THE MEDIA: INFLUENCING FOREIGN POLICY
IN THE INFORMATION AGE
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"Global real-time television, the Internet, and other recent technological advances have clearly affected how top foreign policy-makers do their job, says Warren P. Strobel, a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, and author of Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations. Foreign policy "isn't made by the media," he says, but "in the Information Age, it can't be made without it." |
Reminiscing years after the most profound foreign policy crisis of the Cold War -- the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis -- then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commented almost casually that he did not turn on a television set the entire time President Kennedy and his advisors were dealing with events that could have thrust the United States and the Soviet Union into nuclear war. Fast-forward the clock to the 1999 conflict in Kosovo, and it is clear how astonishingly the role of the news media (and information generally) has grown in the making of U.S. foreign policy. From the TV images of fleeing ethnic Albanian refugees to the propaganda war on the Internet to the councils of President Clinton's top aides debating how to communicate their objectives, information played a major -- even dominant -- role in U.S. foreign policy during the Kosovo conflict.
How has the revolution in global information technology changed the making of U.S. foreign policy? First, a few words of caution. Today's media-rich world has not replaced the need for strong diplomatic leadership. If anything, it has reinforced that need. If U.S. leadership is uncertain -- as it was at times in hotspots such as Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia -- the news media (and U.S. adversaries, using the media), move quickly to fill the vacuum. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mohammed Farah Aided in Somalia, and Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia used the news media, particularly television, to complicate achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives.
Nor does the media replace confidential diplomacy. It complements it. Leaders in Washington may get news of a crisis first from CNN rather than embassy cables, but diplomats are still necessary to provide the detailed political reporting from foreign lands. U.S. foreign policy-makers routinely use the news media to deliver messages to foreign leaders, particularly during crises when diplomatic contact with an adversary may be cut off. But other messages can be delivered only through private diplomatic exchanges. Serbia's military withdrawal from Kosovo was ultimately achieved through face-to-face Russian-European-American diplomacy, backed by the use of NATO air power.
Still, global real-time television, the Internet, and other recent technological advances have clearly affected how top foreign policy-makers do their job. Nowhere is this change more starkly seen than in the time pressures officials now face. McNamara's long days behind closed doors advising Kennedy on the Cuba crisis are an unimaginable luxury to his counterparts today. The rapid transmission of information and a ubiquitous media with questions at the ready mean that officials must make decisions and state policy publicly more rapidly than they might like. Telling the media and the public to wait for answers is always an option, but usually one that makes officials look unprepared or vacillating. The time crunch, combined with an adversary's own "information warfare," can lead to mistakes. NATO's incomplete account of the accidental bombing of a refugee convoy in Kosovo, later amended several times, sapped the alliance's credibility at a key point during Operation Allied Force.
But like most changes brought on by the Information Age, this one is a two-edged sword. In making and executing foreign policy, the ability to communicate rapidly and directly with both allies and enemies -- and their publics too, in some cases -- is a great advantage. President Bush, worried that Saddam Hussein was surrounded by aides afraid to bring him bad news and concerned that he would conclude from U.S. anti-war protests that Washington lacked resolve, used television on several occasions to address the Iraqi leader directly during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. More recently, President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and other top U.S. officials used the media to address numerous audiences during the Kosovo campaign. As conflicts, diplomacy, and peacekeeping increasingly become multilateral affairs, this will become a more challenging task. Sometimes, messages with different nuances or emphases need to be sent to different audiences.
Since the end of the Cold War, there have been not one, but two, revolutions that have affected the communicating of U.S. foreign policy. The global telecommunications explosion is one. The second is the geopolitical revolution: without the Soviet threat, foreign affairs can seem less immediately vital to many Americans. Together, these changes have caused senior policy-makers to adopt more complex and creative communications strategies, using a variety of new and old media. Press conferences by the secretary of state and background briefings for the State Department press corps are still important, but they are not enough. While visiting Argentina in 1998, President Clinton participated in a televised town hall discussion with young Hispanics in both South America and the United States, underscoring the United States' desire for an integrated hemisphere. This year, the State Department's annual human rights report was on the Internet the same day it was released -- and accessed, no doubt, by journalists, non-governmental human rights groups, and the foreign governments cited in the document. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in places such as Kosovo, which combine military deployments with diplomacy, offer an especially challenging communications environment. Target audiences include international, regional, and local media; U.S. troops and the troops of other contributing nations; local ethnic groups that may have grievances; and neighboring countries that may wish to see the effort succeed -- or fail.
