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BEACON SOFT POWER AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY SERIES:DAY 3

For Wednesday’s segment of the series, Paul Kretkowski’s Beacon features a post by Dr. Nicholas Cull , the new head of the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy. A excerpt:

“Public Diplomacy Dateline 1940: The British Cultivate Edward R. MurrowMy all-time public diplomacy coup would be the British decision to cultivate Edward R. Murrow as a means to address the neutral U.S. in 1940. It paid off big-time, both drawing the U.S. into the Second World War and building lasting links between British and U.S. broadcasting communities. I also suspect that Murrow’s approach to public diplomacy was much influenced by his British experiences.”

Read Dr. Cull’s post in full here.

MORE ON UNIVERSALITY

Wiggins at Opposed System Desgn responded to my prior post with further insight into the difficulties of accurately estimating the potential outcomes of a given scenario, with his post “The Limits of Universality“. Commenting on the importance of examining premises, Wiggins writes:

“Albert Wohlstetter often said that the most important part of an analysis was the examination and choice of assumptions. More recently, I believe it was Ralph Keeney who pointed out that millions of dollars and years of effort can be devoted to analyses whose assumptions were decided upon in a superficial five minute discussion. Ed Paxson, who is often credited with creating the field of systems analysis, ran into this issue during one of his studies while he was at RAND. He created a remarkably complex analysis of nuclear combat, but based it upon a modified logistics model so that the goal was to “deliver” the maximum payload of bombs to a specified target list at the lowest cost per pound of bombs dropped (I think I got this account from Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, a solid secondary source but woefully thin on interpreting Wohlstetter). The Air Force dismissed Paxson’s results. “

It is important to note, regarding “ that millions of dollars and years of effort can be devoted to analyses whose assumptions were decided upon in a superficial five minute discussion” that quite often our first good idea about a given subject or problem is not always our best good idea. “Brainstorming” is an overused and much abused term, but done properly, and with an eye to starting a cognitive process rather than securing a finished result, brainstorming is enormously helpful in generating alternatives. Submitting those alternatives to a robustly critical examination before launching forward, is also a pretty good standard practice.

Minutes spent beforehand translates into thousands of hours saved afterward.

STAY TUNED

I have a number of topics today including Day 3 of the Beacon series, but I’m juggling a few projects at the moment. If you have emailed me in the last few days and not yet received a response, I sincerely apologize for the delay. I will be caught-up on my correspondence by late afternoon and back to blogging.

BEACON SOFT POWER AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY SERIES:DAY 2

For Tuesday’s segment of the series, Paul Kretkowski’s Beacon features a post by Professor Patricia Kushlis, a retired Foreign Service Officer and specialist in Europe, Asia, the U.S., politics, public diplomacy and national security. Kushlis is also part of a trio of experts at the highly recommended foreign affairs blog, Whirledview.

An excerpt:

“Public Diplomacy Dateline 1975: A Meeting in Helsinki

Read Patricia Kushlis’ guest post in full here.

Kushlis is correct, in my view. Helsinki’s outcome on human rights was perceived as such a diplomatic disaster by the Politburo that the lead Soviet negotiator, a rising star who had expected a promotion to the “commanding heights” of the nomenklatura, went into a swift political eclipse. On the American side, former DCI Robert Gates, known as a “hardliner” among Sovietologists in the IC community during his tenure, lauded the political and psychological effects of Helsinki in his memoirs.

ON SITUATIONAL CONTEXT AND MULTIPLE UNIVERSALITIES

Wiggins, at Opposed System Design, had the following comment in a post ” Evolving Thoughts on Terrorism ” recently which I had meant to blog about at the time but have only gotten around to addressing now:

“As a rule I am wary of metaphors that involve the second law of thermodynamics, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, quantum physics and evolution. Sometimes they are truly appropriate (this is why John Boyd rocketed to the top of my esteem). Usually they are not. I’m not passing judgment here yet. Just musing that when making comparisons to nuanced concepts, it is very easy to slide into sloppy generalizations. “

A very useful caveat in my view, and one that spurred me to further thought.

There are a number of such metaphors applied to complex adaptive systems, including social ones. I do it frequently here myself. Sometimes I am simply making an analogy and at other times I am writing about a phenomena that is actually in play in a given situation. Some of these phenomena are considered universalities – the Laws of Physics being one example – that seemingly govern all situations or at least enough of those in a humanocentric scenario as to be perceived as being universal. Evolution would be another example and Robert Wright once wrote a well-considered book on that very topic.

Sometimes, however, these universalities do not seem to apply very well to a specific situation, one noted by Wiggins in his post. Most of the time this may be due to the “sloppy generalizations” to which Wiggins alluded. At other time it may be that the role of a universality in a particular situational dynamic, that while still present, is not very important for the following reasons:

a) Time frame of the scenario

b) Relative effect in comparison to that of other universalities is not significant on human scale

c) Perspective of the observer

d) Local vs. Global scenarios

e) Complexity of net variables

I’m certain Dr. Von or Wiggins could think of more possibilities than can I.

Analysts attempting to game the probable outcomes of hypothetical scenarios for complex social systems ( say ” Invading Iraq”) have to weigh the universalities against each other as well as the particularities of the context. The greater the simplification employed in making an analogy between two dissimilar contexts affected by the same universality then, I would argue, the longer the time frame required to see if the analogy has validity.