Post-Liberal American Power

KEVIN MALONEY: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Carnegie Council. My name is Kevin Maloney, and I serve as director of communications here.

I would also like to offer a warm welcome to everyone who is watching online. We have quite a large audience tonight. Approximately 30 countries have signed up to watch this, so there is definitely a desire to hear from Jim and the panel. For everybody watching remotely, thank you so much for joining us as well.

Tonight marks the first panel in the Council’s newest event series, which we are calling Values & Interests. This series aims to provide a civic space where together we can examine the interplay between morality and power during a period of quite significant geopolitical disruption.

Moderating tonight’s panel is friend of the Council and senior fellow at Bard College, Jim Ketterer. Jim is joined by former Ambassador Cindy Dyer, who now serves as chief program officer at the McCain Institute, and Hendrik Onhesorge, who is managing director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Bonn.

Before hanging the program over to Jim, I would like to welcome to the podium Council President Joel Rosenthal, who is going to share a few framing remarks.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thanks, Kevin. Thank you all for coming out tonight; thank you for the audience online.

As Kevin said, I am Joel Rosenthal, President of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and I have been given the privilege to introduce the panel on "Values & Interests: Post-Liberal American Power."

Here at the Council, as Kevin said, we have been working for some time on the relationship between ethics and democracy, and for years we have been making the case for democracy as a normative or ethical standard. We have also been charting the rise of populism and illiberalism, and we have tried to connect these trends to the changing balance of power and the fate of the liberal world order.

I know these are very lofty ideas, but they are basic to the world we have been living in for the past 80 years. We all know that with recent developments, such as dramatic mass deportations, deployment of military units in American streets, the defunding of U.S. soft power institutions and foreign aid, the embrace of gunboat diplomacy, the resurrection of ideas like “spheres of influence,” and the list could go on, the world has changed. We have left an old order behind, and something new is emerging.

Here at the Council we have begun to label this new era as “post-liberal.” For those of you who are interested in exactly what we mean by this term “post-liberal,” you can hear more on the Values & Interests podcast series hosted by Kevin, and you can read more in my short essay, entitled “Ethics in a Post-Liberal World.” Both of these can be found on the Carnegie Council website.

The challenges of this post-liberal moment are both domestic and foreign. Tonight we are going to look at both by focusing on what the second term of the Trump administration has already done to usher in a post-liberal society and where this may lead America and the world.

Fortunately we have this wonderful panel here with us to share their ideas and experiences, and it is my hope that the discussion will help us to better understand what is happening both nationally and internationally so that we can respond in the most effective and appropriate ways.

With that, I want to hand it over to my good friend and colleague, Jim Ketterer, our moderator for this evening. Jim’s insight and guidance have been indispensable, and I am grateful, Jim, for all you have done for us at Carnegie Council to help us along.

JAMES KETTERER: Thanks, Joel, and thanks to all of you for being here. There are lots of other places you could be, and you have decided to be here instead. The work that the Carnegie Council does has been important for a very long time, and I would argue maybe now it is more important than ever. If it is your first time here, I would encourage you to dig into what the Council does, find other ways to get involved, other events, their publications, etc., and if you have been here before, obviously it was interesting enough to have you come back, and welcome back.

We are here to talk about soft power in hard times. I think we can see in the headlines the way those hard times are manifested, whether it is violence in Utah today, whether it is in Qatar, whether it is over the skies of Poland, and on and on and on. I think what we are going to speak about tonight is not somehow isolated or just theoretical but is directly connected to all that is going on.

We will start with short scene setters from our two panelists, I will ask some questions, we will have a conversation for a while, and then we will invite you and the online audience into that conversation. At the end of it, for those who are here, there is a reception so the conversation can continue.

With that, Cindy, maybe you could begin.

CINDY DYER: First of all, thanks so much for having me. I love that here where really smart people are gathered you have a true practitioner. I have spent the past 30 years either being a grantee of Department of Justice (DOJ) grants or Department of State grants or being the head of the Department of Justice office that gave grants or the head of the Department of State office that gave grants, so I have seen this from both sides. I was in the Bush and Biden administrations. I have worked for an organization founded by Hilary Clinton, and now I work for an organization founded by John McCain, so I can tell you the past few months have been a huge change to the way we have seen soft power used.

I think it is important to note that we are talking a lot about how soft power has been reduced and retracted, but please remember that even when we were using soft power we never used it in isolation. We always used soft power along with other things, and I am going to give you two quick examples and then kick it back for questions.

For example, when I was the head of the Office on Violence Against Women, we definitely used soft power to get local governments and counties to treat victims of domestic violence and sexual assault better. We used that money to say: “Here, have a women’s shelter; here, create a specialized prosecution unit. Do good things.”

We also said at the Office on Violence Against Women, “Do not charge people for receiving a rape kit.” Rape victims used to go to the hospital, come back, and then get a bill in the mail for the rape kit, and we said, “You should not do that.” We also said: “If your state continues to allow it, we are not going to send you any highway money. No highway money for you.” That’s not soft power; that’s threat. But that was what worked. We used both.

