Next month I'll participate as a guest of the State Department's U.S. Speaker and Specialist Program on the topic of Obama's public diplomacy.  The U.S. Embassy in Japan has invited me to speak at all five American Centers on the topic of “Persuader-in-Chief: The New Public Diplomacy under the Obama Administration.” My travel will take me from Naha, Okinawa, to Tokyo American Center, and then on to Fukuoka, Nagoya, and Kansai.  I'll be doing public lecures and more intimate roundtables.   

In the summer of 1993 and fall of 1994 I traveled to Japan as a cultural affairs and educational exchange representative of the United States Information Agency.  Both trips were very memorable, with the first involving participation in the International Youth Village, a global gathering of young professionals at the base of Mount Fuji, and the second an exchange of cultural affairs officers, myself from USIA to Japan and Tadashi Ogawa of the Japan Foundation to USIA. (Tadashi and I have remained in touch and he contributed a chapter on Japanese public diplomacy to my Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy.)  The second trip included a family home stay where I slept on tatami mats and took part with my Japanese host mother and daughter in the urban Japanese bath.  Japan is famous for its strong cultural diplomacy and exchange programs, including the JET and Fulbright Programs.   

The downside is an overreliance on the public diplomat-in-chief in the White House. Public diplomacy is best practiced as a symphony, not a one-man band. National reputation does not reside in one person, much less in one electoral outcome. It is deeply buried in the perceptions of countless people around the world, often rooted in their own national cultures, and can be rebuilt slowly and painstakingly only by altering the root causes of a country's good or bad name.

Consider what led to America's recently improved reputation in the world. It was a global perception that this new president would not only pay lip service to a new America that listens and learns, but would also change U.S. policies that connoted American unilateralism. We are now on a collision course among American soft power in rhetoric, a global citizen president in principle, and a commander-in-chief in practice.

Read my entire article in the November 2009 issue of Perspectives magazine.