SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Robert Gates displayed solid news judgment as well as a sense of history when he joked to an audience at Kansas State University Monday that his appeal for increased State Department funding was a case of man-bites-dog. Gates was serious, however, in presenting a valid critique of recent US efforts to meet contemporary challenges almost entirely by military means. His prescription for righting the imbalance between hard power and soft power should be debated by the presidential candidates of both parties. The next president also would do well to ponder the implications of what Gates left unsaid: that damage has been done to the international treaties and organizations America helped build in the past half-century, which the Bush administration has either abandoned or denigrated.
Gates's brief for revival of America's neglected soft power reflects a lucid understanding of the nation's need for nonmilitary capabilities to meet "new threats" that are "fundamentally political in nature." He called not only for expansion of the foreign service but also a revitalization of development aid and new structures to make America's case to the world. "Public relations was invented in the United States," Gates lamented, "yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that Al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America."
This observation is true as far as it goes. But images on Al Jazeera of tortured or humiliated detainees in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo are not easily countered, not even by the most sophisticated public relations campaign.
Gates is not in a position to say publicly that some varieties of anti-American propaganda, such as those that use images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, are effective because they are drawn from nasty realities. In its treatment of detainees, the Bush administration has scorned the Geneva Conventions, permitting forms of torture that Japanese war criminals were convicted of using on American prisoners of war in World War II. This administration has also backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, left negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and tried to quash the International Criminal Court.
What Gates left unsaid, but should have said, is that America will not be able to retrieve its squandered soft power without showing a decent respect for the international treaties and organizations of a world order that was laboriously constructed by previous US administrations.
