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The Last Three Feet Now Only Inches Away
Review by Anthony C. E. Quainton
September 2012
The Last Three Feet: Case Studies in Public Diplomacy, edited by William P.
Kiehl,
Public
Diplomacy
Council/PDWorldwide,
2012,
ISBN-13:
9781478112952, 196 pp. $14.99 (paperback), $4.99 (Kindle).
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The Last Three Feet, the fourth in a series of books published by the Public Diplomacy
Council over the past eight years, maintains the high standards of its predecessors.
Editor William Kiehl has assembled an informative collection of articles, which bring to
both the general public and more specialized academic audiences refreshing insights
and professional understanding about the nuts and bolts of American soft power. The
articles in the volume cover a variety of different and innovative PD programs using
social media as well as elaborations of traditional activities including media monitoring
(Pakistan), trade fair exploitation (Shanghai) and youth exchange programs (Brazil).
Among these various stories the two most interesting come from Bahrain where PAO
Rachel Leslie describes the challenges of trying to use social media in the midst of the
Arab Spring demonstrations and from Baghdad where Aaron Snipes explains how the
Embassy used social media to reach a wider audience than the traditional Englishspeaking elites with which the Embassy was in contact. Equally interesting is Embassy Jakarta’s experience with @America, a
reinvention of the classical off-site cultural center, which permits Indonesians once again to get within those last three feet.
From these articles one gets a strong sense of the energy of contemporary PD officers and of their interest in and desire to be
innovative in conveying America’s policies and values to skeptical and often hostile audiences. What is also striking about the
many programs described in this book is the focus on youth. @American located in an Indonesian shopping mall and open
during normal commercial, rather than bureaucratic, hours focuses on the 15-30 age demographic. Creative use is made of
technology of particular interest to youth. In its first year it welcomed over 100,000 visitors. In Brazil the focus is on youth
ambassadors and in Turkey on youth entrepreneurs. In virtually every article the emphasis is on the use of Facebook and
Twitter, both quintessentially youth media, although that will surely change in the years to come.
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This very fact of reliance on social media points to another facet of 21st Century public diplomacy, the need to cope with an
extraordinary volume of activity. Virtually every article speaks in some fashion of the issue of volume. In Shanghai the
American pavilion had to cope with 50,000 visitors a day. Before a visit by President Obama to Ghana the Embassy
sponsored “Ask Obama a question” on its website and got 300,000 responses. When Embassy Brasilia had a two-hour web
chat 40,000 individuals participated. These are stunning numbers. It is, of course, beyond the capacity of any one embassy or
indeed of the entire United States government to deal with 300,000 questions. The new technologies make it possible to
reach extraordinary numbers of individuals; particularly among youthful age cohorts, but to make these technologies truly
interactive is beyond our ability. Indeed just reading this volume of messages, let alone assessing the significance of the
messages being sent would be a challenge for which there is no obvious solution. This is, of course, a core public diplomacy
issue: how to measure success. It is easy to quantify the numbers of tweets sent and received, of postings on interactive blog
sites or the numbers of Facebook friends of a particular Embassy. But what do these numbers mean and how can we be sure
that we are reaching those who can impact American policies and interests or that we are changing attitudes towards the
United States in a positive way?
A second constraining factor, which emerges in many of these articles, is the question of language. One of the final sentences
of Walter Douglas’ piece on PD in Pakistan is telling. “English”, he says, “can be a pernicious influence” His Embassy had
relied overly on the English language media in Pakistan and had ignored the Urdu media. He and his team changed that and
set up a daily analysis of the vernacular media. Here, however, one of the key shortcomings of American PD becomes
apparent. Embassy Islamabad must rely almost entirely on locally employed staff to do this monitoring and analysis. Similarly
in the examples from Bahrain and Baghdad, while the Embassy has Arabic-capable officers working on PD, the managing of
the social media falls on the local staff.
Historically the Foreign Service Institute has concentrated on giving employees an ability to speak the local language and to a
lesser extent to read it, hence the “S” and “R” ratings on which assignments and promotion depend. Virtually no attention is
given to writing. Yet what is needed in the digital age is a capacity to write twitter feed, compose blog entries and post
Facebook news on the Embassy’s wall. This in turn requires an ability to communicate in writing to the vast mass audience
now being reached through social media. We are still almost totally dependent on local employees, whose loyalty we trust
and whose language capabilities we assume, but they still remain a filter through which American policies and commentary
must pass before it reaches a foreign audience. The problems encountered by the book’s authors strongly suggest that this is
an area to which we need to give more thought, perhaps adding a “W” rating to the traditional “S” and “R”.
Ironically, while the book is entitled the Last Three Feet, as was the conference on which it was based, much of what is
described is not about face to face contact, but about how to exploit hand held devices and computer screens to carry the
messages that we want read and how to ensure that what we post on these screens will make it that last eighteen inches into
the brains of our target audiences. In Jakarta the Embassy has faced up to this challenge. @American is a real last three feet
endeavor using 18 inch technology which deserves to be replicated, even though centers of this kind raise issues of security
and staffing which are quite different from the issues raised by reliance on social media alone. Jakarta is concerned about
both personal and electronic interaction. That surely is the wave of the future.
The Last Three Feet deserves to be read by practitioners who can learn from the best practices of their colleagues, by a wider
public audience that does not understand how American soft power is projected, and by academics who are charged with
educating the next generation of public diplomats. This book fills an important gap in the literature and is a valuable resource
that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Public Diplomacy.
American Diplomacy is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link
back to American Diplomacy
Ambassador (ret.) Anthony C. E. Quainton is currently Distinguished Diplomat in Residence at American University.
Before assuming this position he was president and CEO of the National Policy Association, a Washington research and
policy group committed to the promotion of business-labor dialogue. He served for 38 years in the U.S. Foreign Service
with posts on every continent. He was Ambassador in Peru, Nicaragua, Kuwait and the Central African Republic. He held
senior positions in the Department of State including Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Deputy Inspector General,
Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, and Director General of the Foreign Service. He was educated at Princeton
and Oxford Universities.
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