their people.
But some governments do not actually represent the people. They rule without the consent of the governed – or any partial form of consent embodied in such cultural traditions as respect for the hierarchical authority of kings or tribal chiefs. So when Our diplomacyIn fact, by giving legitimacy to totalitarian authoritarian regimes – regimes that oppress their own people – we harm relations with their subjugated peoples. We frustrate them. We are working to strengthen the efforts made by regimes to reduce them to a psychological state of futile surrender and fatalistic acceptance that political change is impossible.
Some presidencies have considered public diplomacy and relations with foreigners a major priority. For example, President Reagan was a moral witness to people's suffering under communism. He reached out to them – they no longer felt alone and without any moral support in their opposition to communist tyranny. He elevated the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the hierarchy of foreign policy agencies. He boosted the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty with an infusion of $2.5 billion ($8.17 billion in today's dollars). He gave speeches and interviews with the people of captive nations. He told the truth about the oppressive communist tyrants and showed it to the captive peoples Communist power It's no longer so great that it could prompt US presidents to censor themselves. It was this public diplomacy – and the associated strategy of political and ideological warfare against communism – that provided much of the explanation for the reasons that prompted a million people to demonstrate in Moscow to demand radical political change.
China has abused its trade relations with the United States. Trump can fix it
FILE – In this June 29, 2019 file photo, US President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, western Japan. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
today, President Trump It has a tremendous opportunity to reconnect with peoples suffering from communist tyranny. But whatever efforts he makes will only last as long as he is president, unless he and Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio reform the State Department.
This reform must include the creation of a US public diplomacy agency – similar to, but not identical to, the previous CIA – within the State Department, whose director will be deputy secretary of state and legal observer on the National Security Council. Other public diplomacy entities, such as Voice of America (VOA) and even the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), should operate under its umbrella. This structure will only work in the long run if career incentives encourage foreign service personnel to become “full-spectrum diplomats” able to excel at public diplomacy and its “cousins,” such as political warfare, ideological competition, and psychological strategy—nonmilitary tools. Conflict that can enable us to “win without war.” Accordingly, enabling legislation should specify that 50% of all ambassadorial and assistant secretary positions held by career staff should go to those who have spent the majority of their careers in public diplomacy.
After making all our government's global messaging platforms accountable to… American foreign policythe messages should then change. The contents of the programs of the Voice of America and the State Department's Center for Global Engagement have suffered from the influence of leftist ideology that has failed to support the American constitutional order as a truly positive and humane alternative to the narratives of contemporary totalitarian powers, such as communist China and the communist state. The global jihadist movement.
(Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin pool photo via AP, file)
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To that end, VOA's mission cannot continue to be merely “good journalism.” “Good public diplomacy” must serve our national security. We don't need another version of a publicly funded media outlet like NPR. Instead, we must tell America's story to the world and confront Communist China's massive narrative war against us. We must show, for all the sins of our ancestors, what America is like Unprecedented civilizational ability Self-improvement has made our nation the freest, most innovative, prosperous, and generous nation in history, and how alignment with the United States can generate these gifts for other nations as well.
While conventional wisdom insists that incoming President Donald Trump has a laissez-faire mandate from war-weary voters, the reality is that if we choose to ignore the world's problems where they exist, they will show up on our doorstep worse than they were before. They were before. A comprehensive approach to foreign policy that prioritizes persuading and empowering the people of other countries, rather than appeasing their own corrupt or hostile governments, has already proven effective. We saw this clearly in the twentieth century. A quarter of the way into the 21st century, it's time to do what we know works.
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