Public diplomacy in counterinsurgency theory and the culture wars

All political goals require public support to be achieved. This is a basic fact of the political life of any system. And at its root, support requires trust. It is trust that empowers cooperation in society, and it forms the essential mortar to hold any project together from start to finish. But trust is effervescent, difficult to quantify, and thus hard to plan on or around. In contrast to trust, is ideology. Whereas the former is a dynamic personal attribute, the latter is an external marker of signaling between groups. In close proximity to each other, the two prescribe mutually incompatible ways for dealing with ambiguity. While there is a human element of give-and-take to relationship building, there is none with dogma. So dogma tends to destroy trust.

Today, trust in government and the media is at an all time low, and ideological dogma at a recent high.

According to a 2019 Pew research poll, 71% of adults believe Americans are less confident in each other than they were 20 years ago because of social ills, the media, personal unreliability, and government problems. It is no wonder in such an environment why so many of the social projects that need trust to function are breaking down. Dogmatic viewpoints destroy the capacity of another with different viewpoints from inhabiting the same moral universe as the enlightened self. In turn, this fans the flames of hot rhetoric, which ultimately leads to aggressive behavior that can instigate actual violence. Thankfully, we have not arrived at this point in American history, yet. But with our elevation of dogma, our moral banishment of a rising “enemy”, and our rapidly narrowing distance between different peoples’ red lines, the threat of actual violence in the future is an absolute and deeply lamentable possibility. (It just so happens it would accomplish absolutely nothing). It is in possible anticipation of this gear shift that public diplomacy, most recently framed within counterinsurgency theory, could prove useful.

I worry the term counterinsurgency may mislead, so some clarification is necessary. The US Department of State defines counterinsurgency as “comprehensive civilian and military efforts taken to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.” When I speak of counterinsurgency, what perhaps comes to mind are the back-and-forth gun battles and roadside bomb deactivations that have peppered the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. But I invoke the idea of counterinsurgency because of the functional framework it provides: where there are objective threats to the healthy functioning of a society, a lack of community trust, and a need to combat extremism. It is in this goal-oriented framework where public diplomacy is understood to make the most sense. It is also in this framework where harmful ideologies are defined and systematically targeted. And perhaps this layered definition creates a more accurate description of what is needed in American society today, as well as illustrating the conceptual shortcomings of our own terminology (both with counterinsurgency and public diplomacy).

Public diplomacy that is conceived within this framework will look and operate in a way unlike anything before it. This will not be a linear communications channel or dialogue to explain military operations, or promote government foreign policies. It will hardly even have definitive target individuals or formal groups. But it will have clear goals and make explicit use of strategy in its operation. It will follow an emergent, networked discourse that is contributed to and edited Wikipedia-like in response to threats and harmful, divisive narratives. It will have its share of larger stakeholders, but these will not be PR agencies or big governments. It will be entities that have social trust and engagement that continually demonstrate value connecting their words to tangible results in the real world. And the bottom line will always run towards a rigorous prescription of targeted deescalation and destruction of extremism.

To distinguish this ambling and amorphous activity from the current cacophony of public discourse, we will also need something else. The only way to really defeat escalating tit-for-tat action is mass buy-in recognizing the futility of this enterprise. And it is only when members of the public individually internalize this feeling (instead of being lectured about it) can dogmas begin to topple. What is required then is a balance: Balancing policies targeting mass behavior in counterinsurgency with a focus on cultivating a personal and practical buy-in to change an undesirable status quo. This balance of the various elements of national power and statecraft, as General David Patraeus writes in his Counterinsurgency Field Manual, is essential to success.

The freedom to disagree and to act as one pleases this side of a law congruent with our founding values is fundamental to who we are. But when functionally defined as pure license, and in contempt of the laws of a free state, this so-called “freedom” proves itself a self-serving, short-lived cancer that ends its life in the completely opposite condition. Mainstream America’s present inability to articulate, voice, and enforce a standard of reasonableness in the cultural vernacular speaks to our severe deficiencies in this area. Effective public diplomacy is essential to reversing this. But we may be wise to add muscle to this effort through the rigorous, functional, and strategic framework of counterinsurgency theory and the work it does combating extremism.