Re/View: Empire of Ideas

Alex Nagel

The global saturation of American culture is neither accidental nor trivial, it is the product of decades of policy experimentation: an effort to build an empire that manifests over airwaves as much as through boots on the ground. However, projecting ‘America’ requires defining ‘America’, which is as politically contentious a question at home as abroad. Moreover, lacking the censorship powers of more authoritarian states, American diplomats have to project a positive image of ‘America’ without appearing overly deceptive. In Empire of Ideas, Justin Hart traces how the first generation of public diplomats in the United States confronted these challenges. And if the United States wants – or will, at some point in the future, want – to lead the world through existential crisis (Climate Change most pressing among them), it will have to rely on its credibility and positive image abroad. It is a challenge as pressing now as it was in the past, public diplomacy born amidst crisis then, and now.

The project of reshaping American diplomacy started, appropriately, in its imperial backyard: Latin America. There, at a conference in Buenos Aires in 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the process with a speech calling for cooperation, rather than conflict, between the countries of the ‘new world.’ The “American Century” would be built through winning “hearts and minds”. Shortly after the conference, the State Department created a division – the Division of Cultural Relations – to head up these efforts. The initial stabs at fulfilling this promise were cultural exchange programs which, over time, morphed into a system for disseminating American culture. The debate within the division between purists, who viewed cultural exchange as a peaceful post-national project, and policymakers, who saw ‘public diplomacy’ as another tool for the State Department to use, proved tone-setting for the next two decades.

Creating and disseminating propaganda abroad quickly became a pressing issue when the United States joined the fray against the Axis. Import, however, could not hide the question of what the shape and aims of public diplomacy should be. In 1942 Roosevelt signed the Office of War Information into existence, which would further develop American public diplomacy strategy. OWI diplomats, possessing a global mandate, were also the first to run into the question of defining ‘America’ for foreign audiences, dealing with the ugly realities of American society without drawing the ire of conservatives at home. The OWI, holding that – in a world of authoritarian regimes – truth held more power that falsehood, that the appearance of truth-telling served the United States better than any lie ever could. The question, then, would be which ‘truths’ to present, and how to frame them.

Jim Crow was an especially challenging truth; something that required addressing, especially for audiences in the colonized world, but where any excoriation would draw the ire of segregationist politicians – a part of FDR’s coalition – and risked the agency’s existence. Thus, the OWI avoided the subject in public whenever possible, while lobbying the administration to deal with it behind closed doors. Notable, the anti-segregationist argument used by agency staff was that it damaged America’s image and credibility abroad, a threat to national security for a state mired in a propaganda war. Public equivocation did not, however, assuage the paranoia of conservatives towards ‘public diplomacy.’

At war’s end, the OWI’s functions were transferred over to the State Department. Then, in early 1950, Joe McCarthy started attacking the department for ‘tolerating communist infiltration.’ It took until 1953, but McCarthy eventually wound his way towards the department’s public diplomacy efforts. He assailed Voice of America and overseas libraries, picked apart testimony and book inventories, and blamed them as vectors for an ideological “invasion” of the United States. While he succeeded at getting the Eisenhower administration to shutter the State Department’s agency, but public diplomacy was already entrenched in American foreign policy.

The ‘Empire of Ideas’ still lives, but so have the challenges it has to confront: racial, economic, and gender inequality are still present and visible. Add climate change onto these challenges – here the United States occupies a fraught position as a beneficiary of global inequality and mass-emitter. Climate Change is not an issue that Americans can ignore, nor an issue that other states can solve without American involvement. It requires cooperation, which requires goodwill, which depends on the belief that the United States is, despite its flaws, a nation committed to its stated principles of equality and democracy. It means rethinking how American public diplomacy engages with the world overseas; it depends on Americans thinking of themselves as members of a community, not a nation rendered untouchable by vast oceans; and it requires honestly and directly engaging with environmental inequality, especially water inequality. To understand how this can change, and what the past can tell us about the present, we spoke with Justin Hart.

Empire of Ideas traces how an all-encompassing global crisis, the Second World War, functioned as an instigator in the development of the United States as an ideological power. American diplomats created an image of ‘America’ as a nation of democracy, equality, and optimism to confront the specter of fascism. The ‘empire of ideas’ of the present faces another global crisis. Water is at the center of climate change while its effects, rising sea levels, droughts, and desertification, are not borne equally across the globe. How does the crisis that Empire of Ideas traces compare to the present-day crisis of water inequality, where the United States (as a geopolitical hegemon) occupies a complicated diplomatic position? What are the implications for present-day public diplomacy projects seeking to positively define ‘America’ for the world?

