Isolate or engage

During his 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama spoke directly to opponents of the US when he declared that the United States ‘will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist’. The subsequent ending of the diplomatic isolation of states such as Myanmar (Burma), Iran and Cuba has led to some conversation, particularly with regard to Cuba, as to whether the leaders of these countries deserve restored diplomatic relations. But, as Geoffrey Wiseman and the contributors to this edited volume show, the practice of cutting off formal diplomatic relations with adversarial states in an effort to isolate them has been a particularly American, and particularly ineffective, strategy. Isolate or engage examines how US diplomats handled the challenge of limited or no formal diplomatic relations with nine states—the Soviet Union/Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela—with which the United States has or has had intensely adversarial relations. In particular, the chapters explore the public diplomacy efforts that were often substituted for more formal engagement. While the contributors are not public diplomacy experts, each is a specialist in the country which she writes about, and there is a welcome mix of historians, political scientists, area studies specialists and practitioners. In his introduction, Wiseman sets out eight framing questions for his authors, ranging from whether US diplomatic isolation affects the behaviour of the adversarial state, to how diplomacy aimed at the adversarial state's public operates and how American diplomats manage or mediate public opinion pressures at home. A major challenge for the authors is that there is no clear consensus on the definition of public diplomacy, a challenge that Wiseman acknowledges. He provides three different definitions for his contributors—an approach that focuses on the public diplomacy conducted by the State Department; one that considers the efforts of every branch of government; and a third that takes into account the actions of many actors, including non-governmental ones, such as corporations and private citizens—and suggests that authors were also free to come up with their own definitions

Adversarial system · Conversation · Diplomacy · Foreign policy · Framing (construction · International relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public Diplomacy · Public opinion · Sociology · State (computer science · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Public Administration

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