It was the same at the Department of State: Yes, we give countries money to do grants that increase victim protection and increase prosecution—soft power—but we also have the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which gives you a numerical grade, and if that country gets a grade 3, no foreign assistance for you, and I will block foreign assistance from multilateral banks and Millennium Challenge. Always keep in mind that we never used soft power alone; we used it in support, and what we have now is that one of our chief tools has been taken out of the toolbox, and now we only have the ones that are left.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much. Hendrik, maybe from a European perspective.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I will try. Thank you very much for having me. It is a great pleasure to be back here in New York. I am very much looking forward to the questions as well, and I will try to keep it short.

My remarks try to focus on four or five Ds. First, a brief definition: Soft power is the ability to get what you want, whether it is on the world stage or in social relationships of any kind based on attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or inducements. This is a very short, crisp definition of soft power, of course going back to the work of Joe Nye.

My second D brings us back from theory—which is always weird to talk about these days when there is so much going on and we academics don’t really know what is happening in the real world, so it is great to be paired with somebody who knows what she is actually talking about—and turn it over to the real world, where we see secondly a disregard for soft power in the current “toolbox” of American statecraft. There is a long tradition in American statecraft of soft power being a vital tool, maybe even an important tool, in getting desired outcomes on the world stage, of course alongside other forms of power.

This is not something you can separate. I would even argue that they are not two different kinds of power individually; they always interact. Soft power always had its role to play, whether during the Cold War or during the end of the Cold War. There is even a debate whether maybe it was more the soft power part of the equation which ended the Cold War rather than the hard power, because there was no actual war between the Soviet Union and the United States, but still the Wall—I’m from Germany—came down and the 40 years of separation ended peacefully. This was at least partly due to the attraction of the American system, politics, policies, and culture.

Right now we see a major disregard, but we see more than that: We see a third D, and this is I think destruction. We see not only a disregard but an active planned destruction of U.S. soft power. The list goes on and on. We have already talked about some of these things—the discontinuation of several programs and the defunding of several agencies which are the pillars of U.S. soft power, whether it is exchange programs or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or Voice of America. They are all examples of what not to do or examples of soft power destroyed.

The fourth D is decline. You can see a decline in the attractiveness of the United States from a European perspective. You mentioned the European perspective, and being from Europe I can speak to that perspective a bit. We can really see, whether it is in opinion polls or media statements, the number of tourists coming to this country, the number of students coming here, elite voices of policymakers, there is a declining attraction of the United States. This comes at a cost. There is a soft power price tag attached to this decline.

Fifth, we can see the development of what could be called “post-liberal” soft power. So another form of American attraction is emerging with different content and also different means and different audiences that at least sought to be addressed, so we can no longer see U.S. foreign policy based on those liberal foundations that were basically unchallenged for about 80 years after the end of the Second World War, that it is actually good to promote human rights and democracy abroad, that allies are a good thing to have, that alliances work, and that free trade is a good thing.

All of these things are now called into question, and there is a distinctly different variety or phase of soft power coming from especially Washington and I want to say especially from the White House or maybe even more precisely the Oval Office these days. This is what could be called the “development of post-liberal soft power.”

Then there is the big question of duration or durability, to put in a sixth D. We still do not know how durable this form of soft power is, and knowing that the other, liberal form of soft power worked so well for over a century, if you want to pinpoint the starting point with Woodrow Wilson and the speech in April of 1917, “to make the world safe for democracy”—so not going abroad for monsters to destroy and fighting imperial wars but rather fighting for the safeguarding or development of democracy—perhaps to 2017, the first inauguration of Donald Trump, where this came to an end, and especially now in Trump 2.0.

But we do not know how long this will last. My guess is that the post-liberal form of soft power at this stage has feet of clay and is not going to last very long, but we will have to discuss this.

I will hand it over to you with these Ds.

JAMES KETTERER: Thanks very much to both of you.

My first question is: To what extent do you think that Americans in general and Germans in general have a real sense as to what we are talking about today, the nature of soft power, the implementation of public diplomacy programs, and the institutions that have devised and implemented these programs. In my experience in working on them they have gone relatively unnoticed. Maybe this is part of the disregard D, but I think it is even something different than disregard because you have to know it to actively disregard it.

There has been a general failure of leadership to explain what these are, how they work, and why they are important, if in fact they were important if they are no longer there, but even the German institutions that are doing this now. What do you think about my premise that people don’t know, and do you think that has led us to where we are now?

CINDY DYER: I think you are spot-on. Number one, I don’t think most Americans know the term “soft power,” but I also think they don’t fully appreciate how much foreign assistance benefited and benefits them. I think we, the leaders of organizations and leaders of government agencies, have not done a good job of communicating.

For example, we may have a program at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons that is focusing on India, and it is making sure that shrimpers are receiving fair wages, that they have fair work, that they are getting paid, and the people who process the shrimp get paid. That is seen as helping India and helping Indian citizens.

