Resident Fellow  David Frum

Why did Karen Hughes so signally fail as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy? Hint: It's not because she is a shallow and ill-informed person with scant experience of the world outside America's borders but dangerously unlimited confidence in her own abilities.

Although of course that didn't help. No, the real problem was a massive, central failure of strategy--a failure that now threatens the success of the entire Bush foreign policy.

As Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Hughes made it her job to try to "sell" the United States to the Middle East and Islamic world--to persuade Middle Easterners and Muslims of American goodwill.

For this job, she was never a natural candidate. As one critic wrote soon after she started work in the spring of 2005: "Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented 'Good morning.'"

But even had Hughes spoken fluent Arabic and spent years in the region, her project still would have disastrously failed.

Hughes set herself the goal of talking the Middle East out of its anti-Americanism. But according to her own boss, President Bush, the religious violence of the Middle East has its origins in the political, economic, and social failures of the Middle East. If true, Middle Eastern extremism would not respond to a "talking cure." It would abate only when political conditions in the region changed. Which suggested that Hughes' attempts to win over Middle Easterners by presenting the United States as a country that shared their values and respected their faith was doomed from the start.

And so it proved. Anti-Americanism as measured by opinion surveys remained intractably high. Hughes' performance was widely derided inside government and out.

Hughes reacted by redefining her mission. Instead of representing the administration in the Middle East, Hughes began to see it as her job to represent the Middle East to the administration. She became an advocate for downplaying the democracy initiative and reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks. As she lost sight of her original goal, she also lost sight of her true opportunities.

If only actions, not words, could change the Middle East, then the United States was going to need help--and allies. In which case, the greatest need for public diplomacy was not in the Middle East, where public diplomacy could accomplish nothing, but in Europe and East Asia, where it could accomplish much.

But these regions were neglected by the Hughes public diplomacy program. The practice of appointing ambassadors who cannot speak the local language has continued, even in the case of crucial allies with widely spoken languages such as Germany and France. European journalists continued to find it very difficult to gain access to senior U.S. officials.

The U.S. continues to lag at rapid response and the countering of misinformation. It does not explain its actions in terms credible to European public opinion.

Most ominously of all, under Hughes U.S. public diplomacy has often sacrificed relationships in Europe in a vain effort to chase popularity in the Middle East. As Denmark--a NATO ally that had committed troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq--faced threats of violence from Islamic extremists, Hughes' State Department issued a statement denouncing. . .the Danes. Here's State Department spokesman Justin Higgins on Feb. 3, 2006:

These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices.

One of the hardest things in diplomacy is to remember what it is you set out to do. All too often it happens that diplomats who set out to transform adversaries end up being transformed by their adversaries.

That is the story of Karen Hughes--and it is her unhappy legacy.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.