Why is Barack Obama struggling to push his policies through? When he came into office, Obama wanted to bridge the partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans and introduce extensive legislation to improve health care for Americans and to regulate the financial services industry. None of that really happened in the way anticipated by the President.

There are of course previous examples in the history of the United States where a President did not live up to the expectations. And interestingly, there is also a pattern to be found: As Robert B. Cialdini, professor emeritus for Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University, writes in his book “Influence. The Psychology of Persuasion”, the less successful Presidents were all new to Washington – as was Barack Obama.

This is important because of a powerful psychological principle which is often employed in marketing, but also politics: reciprocity. If someone does us a favour, we are very much  inclined to return the favour when asked to do so. In politics, this is often used to rally support for a certain piece of legislation independent of party membership.

As Cialdini writes

this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washingtin identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there.

Sounds familiar? That was also the exact platform Barack Obama was campaigning on when he was elected President. Cialdini’s conclusion however is disillusioning as he believes that much of Carter’s legislative difficulty upon arriving in office “may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.”

Seems you cannot do it right in American politics.

Foto: DonkeyHotey, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

Today, if Henry Kissinger asked again which number to call to speak to Europe, he would certainly be given Angela Merkel’s. Without doubt, the German Chancellor is the most important, and powerful, actor in the current Euro crisis. But the undisputed importance of Germany is also its biggest problem: while the US and some EU partners like Poland want more leadership from Merkel, others fear German dominance, most notably the British.

As for Merkel, being in the spotlight is diametrically opposed to her personal leadership style. She prefers to lead from behind and not position herself too early. Repeatedly, she has explained that there is no single, big solution for the uro crisis and that the Eurozone can only be stabilised step by step.

To observers, this often looks like trial and error. They complain that Merkel first rejects new proposals only to adopt them later because all alternatives have failed (something the leader of the opposition Frank-Walter Steinmeier dubbed “Merkel’s law”). And to some extent, that’s true. But with such a complex issue as the Euro crisis and a coalition partner at home who is in a state of dissolution, there is probably no alternative to her approach. And not only the Liberals, the Bavarian Conservatives, too, are becoming more and more nationalistic and populist with regard to the Euro.

Ultimately, Merkel’s cure for the Euro crisis is based on three principles:

• Austerity, not stimulus: Confidence can only be restored if states adopt a balanced budget. Investments in the economy which would stimulate growth are currently not seen as a priority.
• Deeper integration: Despite growing Euro-scepticism, even in Germany, Merkel believes that the Euro crisis must result in ever deeper European integration. This is also the strong opinion of Finance Minister Schäuble who is one of the pillars of the German government.
• Prevent inflation: Domestically, Merkel is adamant to keep inflation at a low rate. Germans have so far been relatively relaxed about the Euro crisis, but if inflation kicks in, the savings of millions of Germans would be at risk. Merkel is determined to prevent this in her own interest to become re-elected.

For Merkel, the key to the solution of the Euro crisis is not primarily economical. She believes that stronger guarantees for the Eurozone, the buying of government bonds by the ECB or Eurobonds will not ultimately calm the markets. In her policy speech last Friday, she stated self-critically that above all, politics has lost “almost all trust”. Therefore, her response to the crisis is political rather than economical.

There is no doubt that Merkel understood the seriousness of the crisis and that she also has an idea of how to solve it. The question however is whether she will be able to convince her European partners and lead the European Union out of this crisis. Commission President Barroso, for example, is worried that the EU institutions might be weakened as a result of the crisis management of national governments, while President Sarkozy is afraid of yet another transfer of power to exactly these institutions. And the fact that she has so far not been able to present a new and positive vision for Europe (stricter budget controls is hardly something that excites people), it is easy to dismiss her proposals as a “German dictate”.

Surprisingly, it was neither Sarkozy nor another member of the Euro zone who most convincingly pledged for German leadership in the Euro crisis. It was Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski who warned in a recent speech in Berlin: “I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead.”

“Leadership”, Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye writes, “is more like being in the middle of the circle and attracting others than being ‘king of the mountain’ and issuing orders to subordinates down below.” Merkel knows this and is currently rallying for support among her fellow EU leaders, within and outside the Euro zone. Whether she’s successful, we’ll see by the end of this week.

Note: This blogpost was first published on 8 December 2011 on brussels+, the policy blog of the public affairs consultancy g+ europe. To subscribe to the blog and receive regular updates on the European Union and its member states, please click here.

Foto: Nikolas Konstantin, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

A study by the renowned Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) found that a positive image can help to attract foreign direct investment. “Even after taking into account the economic and fundamental standard factors that are being considered in an investment decision, immaterial factors like stereotypes and consumer perception clearly have an impact”, says Margarita Kalamova, one of the authors of the study.

Thus, critics who often dismiss nation branding campaigns like “Cool Britannia” or “Germany – Land of Ideas” miss the point. However, it needs much more than an advertising campaign or a PR campaign in order to attract foreign investors. While communication can help to provide information and tell a story of an attractive investment location, the facts must also be right. Even Simon Anholt, who allegedly invented the term “nation brand,” admits that “image comes from policy, not from communications.”

Read the full article on prnewsonline.com

Foto: woodleywonderworks, Subprime Crisis No Barrier to Affordable Housing, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

A lot of ink has been spilled in the debate between cyber-utopians and tech-pessimists about the potential of blogs and social networks to spark revolutions or strengthen dictatorships. Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky in particular engaged in a long (and occasionally exhausting) exchange of articles for example in Prospect magazine; and while Malcolm Gladwell dismisses the importance of technology in recent revolutions, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen embrace it.

