January 13, 2026
Intended for teachers of diplomacy and related courses, and for diplomacy practitioners, here is an update on resources that may be of general interest. Suggestions for future updates are welcome.
Bruce Gregory
Affiliate Scholar
Institute for Public Diplomacy
and Global Communication
George Washington University
BGregory@gwu.edu | BGregory1@aol.com
Diplomacy’s Public Dimension Archive, Institute for Public Diplomacy & Global Communication, George Washington University
American Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Practitioners as Change Agents in Foreign Relations, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
eBook text and paperback here. Kindle and paperback here.
Practitioners, scholars, and journalists continue to create an abundance of content on the dismantling of US diplomacy and the Trump administration’s adverse actions directed at individuals, instruments, and institutions. This list begins again with selected items available on the date of publication.
US State Department
“Service Disrupted: The Costs of the Government Shutdown,” | John “Dink” Dinkelman, “Above and Beyond Partisanship,” | Rohit Nepal, “Breaking State?” January/February 2026, The Foreign Service Journal.
Ledyard King, “Trump’s Ambassadors Are Largely [91 percent] Political Appointees,” January 12, 2026, National Journal.
Edward Wong, “Trump Administration Orders Nearly 30 U.S. Ambassadors to Leave Their Posts,” December 22, 2025, The New York Times. | John Hudson and Hannah Natanson, “Trump Administration Abruptly Recalls Scores of Career Ambassadors,” December 22, 2025, The Washington Post.
“Court Blocks Trump-Vance Administration from Firing [State Department] Federal Workers in Violation of Federal Law,” December 17, 2025, Democracy Forward, AFGE, AFSA. NFFE.
American Foreign Service Association, “America’s Diplomatic Corps in Crisis,” Press Statement, December 3, 2025. [See report summary below.]
Daniel Wiessner, “US Judge Blocks 250 State Department Layoffs for Now,” December 4, 2025, Reuters.
Michael Crowley, “US Diplomats Report Broken Morale and Abandoned Careers,” December 2, 2025, The New York Times. | “AFSA: State Department Intends to Violate Congressional Mandate,” December 2, 2025, American Foreign Service Association
Madison Alder, “Foreign Service Officers Pursuing Legal Action After State Moves Forward with RIFs,” December 2, 2025, FedScoop.
Michael Gfoeller, “Reforming the Department of State: A Vision for an Elite, Agile Diplomatic Corps,” November, 2025, The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.
Joseph Gedeon, “State Department to Cut 38 Universities from Research Program Over DEI Policies,” November 19, 2025, The Guardian.
International Exchanges
Johanna Alonso, “2025 Brought Chaos for International Students. In 2026, Institutions Hope to Adapt,” January 7, 2026, Inside Higher Ed.
[Letter from former senior State Department officials objecting to surveillance, arrest, and threats against foreign students and faculty], November 17, 2025, posted by Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Julie Moyes, “Dutch Fulbright Board Members Resign Over U.S. Pressure on Academic Freedom,” | Lonnie R. Johnson, “Observations on the Fulbright Board Resignations in The Netherlands and the State of the Fulbright Program,” November 2025, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Todd Wallack, Maham Javaid, and Susan Svrluga, “How Foreign Student Enrollment Is Shifting in the U.S., in 6 Charts,” November 17, 2025, The Washington Post.
US Agency for Global Media
Editorial Board, “Trump’s Closure of Voice of America is Coming Back to Bite Him,” December 5, 2025, The Washington Post.
Minho Kim, “Trump to Close Voice of America’s Overseas Offices and Radio Stations,” December 2, 2025, The New York Times.
Federal Employee Unions: AFGE and AFSA
Daniel Wiessner, “US Judges Skeptical of Union Lawsuits Over Trump Bar on Federal Worker Bargaining,” December 15, 2025, Reuters.
Lawrence Ukenye, “House Passes Bill to Restore Federal Workers’ Bargaining Rights,” December 11, 2025, Politico.
