1776 Reversed

In the Academy-Award winning documentary The Fog of War former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that the U.S. should never use its vast military or economic power in a unilateral way. If we can't convince nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, he noted, then we need to reexamine our reasoning.

A recent survey conducted by the Daily Telegraph reveals that a reexamination of America's public diplomacy strategy (and general approach toward the world in general) is long past due. The report is full of many depressing statistics, some of the most salient of which show that 65% of Britons regard America's influence in the world today as predominantly malign while 69% of Britons say their overall opinion of the US has gone down in recent years.