public diplomacy or propaganda?

In the past few decades the idea of diplomacy has been officially to promote the national interest of a country trough different means such as information, influencing foreign policy. The idea of public diplomacy with the time has seen as the transparent means where a sovereign country communicates with each other in order to inform influence foreign policies. Yes these definitions seem to be perfect but how can we explain public diplomacy without stating the word propaganda. I believe that everything restarts after the September 11 where the United States appears to win ideologically and culturally the cold war, they now fear to lose this war against terrorism if they don’t achieve to seduce the foreign opinion beginning with the Arab/ Muslim population. I certainly believe that this can be clearly illustrate today by numerous examples with Obama and his famous speech he made in Cairo where he attempt to battered reputation of the united states in the middles east or Hillary Clinton in Islamabad where she meet the leaders of Pakistan to discuss on the war on terrorism.


In fact after the attacks of 911 public diplomacy has attracted more attention the idea of public diplomacy becomes a broader concept where not only sovereign countries seems to be the only actors , others like non states actors that plays a global role , or nongovernmental organisations communicate and engage actively with the foreign publics and develop and promote a sort of public diplomacy policies through media and communication technologies which is a great force that has greatly empower the non states actors.


Source: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/about/what_is_pd/