The next round of the seemingly endless frustration over U.S. public diplomacy is underway. Rod Dreher's recent rebuke of contemporary public diplomacy programs succinctly recapitulates the "problem" with U.S. public diplomacy -- at least according to how he frames the subject. For Dreher, the U.S. public diplomacy is losing the "information war," because it is being outflanked by jihadist media campaigns. For Dreher, U.S. efforts look absurdly anachronistic. The U.S.

Now is the time to finish the job we began in Afghanistan five years ago. Last year saw a desperate and vicious onslaught by a new generation of Taliban forces with enhanced logistical and financial support. More than 4,000 Afghans, many of them civilians, were killed in military actions in 2006, a three-fold increase from the previous year. Suicide attacks -- a phenomenon unknown to Afghans before 2002 -- jumped to 118 from 21.

On January 10, 2007, the State Department hosted a Private Sector Summit on Public Diplomacy. The purpose of the conference was to bring together professionals from the public relations sector to consider how U.S. public diplomacy programs and objectives could be improved by input from the corporate communications world. Given the recent BBC polls showing that U.S. popularity continues to plummet worldwide -- it's no surprise that the State Department is reaching out to organizations that are defined by their communication expertise.

(Cairo) Sunni-Shia power politics and U.S.-Egyptian relations have come head-to-head in a dispute over a satellite television station that is the latest weapon in the arsenal of Iraq’s insurgents.

Al-Zawraa, a television version of the now-infamous jihadi websites, is being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider answerable to the Egyptian government. The Iraqi station features non-stop scenes of U.S. troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who died at age 80 December 8, will likely be recalled as the great master of public diplomacy shock and awe during the Ronald Reagan presidency. She was arguably the most effective champion of President Reagan's foreign policy objectives, who rivaled the president himself when it came to working the media.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, December 13, 2006.

Anti-Americanism has emerged as a term that, like "fascism" and "communism" in George Orwell's lexicon, has little meaning beyond "something not desirable." However it is defined, anti-Americanism has clearly mushroomed over the last six years, as charted in a number of polls. This phenomenon is, everyone agrees, intimately tied to the exercise of U.S. power and perceptions around the world of U.S. actions.