This book presents the first-ever close and up-to-date look at how American diplomats working at our embassies abroad communicate with foreign audiences to explain US foreign policy and American culture and society. Projecting an American voice abroad has become more difficult in the twenty-first century, as terrorists and others hostile to America use modern communication means to criticize us, and as new communication tools have greatly expanded the worldwide discussion of issues important to us, so that terrorists and others hostile to us have added negative voices to the global dialogue. It analyzes the communication tools our public diplomacy professionals use, and how they employ interpersonal and language skills to engage our critics. It shows how they overcome obstacles erected by unfriendly governments, and explains that diplomats do not simply to reiterate set policy formulations but engage a variety of people from different cultures in a creative ways to increase their understanding of America.

Front Line Public Diplomacy explains how American diplomats at US embassies abroad communicate with foreign publics to support American national interests, countering misperceptions and hostile portrayals of our country.

"This paper asserts the importance of public diplomacy, an element of soft power, in achieving U.S. national security goals. Following an analysis of the U.S. government's process to formulate and deploy soft power and public diplomacy, this paper presents and assesses historical and contemporary application of public diplomacy as an element of national power. In addition to reform and modernization of the Department of State's public diplomacy capacity, it is recommended that more attention, resources, and personnel be appropriated by the U.S. government towards public diplomacy initiatives. The paper concludes that national policymakers should integrate public diplomacy, as a complement to hard power, more fully into foreign policy planning and execution in order to achieve national security goals."--Abstract

The Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, held at the Royal Academy of Arts of London and seven other major venues throughout the United Kingdom in 1944 and 1945, was the first collective display of Brazil’s art shown in the United Kingdom and the largest ever sent abroad until then. It resulted from an initiative championed by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and envisioned by 70 Modernist painters who donated 168 artworks as a contribution to the Allied War effort. Notwithstanding its historical relevance and unmatched scale, this event had never been academically investigated. Through exploring why and how successfully the Brazilian government devoted superlative efforts to this enterprise in the midst of World War II, this book is intended to fill this gap and gain an understanding of a largely neglected public aspect of a deeply studied period of Brazilian foreign policy. The research unearthed abundant firsthand documents to reconstruct the episode, adopting the hermeneutic method and a theoretical framework from the Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy fields in order to interpret the circumstances that made possible this improbable and challenging endeavor. It contends that the Exhibition was a remarkably innovative action of Public Diplomacy avant la lettre, which aimed at engaging with British society and enhancing the image of Brazil and its culture. Its motivations must be understood within the broader foreign policy, focused on obtaining prestige and repositioning Brazil in the postwar international order, which encompassed the deployment of 25,000 troops to fight in Europe. The research further claims that the initiative was intended and managed to achieve a substantial impact on views about Brazil, by means of conveying a well-planned message.

Proponents of American public diplomacy sometimes find it difficult to be taken seriously. Everyone says nice things about relying less on military force and more on soft power. But it has been hard to break away from the longtime conventional wisdom that America owes its place in the world primarily to its muscle. Today, however, policy makers are recognizing that merely being a "superpower" - whatever that means now - does not ensure security or prosperity in a globalized society. Toward a New Public Diplomacy explains public diplomacy and makes the case for why it will be the crucial element in the much-needed reinvention of American foreign policy.

Veteran diplomatic correspondent Paul Richter goes behind the battles and the headlines to show how American ambassadors are the unconventional warriors in the Muslim world—running local government, directing drone strikes, building nations, and risking their lives on the front lines. The tale’s heroes are a small circle of top career diplomats who have been an unheralded but crucial line of national defense in the past two decades of wars in the greater Middle East. In The Ambassadors, Paul Richter shares the astonishing, true-life stories of four expeditionary diplomats who “do the hardest things in the hardest places.” The book describes how Ryan Crocker helped rebuild a shattered Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban and secretly negotiated with the shadowy Iranian mastermind General Qassim Suleimani to wage war in Afghanistan and choose new leaders for post-invasion Iraq. Robert Ford, assigned to be a one-man occupation government for an Iraqi province, struggled to restart a collapsed economy and to deal with spiraling sectarian violence—and was taken hostage by a militia. In Syria at the eruption of the civil war, he is chased by government thugs for defying the country’s ruler. J. Christopher Stevens is smuggled into Libya as US Envoy to the rebels during its bloody civil war, then returns as ambassador only to be killed during a terror attach in Benghazi. War-zone veteran Anne Patterson is sent to Pakistan, considered the world’s most dangerous country, to broker deals that prevent a government collapse and to help guide the secret war on jihadists. “An important and illuminating read” (The Washington Post) and the winner of the prestigious Douglas Dillon Book Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy, The Ambassadors is a candid examination of the career diplomatic corps, America’s first point of contact with the outside world, and a critical piece of modern-day history.