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BACK TO : The Bush Doctrine - Key Speeches & Analysis
To Lead, the U.S. Must Persuade Others to Follow by Fred Kempe Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2003 EUROPEAN OBSERVER By FRED KEMPE To Lead, the U.S. Must Persuade Others to Follow BRUSSELS -- When Procter & Gamble launches a global product, an army of marketers rolls into action. Focus groups unearth potential landmines. Market studies result in tailored messages for particular countries and regions. As the Bush administration struggles to bring home a new U.N. resolution on Iraq and prepares to pass the hat at this month's donor conference in Madrid, it may want to study the lessons of multinational marketing. More to the point, U.S. officials should dissect what when wrong with one of the more flawed "product launches" in the history of American diplomacy -- the "sale" of the Iraq war. The country known globally for the marketing prowess of companies like Coca-Cola and Microsoft has been ironically inept at selling its Iraq policy in a way that the world can understand and embrace. Sound distasteful or simplistic to compare selling a war to flogging soft drinks? Perhaps. Yet when one considers the billions of dollars America has invested in ending a horrendous dictatorship and trying to replace it with something better, any chief executive would ask why his sales force didn't do better in convincing the world of the rightness of the American cause. That failure's fallout could be long lasting: it makes raising contributions for Iraqi rebuilding difficult and complicates efforts to rally support around other explosive issues, from Pyongyang to Tehran. So here's the first lesson from the commercial world: even the best product fails if it is poorly "positioned." And for that you need a clear, consistent, believable message that speaks to its target audience. The case against Saddam Hussein would have seemed a slam-dunk, particularly in the wake of the outpouring of sympathy for Americans after September 11. Saddam had an ocean of blood on his hands, he'd invaded his neighbors, gassed his own citizens and thumbed his nose at the United Nations for more than a decade. So how did the Bush administration lose the two audiences it needed most to win the diplomatic war: key governments at the U.N. Security Council and the public opinion that could have underpinned their support? You can't "position" a product if your sales force disagrees on the message and refuses to work as a team. The Bush administration lacked the discipline to deliver a single, coherent message, and it badly coordinated the use of diplomacy and military force. A senior Pentagon adviser blames the bad marketing job on the diplomatic "sales team" -- the State Department -- "who never believed in the policy and then refused to sell it." Proof of this, he says, is that the most effective U.S. diplomatic merchant currently on the world stage, Colin Powell, traveled little when he was most needed. Had he flown to Turkey during its critical parliamentary vote last March that blocked U.S. troop deployment there, Mr. Powell could have swung the handful of votes that closed off the northern front. A State Department official instead blames the Pentagon, which he says had total disdain for the Europeans and figured they'd follow soon enough once the U.S. succeeded in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ran an impressive war, but the State Department official says he complicated diplomatic efforts enormously "whenever he opened his mouth." Spanish officials say this "divide" hurt them in two ways. first, Mr. Rumsfeld's manner made their support for the Iraq war a more difficult sell at home and then Colin Powell's diplomatic failure put them on the sing side at the Security Council after they'd been assured that Washington that they were part of a majority. "The people who believed in the war aren't those who cared about the sale," says James Rubin, a State Department spokesman during the Clinton administration. "And the people who cared about the diplomacy aren't those who believed as strongly in the war." Drawing from extensive talks with key U.S. and European officials, Mr. Rubin reconstructed what he calls the "stunning diplomatic defeat" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The next lesson is that you can better sell to a market you take the trouble to understand. A trans-Atlantic public-opinion survey released in September by the German Marshall Fund serves as an ex-post facto focus group. It comes too late to help the Bush administration with the war, but it provides clues on how to rally more support in the future. The study's most publicized outcome was the decline in positive European attitudes toward U.S. global leadership of more than 20 percentage points to 45%. More important, however, is what the underlying figures say about what sales folk call the "segmentation" of the market. Drawing from responses, The poll's analysts separated respondents into four categories: "hawks," "pragmatists," "doves" and "isolationists." Hawks believe war is sometimes necessary to obtain justice. They aren't interested in strengthening the United Nations and are willing to bypass it when necessary. Pragmatists recognize the need to strengthen the U.N., yet they are also willing to use force and act without U.N. sanction if needed. Doves disagree that war is necessary. They whish to strengthen the U.N., and they oppose use of force without its sanction. Isolationists, as the name suggests, care mostly about themselves and thus wouldn't favor any war that doesn't directly touch them. The biggest difference between Europe and the United States is that a coalition of Hawks and Pragmatists makes up 87% of the U.S. population (Hawks 22% and Pragmatists 65%) and only 50% Europe (Hawks 7% and Pragmatists 43%). Doves are a small minority of 10% in the U.S. but balance out the Pragmatists in Europe with a decisive 42%, and far more in Germany, the country whose lost support became so critical. So to win Europe's backing for war and related issues, as the United States did regarding Kosovo and Afghanistan, America can't afford to write off the "Doves." Europeans backed the United States over Kosovo because they bought the human rights' arguments. They supported the Afghan war because of the clear connection between September 11 attacks and the Taliban regime's support and safe haven for Al Qaeda. The U.S. could have overcome French obstructionism at the U.N. if it had sold the Iraq case more effectively to countries that in the end became Paris' allies. Many countries didn't buy the evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat, and few bought the scanty evidence of a connection with September 11. Yet Saddam's murderous ways, his evil intent, and his refusal to play by U.N.-set rules were undeniably a greater problem in a post-September 11 world. Skeptics would say the U.S. sold its Iraq policy badly because its course was mistaken; what's more true is that it made a good case badly, underweighting significant arguments and overplaying weak ones. It then neglected the diplomatic spade-work necessary that previous U.S. administration have done so well, particularly President Bush's father during the first Gulf War. There is one big difference, of course, between a Procter & Gamble and the Bush administration. A commercial company goes bankrupt if it can't sell its products. A U.S. government ultimately has to worry more about its citizens' safety more than the "marketing" of its policies. That said, the U.S. must do better, in the words of Mr. Rubin, to "bring to bear all of the nation's extensive persuasive powers" to complement its proven military might. If Iraq and its aftermath have taught Washington anything, it is that it can only be a global leader if it has more convinced followers. Write to Frederick Kempe at fred.kempe@wsj.com1 |