Marketing the American Brand

Abstract

This chapter shifts from appraising the role of communication distortion as exercised by US policymakers after 9/11 to an evaluation of how the absence of a dialogue-based public diplomacy approach greatly impeded US-Muslim outreach between 2001 and 2008. In making the case, this draws attention to what occurs within the US foreign policy environment when postsecularism is not taken seriously by US State Department officials, and what became of US public diplomacy after 9/11 when a long-term dialogue-based approach was neither considered nor exercised to directly engage global Islamic communities. These and other major considerations are raised in this discussion in light of the new trend established during the Bush era to nominate former corporate marketing executives to the seat of US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs to market the American brand by overlapping the practices of public diplomacy and nation branding. The epic failure of Charlotte Beers and Karen P. Hughes to trumpet America’s brand to a value-defined socially constructed Muslim world is carefully assessed. This chapter uncovers that post-9/11 public diplomacy efforts by the US Department of State hinged on applying these and other ad hoc one-way transmission models of communication that provided short-term solutions rather than a long-term dialogue-based focus with key religious nonstate actors.KeywordsForeign PolicyReligious FreedomMuslim WorldPublic DiplomacySaudi WomanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.