One of the striking things to me about U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, but more especially in the Trump Era, is the relative lack of concern with perceptions of “America” abroad. This has manifested in all sorts of ways from the closing of the USIA in the 1990s to the haphazard approach to public diplomacy during the Age of Terror to the open hostility to longstanding alliances and allies in the Trump era. In some ways, this is not an entirely new story. In Empire of Ideas, I detail the difficulty that public diplomats sometimes had in getting the leadership of the foreign policy establishment to care about their work—to care about the image of “America” projected to the world. But the crux of your question about water, really, is what would it take for the United States to care again about its image abroad? Then, too, the discussion about climate change in the United States and what it would take for a critical mass of Americans to care about that is closely related to the question about image. Americans do not care about issues of water inequality both because the majority don’t care about the environment and the majority don’t care about America’s image in the world. Projecting into the future, one could imagine a chicken-and-egg scenario where a new Cold War (say, with China, over access to various waterways) actually becomes the catalyst for Americans paying more attention to its image viz. water. Essentially, if we are to return to an Empire of Ideas-like scenario, but for water, Americans will have to start to care both about the environment and the nation’s image abroad. One could be the catalyst for the other, but right now the twin indifference has a reciprocal relationship.

The United States is at a national level protected from the consequences of its actions by water, its oceans guarantee it can distance itself from almost any conflict, its freshwater reserves protect it from the effects of climate change, and the nation enjoys easy access to hydropower. Throughout Empire of Ideas, you trace the continued hostility against public diplomacy projects from Americans who decried foreign entanglements where the United States could not act unilaterally. How would Empire of Ideas change if this continued political conflict, between internationalism and unilateralism, and its hydrological dimension, the way that America’s relationship to water as a boundary and resource enables its unilateralist tendencies, was at the center?

A large part of the answer to this question is addressed in my answer to the previous question, but the primary difference between the 1940s and 1950s and 2024 is that there was some sort of critical mass of support for internationalism to counter-balance America’s traditional unilateralist preferences. The unilateralists never went away and they won some battles, but advances such as the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and NATO all suggest that the internationalists were really the dominant foreign policy voice of the period from 1941-1991. Since the end of the Cold War, those who would stress the importance of consultation and cooperation with other countries have been on the retreat, from the debate over the Iraq War (and the rejection of the Kyoto protocol) forward. It’s hard to imagine international cooperation on water issues not just because the United States has (shall we call it?) hydrological privilege, but because it’s hard to imagine the United States cooperating internationally on much of anything right now, from trade (tariffs are back!) to the environment to military alliances.

A constant struggle for American diplomats, as you document throughout the book, was the problem of presenting the idealized form of a country that stubbornly refused to practice its stated ideals at home, such as in the case of Jim Crow. Then and now, this contradiction is evident in domestic water inequality. For example, sweeping technological projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority or the liberation from fossil fuel dependency promised by (water-intensive) nuclear energy exist in a nation where access to clean drinking water and protection from water-based natural disasters are marked by racial and class inequality. How would Empire of Ideas change if this contradiction, a nation that so often refuses to practice what it preaches, and its manifestation through water inequality was at the center?

I think the hypocrisy card remains a fairly potent one to play on a variety of issues, including water inequality. There was, for example, a pretty widespread discussion of the Flint water crisis and what that said about the reality of American claims to equality. However, what was missing from the Flint discussion that would have been front and center during the Cold War was a foreign policy dimension to that argument. Had there been a powerful propaganda engine like that of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia to trumpet the Flint crisis to the world as evidence of America’s shortcomings in its claims to global leadership, perhaps the discussion of Flint would have been amplified even further and been addressed sooner. Even within the last week, there has been considerable discussion of the hydrological dimensions of climate change and inequality in the fires that have consumed several parts of Los Angeles. Although not at the forefront of the national conversation, the front page of the Los Angeles Times has featured articles on various inequalities exposed through the fire. For example, many people in areas of high fire risk with a racially and economically diverse population, such as Altadena, have lost their homeowners insurance in recent years and may not be able to build back, leaving this land open to potential exploitation by developers. The question is how to push back against these trends?

If you brought water to the center of your work and its analysis, do you think that it would significantly change in its form, argument, subject, or conclusion? If so, how?

One thing that I think I could have given more thought to was the way that water not only provided “free security” geopolitically up to 1941, as many have said over the years, but also informationally as well. Sure, the trans-Atlantic cable allowed for communication across the seas going back to the 19th century, but the speed and volume of communication picked up precipitously between World War I and World War II. Woodrow Wilson famously spoke of the (new to him) “whispering gallery of the world” and we could see the Committee on Public Information as his primary response to that. But as I explain in Empire of Ideas, those functions were not considered important or imperative enough to continue absent the exigencies of war. By 1941, the free security from outside information had decisively ended in the age of radio communications and the construction of the permanent public diplomacy apparatus described in Empire of Ideas was one of the clearest indicators of that development.