American soft power and public diplomacy in the Arab world

Since War II, the US government has systematically sought to make use of soft power in the Arab world, using a variety of means to reach those audiences (Rugh, 2006). It has sought to counteract or put into context the negative stories, and it has sought to reinforce the positive aspects of American soft power by using all of the public diplomacy tools available. Making use of American soft power has always been a central element of US public diplomacy efforts in the Arab world, but changes in the working environment have led to changes in the approach. The following are some of the major current challenges that US public diplomacy professionals face in communicating with Arab audiences.

Can we generalize about the Arabs? There are approximately 350 million people in the Middle East and North Africa who can be called Arabs because Arabic is their mother tongue. But they tend to have a wide range of attitudes and affiliations, depending partly on whether they are Sunni, Shia or Christian; wealthy to poor; urban or rural, and so on. Yet they have much in common, and generalizations are possible, so it is common for respectable scholars to refer in their publications to “Arab attitudes” or “Arab perceptions” (Telhami, Cole, and Nakhleh).

One challenge in writing about Arab public opinion is the scarcity of reliable polling data. Until two decades ago Arab polls were was almost nonexistent because of Arab government restrictions, but today researchers like John Zogby, Shibley Telhami and the Gallup Organization are able to carry out regular polling in some Arab countries. American diplomats and intelligence officers have, however, collected a great deal of empirical data, mostly non-statistical, about Arab views, and if they have served in the region for any length of time and have engaged with Arabs on a daily basis, they are able to compile a reasonably accurate picture—although incomplete—of how Arabs think. The present author spent fifty years working in and on the Arab world and as a result has some sense of Arab attitudes.

The basic fact that every American diplomat who has served in the Arab world knows is this: most Arabs are critical or highly critical of aspects of American foreign policy toward the region, yet at the same time they tend to hold very positive views of the United States as a country. One opinion poll taken in June 2004 in Morocco, Jordan and the UAE for example, revealed that the public in these countries had favourable opinions about American science and technology (90, 83 and 84%, respectively), US products (73, 61 and 63%), education (61, 59 and 63%), movies and television (60, 56 and 52%), freedom and democracy (53, 57 and 39%), and the American people (59, 52 and 46%). However, this same poll showed that these publics had unfavourable views of US policies toward the Arabs (90, 89 and 87%), toward the Palestinians (93, 89 and 90%), toward Iraq (98, 78 and 91%), and on terrorism (82, 75 and 84%) (Rugh, 2006). Opinion research in 2010 in six Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi, Lebanon, Morocco and UAE) found that 76% watched US or European movies 3-7 times weekly, and as many as 47% watched them daily. The United States ranked second highest only behind France for country that supports freedom and democracy, but the United States ranked second (behind Israel 77% and 88%) among countries perceived as posing the biggest threat to the Mideast (Zogby and Maryland, 2010).