Dubai

The United States and the Arab World need to do more to understand each other, media and diplomacy experts said at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai on Tuesday.

The lack of understanding runs deep: eight-in-ten Americans cannot find the Middle East on a map, a new study found.

Soft power is big. We speak with Mark Donfried, the Director General at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, at the Arab Media Forum.

A further three-quarters of more than 2,000 Americans surveyed by pollster YouGov for Saudi daily Arab News said they would not want to visit the region.

Yet Arabs are not necessarily well-informed either — and the region’s media bears part of the blame, said Nathan Tek, the US State Department’s Middle East spokesman while speaking at the panel discussion on “The Arab Image in the West.’

“Oftentimes I see the Arab media misreporting about American foreign policy,” the spokesman told a panel of media professionals and academics.

“I see conspiracy theories; I see a constant attack on American foreign policy.”

One path towards greater understanding between cultures is travel — either in the form of tourism or study-abroad programmes, a strategy sometimes referred to as ‘cultural diplomacy.’

“I think every government should consider strongly doing some more to bring a wide range of Americans overseas to the Arab world,” said Tek.

Americans would then get the opportunity to “experience Arab culture first-hand,” instead of relying on pre-conceived notions of the region.

‘Preaching to the choir’

This soft approach, however, carries a few caveats, said Mark Donfried, the director of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, a Berlin-based thinktank.

“I think this issue of preaching to the choir, so to speak, or preaching to the converted is a problem, fundamentally, with cultural diplomacy,” he said.

“The vast majority of Americans don’t even have a passport.”

And Americans who do have passports, he told the audience, are usually not too likely to travel too far overseas.

“We have to reach not those 35 per cent with a passport, but those who don’t have one.”

Earlier this week, the UAE announced the launch of a Soft Power Council that aims to boost its position and project its values across the world.

Panellists noted that the concept of ‘soft power’ — defined as projecting might and status through lighter, more attractive means, had worked well to achieve the goals of some western countries.

Soft power requires a consistent, unwavering foreign policy, said Donfried, the cultural institute director.

“Unfortunately, the USA, for many periods of time, has not had consistency,” he told the audience. However, Germany was a case study of a state that shook off its dark past to become a highly-regarded country.

“If you look at German foreign policy since the end of the Second World War until now, it’s fairly consistent in terms of soft power,” Donfried said, citing the Germany’s reputation for educational programmes as an example.

“That gives much more credibility to cultural diplomacy.”