It is also an important thing for shrimpers in Louisiana and Texas, who cannot compete when other companies don’t have to pay their workforce. They are going to lose that competition when other companies don’t have to pay their workforce, and let me tell you, if those other companies don’t pay their workforce, skirt the law, and are willing to lie on timesheets, they will also lie and stamp something as “Gulf Coast shrimp” which is no more a Gulf Coast shrimp than I am. I think we have not done a good job to explain how these things help Americans.

As someone who has led an office at DOJ and the State Department, every one of our grant programs actually had multiple layers of beneficiaries. It was never purely altruistic. Big shock. Maybe there was a financial benefit, like the shrimpers, but maybe it was, “I’m helping this other country because I want to have a military base there, and I want them to welcome my Navy and my sailors,” or “Maybe I’m going to help this other country because I need their vote at the United Nations.”

We were so busy saying, “Oh, it’s to help you,” that we were not disclosing sometimes what was going on behind the scenes, and I think we should have done a better job, and if we had some of this misinformation and disinformation might not have settled in to Americans where I think they may think all of this foreign assistance really was just wasteful and helping other people and not Americans when it did help Americans; we just did not do a very good job of communicating it.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I agree to that point and cannot add anything to the practical side of things. I think also academia and scholarship has a role to play there because the concept is so all-embracing but at the same time vague so that you don’t really know what it is, and sometimes the term “soft power” itself is a misnomer. I think it helps a lot if you focus on the “power” part to sell it, that it is just a form of power and it could be good or bad just as any form of power can be used for good or bad purposes, but if you want to be a powerful nation you had better also consider this form of power.

I think if we continue to make this point and show empirical examples of where this worked in the past, then I think soft power has a role to play in the future as well and can be seen not as some nice addition that you have if you have the money or if you think you don’t need military power anymore. That’s wrong. I think it is important to keep in mind that they go hand in hand, and you want to have both if you want to be a powerful country.

Part of the problem as well, from a German perspective perhaps, is that I don’t think many people are familiar with the concept or the term, but everybody understands immediately the concept behind it. If you think about the 1950s and 1960s, for example, when there was American culture, jazz diplomacy, and movies coming from America to Germany, and cultural centers were created. They may not know it by this name of “soft power,” but they know the experience and they know the role it played in many of their lives.

There is definitely this shared knowledge of experience, maybe not under this term, but there is the experience that this actually helps to be seen as attractive. Global politics is not a popularity contest, so it is not enough to be liked in and of itself, but it helps if you want to get your outcomes.

Finally, why soft power today perhaps is more under assault than it has been for a long time is because we are seeing more competitors now. The stage is much more crowded. Who is doing soft power? If you think about the Cold War years in West Germany, for example, it was arguably only the United States that did this. The Soviet Union tried as well, but that was basically it.

Now think about all the non-state actors doing it, terrorist networks using instruments of soft power as well, challenging rising nations like China or Russia, so the airwaves are literally much more crowded right now. There is something like the paradox of plenty, where there is so much you cannot take it in.

The United States enjoyed this liberal honeymoon of the 1990s, when they thought, Everybody loves us now and we don’t need to explain our story anymore, but it turns out that others were not so convinced and suddenly had their own stories to tell. Right now, the stage, as I said before, is more crowded, and this makes it hard for any actor to play an important part.

JAMES KETTERER: As you were talking about how people were interacting with the United States in those previous times, in my experience in working overseas on these programs no matter where I would work, no matter where I would go, people of a certain age would have known the American libraries all over the world, and many who came here started that journey by going to those libraries and all the resources that it brought. They were these soft power hubs, but they were highly, highly effective.

In that honeymoon period of the 1990s, when this triumphalist spirit in the United States was winning the day, the agency that ran those libraries, the U.S. Information Agency, was closed down. That was the same year that two of our embassies in East Africa were bombed; 9/11 happened a couple of years later, so the security clampdown in addition to looking for a “Cold War dividend” closed most of those libraries.

To your point, Hendrik, there have been many places where I have gone where people would say, “Oh, that’s where the American Library used to be, and now it’s the Cervantes Center or this or that.” Someone else has filled that space, so you can see that physical manifestation of it, but the soft power public diplomacy space is being filled by allies, adversaries, and nonstate actors. It is not static.

Cindy, I wonder if you could also give us more of a sense, since you have worked so much on these programs for different agencies and different entities, what is at stake? What is really being lost? We were talking about what we wish people had known about it; what do you think people should know about the downside risks of where we are now and tangibly—not just, “Oh, this agency closed or this agency closed”—what does it translate into?

CINDY DYER: First of all, a lot of things are being lost. I will give you an example of something that was just in the news today. The Treasury made a big announcement that they are sanctioning this organization that was engaging in online scam operations where there is dual victimization, where they identify a company that is fraudulently recruiting individuals that they then basically enslave in a compound and make those individuals scam people and defraud them of money. A lot of those scamming victims are U.S. citizens. A lot of them are retirees who have lost their life savings. They are people who are duped in romance scams. Americans have lost billions of dollars.