“Service Disrupted: The War on Federal Labor Unions,” November 20, 2025, [YouTube, 60 minutes], American Foreign Service Association.
American Foreign Service Association: At the Breaking Point: The State of the US Foreign Service in 2025, December 3, 2025. This report by the union and professional association of the US Foreign Service documents an extraordinary loss of personnel and institutional capacity in America’s diplomatic services during the second Trump administration. Grounded in survey responses from more than 2,000 members of the Foreign Service, it describes massive and capricious firing of employees, adverse operational and policy consequences of diminished capabilities, politicization of a nonpartisan, professional service, and destruction of collective bargaining rights based in law and regulation. An existential challenge is manifest in AFSA’s statement that “one in four Foreign Service members has left or been removed since January [2025] and nearly every remaining diplomat reports diminished morale and capacity to carry out U.S. foreign policy.” The report makes three recommendations. (1) Congress must work through legislation to reaffirm the principles of a merit-based nonpartisan diplomatic service. (2) Congress should conduct robust and sustained oversight of the executive branch’s management of the Foreign Service. (3) Needed reforms in US diplomacy’s career services must be undertaken in partnership with their elected representatives.
Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World, (Penguin Press, 2025). In this sweeping, splendidly written book, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Grandin (Yale University) provides a riveting account of five centuries of conflict, diplomacy, and braided influences of political and religious thought in North and South America. He begins with Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas’s humanistic critique of Spanish imperialism and its impact on the abolition of slavery, principles of international law, juridical equality, state sovereignty, and belief in individual reason and free will. Chapters address the important role of Spain and its colonists in the US war for independence, the influence of Venezuela’s Francisco de Miranda and Simon Bolivar on US leaders and revolutions against Spain and Portugal, diverse interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, the Texas Revolution, and the US war against Mexico. Other chapters discuss twentieth century US interventions in the region, Latin America’s social democracies and influence on multilateralism, the Good Neighbor policy, Pan-Americanism, and the Cold War. Prominent among the many other Americans Grandin profiles: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Woodrow Wilson, Sumner Welles, Ernest Gruening, Nelson Rockefeller, Jorge Marti, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Camilo Tores, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, and many more. Donald Trump is mentioned only in passing on a single page. Grandin’s America, América is essential context, however, not only for a reimagination of what Yale historian Ned Blackhawk calls “an urgent vision of the relational history of the hemisphere,” it is a predicate for understanding US policies and diplomacy in 2026.
Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC), George Washington University, “25th Anniversary Conference: The Future of Public Diplomacy,” November 6-7, 2025. Led by director Babak Bahador and a team of talented faculty and student organizers, IPDGC celebrated 25 years as a leading university-based community of scholars and practitioners committed to academic study and support for the practice of public diplomacy. During a two-day conference at GWU’s School of Media and Public Affairs, leading voices in the US and abroad focused on the current upheaval in public diplomacy and future challenges in scholarship and communities of practice. In doing so, they carried forward IPDGC’s founding vision: to honor the past by looking ahead. The reasoned discourse of conference participants provided welcome affirmation of the university’s role in modeling norms of civility, free speech, and evidence-based examination of events in diplomacy’s public dimension. The website contains summaries of conference panels and links to keynote and panel presentations.
César Jiménez-Martínez, “Citizens as Problems or Resources: Power, Diplomacy, and the Contested Voice of the Nation,” in Jan Melissen, HwaJung Kim, and Githma Chandrasekara, eds, Home Engagement in Diplomacy: Global Affairs and Domestic Publics, 40-65, (Brill, 2025). In this important contribution to the conversation on diplomacy’s societization, Jiménez-Martínez (London School of Economics and Political Science) argues that emphasis on the communication and representation roles of the state overlooks the roles of other actors in cultivating, disseminating, and contesting versions of national identity. He develops a conceptual framework that interrogates the literature on the media and the nation-state, the roles of elites in each, the affordances of digital media, and the limitations of what he calls “methodological statism.” Then, drawing on a variety of examples in Latin America, he explores two areas of friction between states and citizens, with implications for public diplomacy, nation branding, and other forms of soft power. The first examines how citizen protests confront and change the symbolic power and policies of states. The second discusses how, in part due to these frictions, governments seek to leverage citizens as resources, not just as implementers of policies, but in projecting versions of national identity. Jiménez-Martínez’s reasoning stands out both for its welcome attention to diplomacy in Latin America and its nuanced assessment of evolving boundaries between governments and citizens in diplomatic practice.
