The officially stated goals of the foreign policy of the United States of America, including all the bureaus and offices in the United States Department of State, as mentioned in the Foreign Policy Agenda of the Department of State, are "to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community". Liberalism has been a key component of US foreign policy since its independence from Britain. Since the end of World War II, the United States has had a grand strategy which has been characterized as being oriented around primacy, "deep engagement", and/or liberal hegemony. This strategy entails that the United States maintains military predominance; builds and maintains an extensive network of allies ; integrates other states into US-designed international institutions ; and limits the spread of nuclear weapons.
The United States Department of State (DOS), or simply the State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other nations, its primary duties are advising the U.S. president on international relations, administering diplomatic missions, negotiating international treaties and agreements, and representing the U.S. at the United Nations. The department is headquartered in the Harry S Truman Building, a few blocks from the White House, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C.; "Foggy Bottom" is thus sometimes used as a metonym.
The National Security Strategy (NSS) is a document prepared periodically by the executive branch of the United States that lists the national security concerns and how the administration plans to deal with them. The legal foundation for the document is spelled out in the Goldwater–Nichols Act. The document is purposely general in content, and its implementation relies on elaborating guidance provided in supporting documents such as the National Military Strategy.
In international relations, public diplomacy broadly speaking, is any of the various government-sponsored efforts aimed at communicating directly with foreign publics to establish a dialogue designed to inform and influence with the aim of building support for the state's strategic objectives. These also include propaganda. As the international order has changed over the twentieth century, so has the practice of public diplomacy. Its practitioners use a variety of instruments and methods ranging from personal contact and media interviews to the internet and educational exchanges.
Public diplomacy in Israel refers to Israel's efforts to communicate directly with citizens of other nations to inform and influence their perceptions, with the aim of garnering support or tolerance for the Israeli government's strategic objectives. Historically, these efforts have evolved from being called "propaganda" by early Zionists, with Theodor Herzl advocating such activities in 1899, to the more contemporary Hebrew term "hasbara" introduced by Nahum Sokolow, which translates roughly to "explaining". This communicative strategy seeks to justify actions and is considered reactive and event-driven.
Cultural diplomacy is a type of soft power that includes the "exchange of ideas, information, art, language and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding". The purpose of cultural diplomacy is for the people of a foreign nation to develop an understanding of the nation's ideals and institutions in an effort to build broad support for economic and political objectives. In essence "cultural diplomacy reveals the soul of a nation", which in turn creates influence. Public diplomacy has played an important role in advancing national security objectives.
Counterinsurgency is "the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces". The Oxford English Dictionary defines counterinsurgency as any "military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionaries" and can be considered war by a state against a non-state adversary. Insurgency and counterinsurgency campaigns have been waged since ancient history. However, modern thinking on counterinsurgency was developed during decolonization.
The United States under secretary of defense for policy (USDP) is a high level civilian official in the United States Department of Defense. The under secretary of defense for policy is the principal staff assistant and adviser to both the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense for all matters concerning the formation of national security and defense policy.
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.
The Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, or ATSD (PA), is the principal staff advisor and assistant to the Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense for public information, internal information, community relations, information training, and audiovisual matters in support of Department of Defense activities, leading a worldwide public affairs community of some 3,800 military and civilian personnel. The Assistant to the Secretary follows the Secretary's Principles of Information in providing Defense Department information to the public, the United States Congress and the media.
In international relations, the term smart power refers to the combination of hard power and soft power strategies. It is defined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies as "an approach that underscores the necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships, and institutions of all levels to expand one's influence and establish legitimacy of one's action."
The Consortium for Strategic Communication is a think tank at Arizona State University.
In the political field, a war of ideas is a confrontation among the ideologies that nations and political groups use to promote their domestic and foreign interests. In a war of ideas, the battle space is the public mind: the belief of the people who compose the population. This ideological conflict is about winning the hearts and minds of the people. Waging a war of ideas can involve think tanks, television programs, journalistic articles, government policies, and public diplomacy. In the monograph: 'Wars of Ideas and The War of Ideas' (2008), Antulio J. Echevarria defined the war of ideas as:
A clash of visions, concepts, and images, and — especially — the interpretation of them. They are, indeed, genuine wars, even though the physical violence might be minimal, because they serve a political, socio-cultural, or economic purpose, and they involve hostile intentions or hostile acts. ... Four general categories [include] ... (i) intellectual debates, (ii) ideological wars, (iii) wars over religious dogma, and (iv) advertising campaigns. All of [the categories] are essentially about power and influence, just as with wars over territory and material resources, and their stakes can run very high indeed.
Full spectrum diplomacy is a combination of traditional, government-to-government diplomacy with the many components of public diplomacy as well as the integration of these two functions with other instruments of statecraft. The term was coined by John Lenczowski, founder and president of The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. in his book Full Spectrum Diplomacy and Grand Strategy: Reforming the Structure and Culture of U.S. Foreign Policy which was released in May, 2011.
Public diplomacy is that "form of international political advocacy in which the civilians of one country use legitimate means to reach out to the civilians of another country in order to gain popular support for negotiations occurring through diplomatic channels."
National Security Decision Directive 77, was a U.S. National Security Directive signed on January 14, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan. The directive established a Special Planning Group (SPG) under the National Security Council (NSC) whose purpose was to strengthen, organize, plan, and coordinate public diplomacy of the United States relative to national security. This NSDD positioned the White House and the National Security Staff at the helm of public diplomacy coordination across government agencies. NSDD-77 lay the groundwork for the Reagan administration's aggressive public diplomacy strategy and included guidance for inter-agency working groups to execute wide-ranging tactics for information dissemination both domestically and internationally.
Cyber-diplomacy is the evolution of public diplomacy to include and use the new platforms of communication in the 21st century. As explained by Jan Melissen in The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations, cyber-diplomacy “links the impact of innovations in communication and information technology to diplomacy.” Cyber-diplomacy is also known as or is part of public diplomacy 2.0, Digital diplomacy, EDiplomacy, and virtual diplomacy. Cyber-diplomacy has as its underpinnings that, “it recognizes that new communication technologies offer new opportunities to interact with a wider public by adopting a network approach and making the most of an increasingly multicentric global, interdependent system.”
The Interagency Active Measures Working Group was a group led by the United States Department of State and later by the United States Information Agency (USIA). The group was formed early during the Reagan administration, in 1981, purportedly as an effort to counter Soviet disinformation.
Political warfare is the use of hostile political means to compel an opponent to do one's will. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience, including another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations ("PsyOps"), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations.
United States–China security cooperation refers to various projects, combined operations, communications, official dialogues, joint exchanges, and joint exercises, between agencies, groups, and individuals within the government of United States and the People's Republic of China, in a number of areas pertaining to global security, defense policy, and various forms of military and security cooperation.