The Treasury Department is so excited, and they recently announced this big sanction, which is both helping enslaved individuals and Americans who have lost money. I will guarantee you, as someone who worked on sanctions, where do you think they got the information? They got it from local civil society organizations; they got it from local journalists. That is who gave the information about these really bad actors which allows us to sanction, free enslaved peoples, and prevent Americans from losing money.

The reason those civil society organizations are there and that they talk to us is because they have been supported by us. We support civil society organizations through our foreign aid. We support journalists who are working for Radio Free Asia or Europe, all of which have been completely defunded now. What we are losing is friends, information, and allies.

They got this sanction because they have been supported by the United States, but they are not going to have that going forward, and we are going to lose friends on the ground, connections, and information that we are not otherwise going to have access to, and that is going to harm America. It does not make us safer, for sure. It does not make us more prosperous. It is not an “America First” policy.

JAMES KETTERER: Hendrik, how do you feel what Cindy was just saying translates from the European side? You were saying in your opening statement about the view of the United States from Europe, but maybe you could give it some more specificity.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I couldn’t agree more with what was already said, but I think you could add to that what is also lost is the sense of American exceptionalism, that the United States is different from other countries—not always better, maybe. There are different definitions of “exceptionalism,” of course. Does it necessarily mean “normatively, ethically, and morally better?” You could argue for that, but there was always this sense that the United States did things differently than previous major world powers, certainly differently than the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Think about some major incidents, like mistakes made or natural or technological disasters. Within a couple of years we had Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion in the mid-1980s, and how both nations dealt with those. President Reagan gave an address the very evening of the Challenger disaster, very touching still to this day, very open, that we wanted to explore space but there were always going to be setbacks and some technological and maybe even manmade problems, and we had this catastrophe, but we are going to move on, no matter what. That was the general idea.

What about Chernobyl? There was no speech whatsoever. They literally tried to bury it in this concrete coffin that they built over it. This is one example where the United States was always perceived at least to be different from any other great major world power, even in a historical perspective.

If you think about other empires of the past, what made America different from a European and especially from a West German perspective was that America was this “empire by invitation,” not an empire that was put there or invaded another space for territorial gains as other empires did like the British Empire and the Roman Empire with cultural parts to it of course, but the general idea was increasing your own territory, but that was not the case with America after World War II. It was to make sure that you are not going to have to fight World War III. Being from Germany you have already seen that twice within one generation, and the idea was that the United States was invited to Western Europe to defend freedom quite literally on the Berlin Wall against the Russians. This is I think something that is being lost right now, this perception of the United States being different and doing things differently.

There are many examples. Trump sometimes speaks about it openly and says, “We are no different from other powers.” You don’t even have to read between the lines here, but I think this is something that is lost and is very hard to recover. Many Republicans and conservatives often compare their politics and the politics of strength and America First, as you have mentioned, to the politics of “peace through strength” approach of Reagan’s, but I think this misses the crucial aspect that Reagan was a firm believer in American exceptionalism, perhaps the most vocal believer in this when he spoke of the “shining city upon a hill.” This is something that is being more and more lost. The light has maybe not gone out but has grown rather dim right now.

JAMES KETTERER: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) were Reagan-era institutions.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Exactly, yes.

JAMES KETTERER: You mentioned something, Hendrik, that I want to explore with both of you too, and that is this idea of American power “invited in.” I have seen many cases where governments overseas would say: “How dare USAID show up here and wag their finger and tell us what to do, and how dare the Americans and others in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe judge our elections and tell us what to do?” But behind the scenes in my experience there are local actors and activists oftentimes in very precarious situations who quietly—because they have to quietly—invite the United States to come in, invite, if not the U.S. government, other organizations like NDI or IRI or others working with the U.S. government to come in and support them somehow, to do some things that they can’t do because their lives are at risk in doing it.

I think that is often lost in the conversations about this. It is not to say that the United States has not engaged in all kinds of shenanigans, problems, and highly problematic things, but there is this sense of being invited in. To say, “Well, these local actors will just be on their own and have to make their way on their own” is oftentimes a very grim situation for those local activists in my experience.

Cindy, given your experience, maybe you could also weigh in a little bit on the many people you have worked with over the years who have devoted their careers in the federal government and also with affiliated institutions to work on these programs who now find themselves out of work, find their programs or their whole agencies abolished, or if they are still employed feel themselves walking on eggshells every day for doing the work that they do. People read the headlines and see it from a distance, but maybe you could give it some up-close perspective.

CINDY DYER: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my friends. Most recently I was the ambassador at large for the Tafficking in Persons Office at the U.S. Department of State. Our office was slotted for 84 positions. It is interesting because the Trafficking in Persons Office work was not stuff that we did just because we wanted to. It was not subject to the whims of the secretary of state because it is very, very proscriptive. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act says “There will be an office, it will have an ambassador, it will give a trafficking in persons report every year, it will cover these 188 countries, it will be given to Congress on June 30th, and it will cover these specific things.” It is extremely proscriptive.