Ilan Manor, “Disruption in Public Diplomacy: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Term,” in Anna Popkova, ed., Disruption and Dissent in Public Diplomacy, 17-37, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Manor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev), widely recognized for his cutting-edge scholarship on diplomacy and digital technologies, explores the variety of ways disruption can occur in public diplomacy other than through digitalization. Defining disruption as “disorder or the interruption of the normal course of unity,” he discusses the impact of disruptive events (e.g., 9/11, Covid-19, the Peace of Westphalia), metaphors (e.g., globalization, soft power, publics), ideas (e.g., image management, nation branding, domestic public diplomacy), and politics (e.g., nationalism, populism). Manor seeks to decouple disruption in public diplomacy from a singular focus on digitalization. Broader trajectories, he argues, call for examination of different sources of disruption and diverse governance and societal disruptors.
Efe Seven, César Jiménez-Martínez, and Pablo Miño, Nation Branding in the Americas: Contested Politics and Identities, (Routledge, 2025). Sevin (Towson University), Jiménez-Martínez ((London School of Economics and Political Science), and Miño, (Universidad de Los Andes, Chile) build on a nation branding literature that traditionally has largely neglected the Americas. In this volume they examine four key questions. What are the meanings and conceptual boundaries of nation branding and how does it relate to other practices such as marketing, tourism, and public diplomacy? What is meant by the terms America, the Americas, and “nation”? How has nation branding changed since its emergence as a concept and practice in the 1900s? And what are the controversies and operational consequences of nation branding as a process wielded by governments and citizens between and within countries. The co-authors develop provisional answers to each in the context of 12 country case studies: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Their carefully researched study, distinguished by its geographical focus and academic excellence, has value for students and practitioners.
Katherine Stewart, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, (Bloomsbury, 2025). With careful research and exceptional clarity, journalist Katherine Stewart divides radical antidemocratic networks in American society into five categories. “Funders,” beneficiaries of massive concentrations of wealth. “Thinkers” associated with the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and other advocacy groups. The “Infantry,” a large group with diverse economic, educational, and regional identities and agendas. “Sergeants” who turn money and messages into votes at the local level. And “Power Players,” leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, super lobbyists, and media influencers. Some have relevance to public diplomacy. Darren Beattie, currently the State Department’s “Senior Bureau Official in Public Diplomacy” and acting head of the US Institute of Peace. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Michael Pack, former head of the US Agency for Global Media and former CEO of the Claremont Institute. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. And Lt. Gen (ret.) William Boykin, committed to fostering Christian nationalism in the military and NGOs abroad. Stewart’s superb guide provides foundational context for understanding events in 2026 and beyond.Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Carnegie Endowment’s Jessica Mathews calls it “one of the most closely reported and cogent” books on the political movement that brought Donald Trump to power.
US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, 2025 Comprehensive Annual Report on Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting, November 2025. The bipartisan, presidentially appointed Commission, led with astonishing dedication for many years by Chairman Sim Farar and Vice Chairman William J. Hybl, faced significant challenges in producing this 174-page report. Chaos in US diplomacy’s institutions. Destruction of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. White House and Congressional failure to fill Commission vacancies. Public diplomacy funding cuts, program suspensions and terminations, and numerous operational and planning uncertainties in 2025. Most of the report, edited by executive director Sarah Arkin and Daniel Langenkamp, consists of FY 2024 budget data and program descriptions provided by the State Department’s bureaus, overseas US missions, and USAGM. Granular and graphically well-presented, they will be useful to scholars, Congressional staff, practitioners, and partner organizations as a baseline context for assessing current and future changes.
