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can be carried out with and without congressional approval. Timelines for action on these fronts should be developed accordingly, but speed should be a priority.

Consolidate foreign assistance authorities. Foreign assistance is a critical foreign policy tool that is too often disconnected from the federal government's practice of foreign policy. Bureaucrats spend significant energy resisting the use of non-emergency foreign assistance to leverage positive results for the United States, even though it is a perfectly reasonable proposition. The coordination of foreign assistance dollars is also difficult because the foreign assistance budget and foreign loan issuance authorities are divided across numerous Cabinet departments, smaller agencies, and other offices.

The next Administration should take steps to ensure that future foreign assistance clearly and unambiguously supports the President’s foreign policy agenda. For example, the next administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is technically subordinate to the State Department, should be authorized to take on the additional role of Director of Foreign Assistance with the rank of Deputy Secretary and oversee all foreign assistance. This role—which existed briefly during the George W. Bush Administration before it was eliminated by the Obama Administration—would empower the dual-hatted official to better align and coordinate with the manifold foreign assistance programs across the federal government. The next Administration should also evaluate whether these multiple sources of foreign assistance are in

the national interest and, if not, develop a plan to consolidate foreign assistance authorities.

Make public diplomacy and international broadcasting serve American interests. A key part of U.S. foreign policy is the ability to communicate with not only governments but with the peoples of the world. Indeed, in some ways, communicating directly with the public is more important than communicating with governments, particularly in times of governmental conflict or disagreement. Public diplomacy has historically been, and remains, vital to American foreign policy success. Unfortunately, USS. public diplomacy, which largely relies on taxpayer-funded international broadcasting outlets, has been deeply ineffective in recent years.

The U.S. government’s first foray into international broadcasting started with the Voice of America radio broadcast in 1942, which was intended as

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a tool to communicate directly with the people of Europe during World War II. During the next half-century, America’s international broadcasting efforts both expanded and increased in sophistication as the United States shifted out of its “hot” war in Europe and into the Cold War with the Soviet Union. U.S. international broadcasting prowess, and the confident willingness to communicate the correctness of American ideals in the face of global resistance, arguably hit its peak near the conclusion of the Cold War in the late 1980s.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse

of Soviet and Eastern Bloc Communism, factors including the false

appeal of a so-called peace dividend triggered a slide in the U.S. ability to communicate a pro-freedom message to the rest of the world and in its commitment to do so. Ironically, this slide accompanied the rise of the Internet and mobile phone technologies, which arguably facilitated the most significant revolution in human communication since the invention of the printing press.

The United States must reassert its public diplomacy obligations by restoring its international broadcasting infrastructure as part of the broader US. foreign policy framework, consolidating broadcasting resources and recommitting to people-focused and pro-freedom messaging and content.

Engage in cyber diplomacy. Cyberspace has become an arena for competition between the U.S. and nations that seek and export digital authoritarianism. Cyberspace protection is critical to national security and deserving of commensurate diplomatic resources. Defined as “the use of diplomatic tools to address issues arising in and through cyberspace,” cyber diplomacy is a key part of the U.S. government’s toolkit for preventing and addressing cyber threats.**

The model for cyberspace that the U.S. espouses is based on democracy

and freedom of information. It is “an open, interoperable, secure, reliable, market-drive, domain that reflects democratic values and protects privacy.””> Russia and China, meanwhile, are authoritarian regimes that use the Internet to limit public opposition and control information. They have created technological tools to enforce dominance over their peoples, and

at the U.N. and international organizations dealing with cyberspace, they strive to push standards that assist their totalitarian efforts and undermine Western nations.