It also said, “It will lead U.S. government efforts to coordinate, and they will have a Survivor’s Council, and they will do these grants.” I think many in the trafficking persons community thought that because the issue is also very bipartisan—right now our biggest champions of the Trafficking in Persons Office are actually Republicans—that we would be spared.

The Office was not spared. We went from 84 staff members to about 33. They literally cannot do the congressionally mandated work that Congress has required us to do. They do not have the staff. The way that the “reductions in force,” the firings, were done was very objective: If you had less than a specific number of years of experience—and it was a lot, like six-and-a-half or seven years—everybody under that just got let go.

What is interesting is that we are not talking about people right out of school. Most people worked hard, studied, learned a language, and maybe worked at a local organization before they got into government, then they worked so hard and they have so much experience—six years; people don’t stay in jobs six years anymore—where they know these countries, and then they were decimated. Because it was the newer staff, of course the newer staff is in the hardest job, the reports and political affairs, the people who write that Trafficking in Persons Report. They lost almost all their staff and literally do not have enough manpower to do the congressionally mandated actions.

What is interesting is that the Trafficking in Persons Report, which was due when? June 30th, has not been released. It is complete because it was drafted in the spring before these layoffs occurred. I don’t know why it has not been released. The thing that I really don’t know is why Congress isn’t saying anything about it because it is due to them, and they haven’t said, “Hey, where’s that Trafficking in Persons Report that was due on June 30th?”

Guess what my office should be doing right now, in the Fall? They should be going to countries and saying, “This was the report, these were the areas you need to improve, you need to do this, you need to provide shelter for victims, and you need to not criminalize victims.” Well, they can’t do that because they don’t have a report, and the clock is ticking. They are not going to be able to go and engage in bilateral relationships to make progress on the TIP report because there is no TIP report, and soon it is going to be time for the next year, and what are we going to do then?

I don’t understand why Congress isn’t asking, “Where is the report?” It is super-frustrating because if this can happen to an issue with broad support—it’s a crowd pleaser; we can all agree that people should not be victims of trafficking. There are very few things we can agree on, and if it can happen to that office, boy, it can happen to any office.

JAMES KETTERER: So it has a chilling effect across the board.

Hendrik, I was thinking about something you mentioned earlier, and I want to have you expand upon it. We are spending a lot of time talking about how these narratives that are supporting the new hard power and the new manifestations of power are produced, but they are finding in many places, not just in the United States, receptive audiences. In fact, I think we could argue that they are finding audiences that are growing and we have to be honest and say that are agreeing with a large part of the manner in which these narratives are presented and the substance that they are presenting.

I know the current American leadership has been projecting that message also to Germany and Europe. There have been some fairly noteworthy cases, even in the first few months of the administration. Maybe you could talk about that and give us your take on what is happening with those audiences.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: First of all, I think you are exactly right, that there is a strategy behind that, the current administration seeks to find partners in this endeavor to focus on the hard power side of things and doing things more on a bilateral basis but discrediting international organizations, things like human rights promotion, democracy promotion, and other things.

I think this is for different reasons: One is because they cost money. They are not free, even though they are cheap when you compare them to one fighter plane. If you compare them to military expenditures, it is still very little. That is part of it.

I think it is also to do with the current situation in general because in most Western countries and certainly also in my country we are looking for dollars or in my case euros to be saved at a time of strained budgets, and usually those are the things that go first.

This was the case in the 1990s in this country. You talked about the “peace dividend” and the idea that you are spending lots of dollars on those programs which perhaps were no longer needed at a time when the economy was doing not very well after the end of the Cold War, so the first thing to do, perhaps even the natural thing to do if you don’t know what to do or how these things are working, is to cut spending for these things.

This circles back to the first question because there was at some times and still is a misunderstanding of how important these things are and also how long term they are. This is another problem, that things like exchange programs, for example, take years or decades to take effect, if at all. This is very hard to explain to a congressman, to say you have to invest money in this program and maybe in 30 years somebody who took part in this Fulbright program will become the leader of this country and will think back on the good time they had in the United States. That is a very long stretch. There are a lot of intervening things that can happen and a lot of time that goes by. That is part of the problem too.

Also, because issues are becoming more and more complex and the world is becoming more interdependent it is sometimes easier to just say: “Well, we don’t do these complicated things anymore. In times of so many crises, we do simple things. We do have a lot of hard power, so we want to use it.” I think a combination of these things contributes to the perception that soft power doesn’t matter anymore or perhaps right now is not the advisable thing to do, but I think it is actually the opposite.

JAMES KETTERER: You talked about people not being fully aware of what the programs are and the shapes that they take and how long it takes to get a return on that investment that might be captured. I think in general people also do not have a clear sense of how much they actually cost. You were talking about comparable costs, but there is an annual poll by the University of Maryland, and I think it has regularly said that most Americans think that these kinds of programs that we are talking about cost about 25 percent of the budget. Then they are asked, “Well, what should it be,” and they say maybe half that, and of course it is less than 1 percent of the budget.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I think during the Clinton administration in the 1990s when there were so many cuts that people started wearing buttons when it was just 2 percent or something. I think that is right. We have to explain better that it is not actually that much money.