Readers should give priority to the report’s recommendations to the White House, Congress, and State (pp. 15-18). Some the Commission has advanced for decades (e.g., funding prioritization, National Security Council coordination, leveraging the expertise of PD professionals in decision-making, streamlining exchanges, and better use and management of research and evaluation). Others are new (e.g., branding strategies, advanced messaging tests and marketing techniques, and greater focus on visual storytelling). Especially welcome are the Commission’s extensive views on USAGM and the future of US government media (p. 22 and pp. 161-166). Grounded in its belief that government supported media are essential to US interests, the report summarizes relevant history and the state-sponsored media activities of adversaries. It then provides an abundance of foundational questions and suggestions for what should be done with the Voice of America, US-funded grantee networks, and the Open Technology Fund. The Commission’s recommendations will spark needed debate. They also will provide lawmakers, policymakers, and practitioners with insights and information needed for reimagining tools, methods, and structures in US diplomacy’s public dimension.
Jonathan Vickery, Stuart MacDonald, and Nicholas J. Cull (eds.) Understanding Cultural Diplomacy and International Cultural Relations, (Edward Elgar, 2025). Vickery (University of Warwick), MacDonald (ICR Research Ltd), and Cull (University of Southern California) ground this ambitious and instructive volume on three assumptions. (1) A separation between cultural diplomacy and “international” cultural relations. (2) Their evolution in “a common space of development, contradiction and possibility.” (3) Heterogeneous characteristics that elude single definitions and conceptual frameworks. The collection divides into three parts — analytical and historical approaches, tools and practices, and critical issues. Each part contains chapters and illuminating case studies. The 46 contributors, a globally diverse gathering of scholars and practitioners, the 39 chapters, too numerous to identify here, and an overview in the book’s preface can be located in Elgar’s open access “Look Inside” feature. The authors examine definitional debates, historical approaches, identity narratives, normative values, policy issues, research trends, the meaning of soft power, digital cultural relations, critical theory, cosmopolitan constructivism, and more. Case studies that include sports diplomacy, museum diplomacy, popular culture, music, art, and the trajectories of cultural diplomacy in Japan, Turkey, China, Russia’s cultural institutes, the British Council, and the EU’s National Institutes of Culture illuminate the chapters.
Although the collection is far from comprehensive, as the editors are quick to acknowledge, it is an exceptionally useful framing of ideas, instruments, institutions, and strategies in today’s geopolitical and technological environment. Researchers and practitioners will have much to build on as they explore cultural domains that have endured throughout human history, that are notoriously hard to define, that are context dependent, that are hard to evaluate, and that can reinforce negative perceptions and stereotypes as well as trust and mutual understanding.
Recent Items of Interest
“AFSA Achievement and Contributions to the Association Award: Vivian S. Walker,” January/February 2026, The Foreign Service Journal.
Anne Applebaum, “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark,” October 14, 2025, The Atlantic.
Matt Armstrong, “‘Cognitive Warfare’ Fails the Cognitive Test,” November 17, 2025, Arming for the War We’re In.
J. Brian Atwood and Andrew Natsios, “What Americans Lost in the Dismantling of USAID,” January 8, 2026, The Hill.
Robert F. Cekkuta and Eric Rubin, “The Mass Recall of Experienced U.S. Ambassadors Endangers American Security,” December 28, 2025, The Steady State Substack.
John Fer, “Measuring and Mitigating Cognitive Dissonance in Public Diplomacy,” January/February 2026, The Foreign Service Journal
Thomas L. Friedman, “Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?” November 16, 2025, The New York Times.
Barry Fulton, “Looking Back and Struggling Forward,” December 23, 2025, Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, GWU.
“Jim Goldgeier Elected President of International Studies Association,” December 12, 2025, American University.
Paul Hare, “The Peacemaker President and U.S. Public Diplomacy: How Trump Could Reshape the U.S. Peace Corps,” December 17, 2025, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
“How the Exasperating, Indispensable BBC Must Change,” November 12, 2025, The Economist.
