21st-century statecraft

I AM suspicious of the phrase “21st-century statecraft”. I am suspicious because I can’t define it, even though I’ve listened to Alec Ross speak about it twice. (Mr Ross is the senior advisor for innovation at America’s Department of State.) Is it a new kind of state-run broadcaster, a digital Radio Free Europe? Is it a new kind of public diplomacy? Is it a new kind of foreign aid, a digital USAID? Is it a quicker, less centralised way of determining America’s public response to an international event? Does it signal a focus on the role the internet plays in human rights and international trade?

I’ve now encountered it for a third time, in a profile of Mr Ross and a colleague, Jared Cohen, in the New York Times Magazine. And I’ve decided that “21st-century statecraft” is just a grab-bag; it means all of those things. Some of them are good ideas. Some of them are not. And all they have in common is that the internet exists. Over the last twenty years, industry by industry, young men and women have made a living by saying “You don’t get it, old man, this is the internet. Everything’s different now.” I don’t blame Mr Ross for wanting this gig; it’s a good one. (It was mine, once.) The problem with “you don’t get it, old man” is that it fails to distinguish what about the new is good, and what is bad, and it often fails to recognise that much of what you can do on the internet is not new at all.

Take just one of these ideas: a digital Radio Free Europe. Accurate information is as important now as it was during the Cold War, so of course it’s a good idea to distribute that information where the readers are, in social forums on the internet. But now, as then, it’s hard to determine how to fund a state broadcaster so that it’s both trusted and trustworthy. Radio Free Europe was paid for, originally, by the CIA. Was it therefore tainted? If it was perceived as such – and it was – then it doesn’t much matter.

Last summer, after the election in Iran, the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled service interruption (and either Twitter or State leaked the request). Iran noticed. As Evgeny Morozov pointed out in an oped in the Wall Street Journal,

    …the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world—i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions of the U.S. State Department—may simply endanger the lives of those who use such services in authoritarian countries. It’s hardly surprising that the Iranian government has begun to view all Twitter users with the utmost suspicion; everyone is now guilty by default.

Or take another idea: digital public diplomacy. Mr Ross has been working with Farah Pandith, America’s new special representative to Muslim communities. He wants to help amplify her physical presence with an online one, telling her “There should be a trail of Muslim engagement behind you.” But there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between what Ms Pandith is expected to do and what Karen Hughes did as the ambassador for public diplomacy during the second Bush administration. Ms Pandith, who was born in Kashmir, might be easier for Muslims to relate to than Ms Hughes, but both set out to solve the same problem: The world just doesn’t seem to understand how great America is. This is the central problem of public diplomacy, which is expected to fill in the gaps between America’s policies and its self-image. I’m not sure how Twitter is going to help.

And of the traditional work of any diplomatic corps — meeting with representatives of other countries to hammer out agreements — Mr Ross says this:

    …even last year, in this age of rampant peer-to-peer connectivity, the State Department was still boxed into the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations, what Ross likes to call “white guys with white shirts and red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties, with flags in the background, determining the relationships.”

You don’t get it, old man. This is the internet. Everything’s different now.