We have to explain that it is not necessarily a partisan issue. I think this goes into it also. You mentioned Germany and Europe. There is a lot of polarization of course connected to this issue, but I think if you look at it in a historical perspective that was not the case. We have already mentioned Reagan. The U.S. Information Agency in the 1950s was founded under Eisenhower, certainly not someone you would label as liberal, weak on communism, or not interested in hard power. It was the opposite case with Eisenhower. It was McCain who said in 2007 in The New York Times during a time when the United States was facing comparable problems in terms of its international reputation during the Bush administration in their final stretches. He said, “We are disarming unilaterally in the war of ideas.” He too was not someone who should not speak to the Republican or conservative side of Congress. We have to make sure that politics does not creep into that, but it already has.

JAMES KETTERER: I am going to ask one more question for a very quick answer, and then we will turn it over to question-and-answer. This semester I am teaching two very different classes. One is a graduate class on diplomacy, and several of those students are here. They are certainly a lot younger than me. I am guessing they are in the their 20s.

I am also teaching a class on U.S. foreign policy that is designed for older adults. Both of these classes are taking a hard look at the history and dynamics that create the context, but you cannot avoid the context that we are in right now, the moment we are in.

I wonder what you might say to both of those groups, one of which is older and baffled at what is going on and deeply upset by it, and the other who are starting their careers in the field of international affairs. What kind of explanation would you give one group and advice for the second group?

CINDY DYER: To the old group—I am a little long in the tooth, so these are my people—I would say I am an optimist, and I jokingly say that at the McCain Institute we call ourselves a “do” tank, an action tank. We are not just a think tank; it is a do tank.

I immediately go to being angry. I will spend a while sulking and drinking margaritas, but then at some point we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, so to the old group I would say we have been here before. In the late 1980s and 1990s people did not care deeply about child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault. We fought hard to bring that into the mainstream and to make it a bipartisan issue, and dammit, we can do it again.

I did not want to do it again. I want to just relax and drink margaritas, but we can do it again, and I do think that is what we need to do. These are crowd pleasers. Nobody is going to say we need to start with those and gather it back, gather it back, gather it back.

To the young people I would say: “I intended to leave it better for you. I am sorry.” And it was better, but you can do this. Sometimes I think that young people—everybody thinks that it was harder for them, but you can do hard things. This is not good but learn from it. You can do it better than us.

There were things we could have done differently. We could have acknowledged the problems with the way USAID worked because everybody, even in foreign affairs, would say that was not a perfect system. It was very difficult. That is why there were so many for-profit companies that got money. We could have acknowledged it.

Second, we could have talked more about the benefits to U.S. citizens and America. We did not do that. So I would say you can do it and learn from our mistakes.

I would also just point out, we have been talking today about how this is impacting foreign support but just know that this is impacting my old office, the Department of Justice. This is impacting local communities too. They have had their Office on Violence Against Women funding cut, Office of Victims of Crime funding cut, and Bureau of Justice Assistance, so it is not just the things we were saying that we were wasting on foreigners. The government is pulling back support for U.S. folks too, and local women’s shelters are suffering, so keep in mind it is not just us.

I will say that one of the things that the grants that the Office on Violence Against Women, my old office, gave is we created strong coalitions in Dallas, Texas; Sacramento; and King’s County. Those strong coalitions that we supported with grant money are rising up. They are coming up and saying, “This is not okay,” so hopefully some of those original investments that we made will sprout; those seeds that we planted will grow.

JAMES KETTERER: Hendrik, explanation, advice, anything like that?

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Yes. An explanation would be good, advice maybe even better, but I would give the same advice to both groups of people, and I am not sure where I fit in in this generational divide that you opened that I don’t think sometimes exists. The important thing is to keep in mind, especially for soft power as well is that soft power has a distinct civil society and even individual perspective or part to it. It is not just what is happening in Washington. It is not even what is happening in Austin, Sacramento, or other state capitals. It is also about what is happening at the Lincoln Center or Kennedy Center or countless other initiatives and things that have not even been thought of. It is what is happening in a startup that is doing artificial intelligence.

The government has nothing to do with that. Quite the contrary. Sometimes soft power works best and is most attractive when it is removed from the government, which is even anti-governmental in terms of critical of certain policies, so I think that is not the time to lose hope. I am very much optimistic about that.

The democratic system is still the best that we have and this country has faced other problems in the past, certainly my country has, and with the help of your country we think we have overcome them. I think democracy and the role of soft power was very crucial in that and can be like that in the future.

I think there is no alternative to being optimistic. The great Sir Peter Ustinov, who was a United Nations Children’s Fund ambassador for many years always said, “I am an optimist because there are no alternatives.” I think that is a good way to think about it even in dark times sometimes.