Nate Jones, “State Department Erases 15 Pages of Nuclear History [Foreign Relations of the United States] — With No Warning,” November 13, 2025, The Washington Post.
James Ketterer (Bard College) and Kevin Maloney (Carnegie Council on International Ethics), interviewed by Nick Cull, “Values-Based Narratives in U.S. Foreign Policy,” transcript and YouTube video, January 5, 2026, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, “The Price of American Authoritarianism: What Can Reverse Democratic Decline?” January/February 2026, Foreign Affairs.
Ilan Manor, “AI Companions: The New Frontier of Disinformation,” November 25, 2025, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Sandra Montoya, “Disruptive Cultural Diplomacy: A Transformative Tool for Peacebuilding,” January 8, 2026, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Yelena Osipova-Stocker, “Russia’s Investment in Dual Track International Engagement: Sharp Power and Public Diplomacy,” December 9, 2025, Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, GWU,
Ben O’Loughlin, “The Future of Soft Power and Strategic Narratives,” November 24, 2025, Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, GWU.
Maria Repnikova, “The New Soft-Power Imbalance: China’s Cautious Response to America’s Retreat,” November 20, 2025, Foreign Affairs.
Neal Rosendorf, “A Post-Trump Domestic Policy Roadmap to Restore U.S. Soft Power,” December 15, 2025, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Thomas Scherer, “How to Predict the Future in Foreign Policy,” November 25, 2025, fp21.
Efe Seven, “The Last Three Feet: An Idea Ever Popular,” December 16, 2025, Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, GWU.
Amro Shubair, “Smart Power: A Framework for Influence,” January 2, 2026, “Pressure Without Consent,” November 20, 2025, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Zachary Small, “Alma Allen, American Sculptor, Is Selected for Venice Biennale,” November 24, 2025, The New York Times.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Exposure Therapy: The Case for a Domestic Exchange [Fulbright] Program,” November 25, 2025, Commonweal.
Adam Taylor and Hannah Natanson, “Under Trump, U.S. Human Rights Reports Will Flag Abortion, Gender Care,” November 20, 2025, The Washington Post. | Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis, “New US Rules Say Countries with DEI Policies Are Infringing Human Rights,” November 21, 2025, Reuters.
Eriks Varpahovskis, “The Role of Piracy in Cultural Diplomacy,” January 2, 2026, CPD Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
Bill Wanlund, “Of Values and Narratives,” January 2026, Public Diplomacy Council of America.
Gem from the Past
Geoffrey Wiseman, ed., Isolate or Engage: Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy, (Stanford University Press, 2015). Ten years ago, Geoffrey Wiseman (DePaul University) compiled nine case studies that examined how (and how effectively) the United States seeks to engage the people in adversarial states when it also seeks to isolate their governments through the absence or limited presence of diplomatic relations and other means. Public diplomacy methods used to influence publics — with the intent they will constrain or change their government’s behavior — include international broadcasting, track two diplomacy, and cultural and educational exchanges. Cases and contributors include USSR/Russia (Robert D. English), China (Robert S. Ross), North Korea (Scott Snyder), Vietnam (Mark Philip Bradley and Viet Thanh Nguyen), Libya (Dirk J. Vandewalle), Iran (Suzanne Maloney), Syria (William Rugh), Cuba (William Leogrande), and Venezuela (Michael Shifter). Patterns of behavior, key questions, and lessons discussed in the cases have relevance in extended adversarial relations that in many instances continue today. A central theme of the study is that while public diplomacy in adversarial relations can project national interests and national identity, it can also have a mirror effect in reshaping American identity and culture. Wiseman and most contributors are skeptical of the isolationist approach and question the wisdom of “carrying out official, state-based public diplomacy while refusing to have formal diplomatic ties with such states.” At this writing, the Venezuela case is particularly relevant.
An archive ofDiplomacy’s Public Dimension: Books, Articles, Websites (2002-present) is maintained at George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. Current issues are also posted by the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, the Public Diplomacy Council of America, and Len Baldyga’s email listserv.