After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US government rolled out an arsenal of heavy weaponry; all were arm's-length public diplomacy in a region that values people and faces, not facts and figures. While the United States focused on presentation of policy, the audience focused on policy, period.

Public diplomacy during the Cold War was about bipolar interests, information volume, control, and separate audiences. Public diplomacy was a product.

But the Cold War information strategy is not working today. The more globalization spreads, the more culture becomes the new frontier for defining identities and allegiances.

Today's communication interactivity has transformed public diplomacy into a process.

Fighting information battles over the airwaves cannot win hearts and minds; building communication bridges and forging a network can.

Yesterday, the communicator with the most information won. Today, the one with the most extensive and strongest network wins.

Disseminating information is spam, networking is strategic.

Rather than using research to find the right messages, Washington should attempt to learn how people are connected in order to develop new links. In the future, reliable databases will be more valuable than opinion polls.

In the global communication era, to effectively maneuver the political landscape requires networking as the new paradigm of strategic U.S. public diplomacy.

The Network Paradigm of Strategic Public Diplomacy

This book was published in March by Brookings Press. Excerpts from the first chapter:

Gutenberg may have created masterpieces, but he was primarily out to make a living.

Gutenberg could not have foreseen the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the emergence of the nation-state as the dominant political form, the spread of mass literacy, or the rise of representative democracy. Yet all were made possible by the printing press.

Over time, Gutenberg’s invention also changed the geography of language.

These consequences were not inevitable. Movable type presses were available in China as early as the eleventh century, but they were little used and had essentially no influence. The European invention of the printing press transformed Europe because Europe was ready to be transformed.

We are now, potentially, at a similar turning point. Information technology may once again be poised to transform politics and identity. If the print revolution made possible the nation-state system and eventually national democracy, where might the digital revolution lead us? Can it help us create new, and possibly better, ways of running the world?

New systems of global decision making are emerging that go beyond cooperation between states to a much messier agglomeration of ad hoc mechanisms for solving the many and varied transnational problems. No one is planning this system. It is evolving, with many disparate actors who are largely unaware of the roles of other sectors and their relationships to other issues.

The tools are now available to do at a global level what the printing press helped do for national governance -- to decentralize the flow of information, enabling democracy to emerge. The speed and scale at which decision making must now take place has outstripped the capacity of purely electoral systems of democracy to cope. If democracy is to survive globalization, it must attend to the free flow of information.

Innovative solutions often do not look much like the electoral, representative systems that are the usual focus of works on governance. Indeed, there is not much discussion in this book of the formal structures of political decision making. Instead, the focus is on what can be truly new when technology and politics combine to open up the information floodgates, in a time of transformation potentially as great as was the period following Gutenberg’s invention more than half a millennium ago.

The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World

The statement, which follows a visit to Caracas by Iranian President Mohammed Khatami in March, was intended to be noticed — and it was. The question is why he would have said it.

Confused? Don't worry. George Friedman explains it all.

Venezuelan Red Flag

French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Do you suppose Tom Friedman columns will soon show up on BitTorrent networks?

A Race to the Top, Or, An Obit For Old Europe

The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting."

The Secret Way to War

Although Beijing has managed to assuage many of its neighbors, not everyone along China’s periphery is persuaded by the "charm offensive."

China Engages Asia [PDF]

Thomas Friedman spends an hour talking to MIT about his new book. Watch streaming video of the May 16 event.

Chances are good that Bhavya in Bangalore will read your next x-ray, or as Thomas Friedman learned first hand, "Grandma Betty in her bathrobe" will make your Jet Blue plane reservation from her Salt Lake City home. In "Globalization 3.0," Friedman contends, people from far-flung places will become principal players in the marketplace.

The World is Flat: An Hour With Thomas Friedman | MIT World

Can Korea maintain its market position in both Chinese and world markets as China becomes more competitive in many industries where Korea currently has a relative advantage? This study develops a simple model of the Korean economy and four alternative S&T strategies that Korea could follow and shows how those strategies may affect Korean prosperity, explicitly considering the many uncertainties that Korea confronts.

Korea in the Era of a Rising China

Europe's response should not be to side unthinkingly with the US but to work out, in conversations among ourselves and with the Americans, what are the basic conditions on which we will engage with the emerging dragon of the East.

Selling Out for a China Deal?

Believe it or not, that headline is for real.

KANDAHAR -- A wave of crime in this southern Afghan city has evoked a growing local nostalgia for the Taliban era of 1996 to 2001, when the extremist Islamic militia imposed law and order by draconian means.

The rising discontent in Kandahar could prove particularly problematic for Karzai.

There is much about Kandahar that underscores how far it has progressed since the Taliban's ouster. Bazaars are filled with merchandise, from photos to VCRs, that would have been unthinkable during the Taliban era.

Still, residents say, the outward trappings mask entrenched problems.

On March 13, I ran an NYRB article called "The Real Afghanistan"; did you read it? This story reinforces the same themes.

Afghan Crime Wave Breeds Nostalgia for Taliban