WASHINGTON, 26 August 2005 — Two years ago a US task force concluded that hostility toward the United States has reached “shocking levels,” but only this week has Karen Hughes finally taken up office at State Department as the new Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy.
Why the delay by the Bush confident? She resigned in 2002 to move back to Texas until her son finished high school — he finished this Spring, but Hughes then said she wanted to prepare him for college (he’s off to Stanford) and then she wanted pack up the house and then move back to DC...
All of which indicates a surprising lack of urgency for an Administration, and president, who’ve reached their lowest poll ratings ever.
Also, the majority of Americans now say that one foreign policy decision — the war in Iraq — “was a mistake.” The question now being asked in Washington is if it’s too late for Hughes to repair and improve America’s image problems abroad. The 2003 Task Force, headed by former Ambassador Edward Djerejian, concluded that 80 percent of America’s lousy image abroad stemmed from American policies. So how much good can tweaking communication and image affect the other 20 percent?
Hughes, who last week laid out her plans for public diplomacy during a meet with Bush at the president’s ranch in Texas, said one of her first priorities is to set up “rapid response” teams to counter bad news and defend administration policies around the globe, especially in the Middle East. Condoleezza Rice said in an interview this week that the units would “work to deal with misinformation and misinterpretation.” Hughes, 49, a former television reporter, says she also wants to create an “interagency public diplomacy” operating team, and start training State Department Foreign Officers to improve their public relations skills.
She has instructed State Department officials to send new summaries of American policies on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the Iraqi constitution to embassies overseas. A good start for US Foreign Service personnel who have often complained of orbiting in darkness regarding America’s foreign policy.
Hughes also is planning trips to the Middle East to assess things there herself, and already has held a flurry of meetings here with ambassadors, students, clerics and academics from Arab and Muslim countries.
But what about Hughes’s real foreign affairs experience? This week the White House began emphasizing the fact that she has accompanied Bush on foreign trips and has worked to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan. But no one is pretending that foreign affairs is her forte. Hughes will face a much tougher audience than when she resigned from the White House in 2002, before the US invasion into Iraq has severely hurt America’s image throughout much of the world.
Both of her two predecessors in the post — advertising executive Charlotte Beers and Margaret Tutwiler, a onetime aide to former Secretary of State James Baker — left office without much to show for their efforts.
But, analysts say, don’t count out Hughes before she begins, particularly as recent elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories have given Bush’s vision for Middle Eastern democracy a boost.
