The current debate over America’s declining reputation has focused on “public diplomacy,” a term coined in the 1960s by Edmund A. Gullion of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and perhaps most fully articulated by the U.S. Information Agency in a statement recently quoted by William P. Kiehl, editor of an excellent new book from the Public Diplomacy Council called America’s Dialogue with the World:

Public diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.

Inherent in this definition is a tension between “informing,” in the sense of objective reporting, and “influencing,” in the sense of shaping a “message” to win foreign support for U.S. policies. The first is modeled on the journalistic ideal of truth-telling, the second on the need for propaganda--or, to use the preferred military term, “strategic communications.” Both of these aims are legitimate, but obviously they pull against each other. And the resulting tension is not likely to be resolved any time soon.

But this is not my topic. My topic is the cultural dimension of America’s image--or if you prefer, the image of American culture in the world.