The U.S. military, in particular, has had to adjust its dealings with the media. In times of war or other national emergency, the news media and information flows can be controlled to some extent via formal means (i.e., selected groups of journalists known as press "pools," escorted by public affairs officers, and security reviews of stories) or informal ones. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations -- known to the military as "operations other than war" -- offer no such opportunity for officials. In places such as Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo, journalists may be "on the ground" before troops ever arrive and, because of political concerns over military casualties, may be less restricted in their movements than the soldiers. The U.S. military has gone back to school -- literally in some cases, with heavier doses of media training. A plethora of conferences and writings has explored this new military-media relationship, as both sides try to understand better one another's needs in the new environment. Given their starkly different professions and cultures, however, it seems certain that some tensions will linger.
The news media, again television in particular, can affect the agenda of U.S. foreign policy. From 1992 until 1995, Presidents Bush and Clinton did not believe the war in Bosnia threatened U.S. interests sufficiently to send in U.S. ground troops. But near non-stop coverage of the carnage and humanitarian suffering ensured that they had to deal with the conflict nonetheless. Similarly, when organized violence broke out following East Timor's referendum on independence last year, it was not perceived initially as a major issue on the administration's agenda. TV images and journalists questioning the administration's policy ensured that it was on the White House agenda, nonetheless. Conversely, there may be less pressure to attend to conflicts, such as the civil wars in West Africa, if they do not generate media attention and no other national security interest is involved.
One of the most interesting developments brought on by the Information Age has been a democratization in access to media tools, meaning more and more groups can affect foreign policy. As mentioned at the outset, policy-makers and diplomats have not seen their places usurped. But they now must share the arena with non-governmental actors, including human rights and relief groups, loose coalitions of activists on various causes, even guerilla armies and terrorists. While President Bush made the ultimate decision to send U.S. troops to Somalia in 1992 to safeguard relief supplies, it is now known that a loose coalition of relief groups such as CARE, members of Congress, and mid-level U.S. officials helped direct Bush's attention to the starvation in Somalia by encouraging and facilitating media coverage there. Similarly, "progressive" groups used the Internet to organize protests against the World Trade Organization that disrupted ITS 1999 Seattle meeting, and to change U.S. policy toward Burma by achieving a series of state-level sanctions on that country.
Does the news media actually change U.S. foreign policy? Not nearly as much as some argue. But it does seem to have an impact in one narrowly defined area: humanitarian relief policy. Television images of people suffering from famine, disease, or natural disasters can, by their effect on world public opinion (or presumed effect, in policy-makers' minds) get the United States and other industrialized nations involved where they might not be otherwise. Beginning with the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, this has happened time and again, from the refugee exodus from Rwanda in 1994 to the humanitarian crisis caused by the wars in the former Yugoslavia to the devastating floods in Mozambique in 2000. As already mentioned, often it is not the media alone, but non-governmental organizations working through the media to draw attention to a region, that affect policy. One concern is whether television skews policy-making toward humanitarian concerns, and away from the more difficult (and risky) job of solving underlying conflicts. In the apt words of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, "The dictatorship of the fourth power, the dictatorship of the TV picture, horrifying millions of people with images of mass violence, urges us to adopt humanitarian decisions and to avoid political ones."
U.S. diplomats, by and large, do not spend their time reading public opinion polls. But they, and even more so officials at the White House, believe they have a good sense of the U.S. public's mood from the media, their public affairs advisers, and their own past experience. That is one reason why news media reports alone are not enough to send U.S. troops into harm's way if no national interest seems at risk. Despite heavy media coverage, the United States did not intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda. Neither President Bush nor President Clinton supported sustained U.S. military involvement in Bosnia until the latter sensed that the war there was threatening a major U.S. security interest -- the cohesion of NATO and the Atlantic alliance. In other situations, such as Haiti and Kosovo, national interests caused U.S. policy-makers to choose intervention even in the face of a skeptical Fourth Estate.
One final example shows how the media's role in U.S. diplomacy is not always what it appears, and how policy-makers use the media as much as they are used by it. It is widely believed that the February 1994 "marketplace massacre" in Sarajevo, captured on videotape, changed U.S. policy in Bosnia to a much more aggressive, interventionist role. Sixty-eight people were killed, and almost 200 others horribly wounded, when a mortar shell, believed fired by Bosnian Serbs, fell on the Bosnian capital's central market. Within days, NATO demanded that the Bosnian Serbs withdraw their heavy weapons from an "exclusion zone" around Sarajevo, under threat of air strikes. For the first time since the war began in April 1992, Sarajevo experienced a taste of normalcy.
This is what actually happened: In the days before the mortar shell fell, the United States, under heavy pressure from France, had concluded that the current U.S. policy was not working. Then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written a memo to senior colleagues at the White House and the Pentagon, laying out the case for a more proactive U.S. policy. Meetings on the details of that new policy were actually under way when the mortar shell fell. The videotaped horrors helped the Clinton administration get public backing for the more aggressive policy that it wanted to undertake. Numerous top officials have confirmed this sequence of events in subsequent interviews. And where did then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright and her colleagues go to make the case for the new policy? In front of the TV cameras, of course.
Foreign policy isn't made by the media. But in the Information Age, it can't be made without it.