JAMES KETTERER: That is a good segue into our question-and-answer period. I like that.

We will start with some questions from the online audience.

ALEX WOODSON: I am Alex Woodson from Carnegie Council, and I have some questions from the virtual audience.

This just came in, from Noha from Egypt: “My question is, in today’s crowded narrative space, what role can education still play in helping young people critically engage with competing global narratives?”

CINDY DYER: You actually asked a question earlier that this is potentially related to. You asked whether or not the average American understands and knows about soft power, even if they don’t know it by that name. Let’s shove that aside, because the answer to that is no, but even just the concept, and I would say no, but to answer this woman from Egypt I think there is an opportunity. I am a product of small-town public school Texas, and I sure did not know anything about this, and I am not sure that the small-town school that I went to has drastically changed since the early 1970s when I was there.

I do think more acknowledgment about teaching in civics—I don’t know that this came up in civics. We learned how a bill becomes a law. I don’t know that we learned some of the nuances about how do you make friends on an international scale, and it is more important now than ever because we live in a global world and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So that would be one thing, I think.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: I think education is absolutely key. I just thought about the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It says in its preamble that education is the most important part. I am quoting someone loosely here: “Wars begin in the minds of people,” so I think this is why education is key; in this sense soft power even precedes hard power because if you are good in explaining your story and your narratives—and this country has been second to none in explaining its story, having its story, and having the story of the American dream and possibilities for all, opportunity, freedom, democracy, and peaceful transfer of power—if you do that in an educated and fact-based way, warts and all, then you are much stronger because you’re in a position that you do not have to bomb others if they buy this narrative, are onboard, and if you act in accord with them to tackle the many common problems that we have. It is not that we don’t have any; we have too many. I think education is really the basis.

JAMES KETTERER: I would add to those great answers that there is a long and I think very positive history in American diplomacy in the use of educational programs as diplomatic tools. Some of them have to do with higher education and exchanges and things like Fulbright, which is an educational exchange but it is also probably our preeminent tool of soft power in that educational space.

I implemented some of these programs. One that was very, very successful worked with high school students and the teaching of English but also using English as an avenue into studies on leadership, cross-cultural communications, college readiness, and these were for students that did not have any thought that they might go to university. This program, which has a very long bureaucratic name—English Access Microscholarship Program—was actually started in Morocco by an ambassador who had some leftover money at the end of a budget cycle, and you use it or lose it. This was Ambassador Tutwiler, and she said, “Let’s take some of the counter-terrorism money and put it toward something like this.” It was so successful that it has been replicated in many, many countries, including countries I have worked in. It is a very powerful tool.

I have been with congressional delegations when they have met these students. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have loved it, so there is a clear understanding of how this promotes American interests and not just American values, and yet I saw that it was on the list to be eliminated. It costs a pittance. That is just one example.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: By the way, I think this is also a domestic side of things. It is not just for foreign student education. It holds true in every democratic society to educate their own citizens. This goes back to the founding of this republic, to Jefferson in founding, for example, the University of Virginia. He recognized that this country as it was growing militarily and economically also had to grow in terms of culture and arts, and there are many examples from the very early days of the republic where you recognize that it is vital to keep democracy working at home as well. Education as a basis for democratic rule and understanding is not something just Germany should do in other countries, but Germany should also do it at home.

JAMES KETTERER: Another place where there is a lot of competition now for the United States as it steps back is the promotion of higher education as a diplomatic tool but also a financial tool. In the embassies that I have worked with no one is more interested in people from outside coming to American universities than the Foreign Commercial Officer because the money is real, and anybody who works in higher education certainly knows how that works. There is a whole program called EducationUSA that promotes these programs, and as the United States, for whatever reason, steps back from this, there are plenty of allies and adversaries who are more than happy to and have the capability to step into that space.

QUESTION: My name is George Buelow. I am an independent historian. I want to compliment you, first of all, for bringing these thoughts forward, explaining soft power and going on with it.

I am sorry to say that I feel extremely pessimistic. The question I wrote to myself at the beginning was: Who will be the public who will respond? I then thought to myself, We have nativist, populist, anti-immigrant, and anti-democratic feelings across classes, across education, and across income levels. These are the people right now who don’t read the news, don’t care about the longer-term issues, and are not particularly interested in being educated in all of the things that we have talked about so wonderfully.

In the United Kingdom you have the Reform Party; in France you have the [National Rally]; in Germany you have the Alternative für Deutschland. You have fascists in Italy. In Hungary and Turkey you have autocrats who have done everything they can systematically to make them anti-democratic, and on top of all this we are witnessing country after country with a percentage of gross domestic product that constitutes national debt that does not provide the wealth to come forward with longer-term programs with the kind of thinking that the United States had for 80 years.

I am very, very worried because as I see it we might have to wait for an entire generation to go through all of this, and that is quite a while. We may find something similar to what happened in the 1920s or with the Know-Nothing Party.

