Transcript
KRISTIN LORD: if you ask me quite simply, should the United States try and take advantage of a humanitarian disaster in order to improve its public diplomacy, should we do that, my answer would be no, please don’t because it’s likely to do more harm than good. There’s good no evidence it will have an effect, and it’s just a poor way of getting our message across about who we are because I think who we are is actually people who actually care about the suffering and relieving the suffering of people, no matter where they live.
In terms of how do you affect it, if you can’t do that, what do you do? I think that’s part of your question. Actually, I think some of the things you’re talking about building long-term relationships, building working partnerships, talking about shared norms, about cooperative decisionmaking, cooperative approaches to climate change, these are valuable things that can be done, but they’re all pieces of a much larger relationship.
I think that’s why we do see these opinion polls that show maybe a small positive blip after a disaster relief, but then they settle back down because it’s the totality of the relationship that matters. We need to pay attention to the totality of the relationship instead of trying to hope that we can get a quick success just because we happen to have intervened and tried to assist people after a disaster.
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