JAMES KETTERER: Let’s get a response from our panelists to that scene setter.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: This was more a comment than a question, but I think you touched upon a very important issue, which is that it also matters what the respective country or political system delivers for its people, not just for its constituents or those who voted for them but for the people living in the country: Do they provided the basics that a government should provide — security, welfare, and a better life for their children?

There are many instances, especially in Western societies, where there is at least the perception that those parties of the past did not deliver on that. This is the same in my country as it is in this country. It is important to keep in mind, and this is something I have been working on for a number of years. My colleague Michael Oppenheimer is in the audience from New York University, and he has been talking about that a lot as well, that it also matters to make competent good decisions and deliver outcomes for your people because that after all is what the government should be about, not infighting or about political party gains, redrawing electoral maps, or whatever, but to deliver outcomes for a more prosperous, safer, and more secure future.

In this sense it is important to keep in mind that these parties exist, but those problems can only be tackled if the established parties make good decisions and deliver outcomes.

CINDY DYER: I also think that we may need to do a better job of communicating and reframing the benefits of soft power. I don’t know if we are explaining it in a way that explains to the average American how beneficial it is, and I think it may be helpful to get a chorus of other people, not like pointy-headed ambassadors and academics up here but veterans who will say that they don’t want to go to war as the first thing, so please try to exhaust some other options before you send me, my son, or my daughter in.

This is not an either/or, I am going to use soft power instead of hard; this is a both/and. I think in general soft power is less expensive, much safer, and usually pretty effective. So we just need to change our argument so that it is more compelling, appealing, and understandable to people. Maybe even having more of our veterans talk about the benefits — I have many family and friends and they will say, “Do soft power first, please, before you take me away from my family and send me to the other side of the world.”

JAMES KETTERER: I think it was General Mattis who said, “Either get me some more diplomats or buy me some more ammunition.”

How about one more brief question? We will have brief answers, and then we can segue into the reception and continue the conversation.

QUESTION: I think you guys made a lot of good points. That was an interesting question from George, but something that kept going through my mind is when you brought up earlier Reaganism versus how Trump runs his government now, it made me think how social media plays a hand in this and how we can be educated and how we can understand what this shift means. You brought up earlier to the older generation that you guys tried to fight for these things and you wanted them to still be instilled for us, but they weren’t.

I think there are poor people and people who are not educated who do care about these things. They don’t necessarily realize that it is going on. How do you think we can better come up with solutions to have people realize this is happening and find a way to bring back what our older generations fought for without feeling like everything is lost? We are very desensitized lately.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you.

HENDRIK OHNESORGE: Excellent point. Maybe I can go first. I think technology has always been crucial for the projection and use of soft power, and this goes back through history; only the technology has changed. This goes back to the invention of the printing press, which was crucial for the Reformation, for example, to bring out a certain narrative and open up new audiences with printing books in numbers that were unheard of just a few years before. This goes back to the invention of the radio in the early 20th century, to television, to the internet itself, and now to social media.

In this sense social media can be seen as an instrument to use soft power, but at the same time technologies by themselves have no ethic. They can be used for both good and bad purposes, and what is good and bad very much depends on the eye of the beholder as well. Dictators through the 1990s, certainly in my country, made use of technology to horrific effect but very successfully in a way. We have to learn from these lessons as well that technology can also be used in very unethical and worst possible ways, and we have to keep that in mind.

At the same time, we were talking about this earlier, but what is also changing the scene right now is not just new technology but artificial intelligence, which not only changes or brings a new medium, a new way of communicating, but is communicating itself. That is a new level, and we have seen many examples where you ask a question to a handful of artificial intelligence programs and they come up with very different answers to the same questions, and what lies behind that is still something that I certainly don’t understand but it is something that has huge ramifications on the formation of narratives. If we are talking about narratives as a form of soft power, for example, if you type in certain artificial intelligence programs, “Who is responsible for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine,” you get very different answers.

What matters now is not only to use those technologies but also to see who misuses them or to keep in mind that there is always a dark side to this power as well. This goes back to the very beginning, that soft power is just a form of power which can be used for both good and bad purposes and can be used in a liberal and post-liberal way, and each and every one of us has to take care that it is used in a good way.

CINDY DYER: I am the parent of two young adults, and I tell them it is possible now for them to basically only hear news and individuals who agree with them. You can very easily avoid exposing yourself to alternative viewpoints, and I think that is a real danger. It is a danger even for you to aggressively promote your own viewpoint. If you don’t know what the other side is saying, you cannot craft your argument to object to it.

Intentionally expose yourself. Pick the website that you think is the most awful and read it every day. Read the one that makes you happy everyday too but read the one you disagree with because otherwise you are not even going to know what the other group is saying. I tell this to my two young adults all the time, and I think it is such an important point. I think young people now can pretty much surround themselves only with people who agree with them, and that detracts from their ability.

Everybody is so busy setting boundaries. Well, what happened to crossing boundaries? Didn’t that used to be a good thing? I think intentionally exposing yourself to alternative viewpoints will better improve your own argument.

JAMES KETTERER: Please join me in thanking this wonderful panel.