But although all these prominent writers have thought intensively about the link between technology and freedom, we are still far away from an agreement. Partly, I believe, this has to do with the fact that some of the debaters seem to be more interested in their own egos than in the subject itself. Partly, it is also because we only have very limited data and finding a causal relationship between Twitter and the start of a revolution is indeed very difficult if not impossible.

On balance, however, I tend to side with the cyber-uptopians rather than the tech-pessimists. Of course, Gladwell is right to remind us that high-risk-activism is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. Referring to the protests in Eastern Germany which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall he writes:

Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends” – the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

Technology alone is certainly not sufficient, but blogs, Facebook, and Twitter can provide for a digital equivalent to the St. Nicholas Church, i.e. serve as a platform to meet likeminded people and to reassure oneself that one is not alone with his criticism of the regime (Thomas Friedman first made a similar argument with regard to the 2009 protests in Iran).

[aartikel]1846143535:right[/aartikel] Similarly, governments in China, Iran, and elsewhere of course do use the Internet in order to spy on protestors. And despite the various technologies to disguise onself on the Internet, this may not always help. We witness a constant race between those who use the Internet as a tool for liberation and those who use it as a means of opression. Presumably, there will never be a clear winner in this race – somewhere, there will always be a Neo, fighting against the Matrix that evil dictators have programmed to keep their people distracted from the real problems.

But most importantly, if you are speaking to people from Egypt who went to Tahrir Square in January and February, they themselves firmly believe that the Internet helped them with their protests. And if the Internet really was a tool for repression, why would governments in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere shut Internet services down once it’s getting hotter in the streets?

The Internet is neither “good” nor “bad” – it’s what people make of it. And many citizens in the Arab world (and elsewhere, including the US and Europe) rely on the Internet as a place where they can voice their criticism if traditional media ignores social and political problems. It provides a direct link to donor organisations and offers some kind of protection for prominent members of the opposition. Therefore, we should promote the use of the Internet wherever we can, knowing that this can only be the first step.

Foto: Ahmad Hammoud, Protest 5, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

For many PR professionals, the Internet is already an essential channel for reaching out to a broad public. But is that also true for public affairs? Traditionally, lobbying is associated with secrecy and mystery-mongering, but consumers and NGOs today increasingly demand transparency.

In an article for prnewsonline.com, Klas Roggenkamp (compuccino) and I argue that although digital public affairs is no substitute for traditional lobbying, it can nevertheless help to manage political and reputational risks. The article is an excerpt of our much more extensive book chapter on digital public affairs strategies, published in 2010.

Foto: Rosaura Ochoa, Alto a la Violencia, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

The fall of the autocratic governments in Tunesia and Egypt took Western governments by surprise and unsettled the geopolitical strategies that the West applied to the region for the last twenty years. “The new Arab world”, writes the German weekly Die Zeit, “will be less comfortable, not merely a figure on the geopolitical chessboard, but a threedimensional landscape with real people”. However, it remains unclear how the revolts in Tunesia and Egypt play out and many experts are still unsure how to read the events. How do the different scenarios look like?

The analysts at the political risk consultancy Maplecroft see the Egypt military as the main risk factor: “Senior members of the armed forces have a vested interest in maintaining a strong hand in politics”, the analysts write and point to the fact that many of Egypt’s current leaders are in fact long-time allies of Hosni Mubarak and that the military seems to be opposed to giving Mohamed ElBaradei a role in the new government. The political outlook for Egypt therefore remains “dynamic”.

Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, sees the revolts in the Arab world as part of a larger modernisation process. In his book “The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), Bremmer introduced a model which describes how societies develop from close and stable countries (think of North Korea) to open and stable ones (like Western nations). This transformation, however, does not have a linear shape but instead resembles the letter “J”. Between both end points, there is usually a dip in stability, a period of “turbulent transition” which we can currently observe in the Middle East.

Another positive interpretation of the Arab revolts comes from Thomas Barnett, chief analyst at the forecasting company Wikistrat. “If you think about Tunesia, if you think about Egypt”, he says in a video interview, “at their heart, these are really middle class revolutions in the sense that the aspirations expressed are primarily about jobs, opportunity, decent income and the like.” For Barnett, the middle class, and not extremists, criminals or other ‘dark forces’ of globalisation are drivers of political change.

But will the Arab revolution really play out like the “peaceful revolution” in Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989? Or will it rather be like the Islamic Revolution of 1979? The daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argues that the historic reference should rather be Indonesia. In the last twelve years, Indonesia moved from a military dictatorship to a democratic government which may at times be fragile but still gives hope. The “Indonesia scenario” seems much more realistic than the “1989 scenario” because the democratic revolution of 1989 was accompanied by a massive economic aid programme from the West and a quick accession to the European Union. Such a programme however is nowhere in sight at the moment.

But despite all the insecurity about Egypt’s near future, it is clear that the actions of the people in Cairo and elsewhere will be crucial for the long-term success of the democratic transition: only if the Egypt citizens continue to press for political reform publicly, they can maintain the momentum which is needed for the transition period. As the Turkish economist Timur Kuran showed in his economic model of revolutions, the opinions that people express in a time of revolution are often based on what they expect to be the opinion which will be sanctioned positively by their peers.

We don’t know yet whether the democratic middle-class will prevail in Egypt or whether the country will remain at the bottom of the “J-curve” for the forseeable future. Our next strategy for the Middle East should therefore be much smarter than the last one.

Photo: Ahmad Hammoud, Protest Face Paint, License: CC BY 2.02

The Obama administration has the reputation for being Web 2.0-savvy, and for good reason. Barack Obama’s campaign for the US presidency was notable for its use of social media for organizing and fundraising. Supporters were able to keep track of the candidate through websites like Myspace and YouTube, and were prompted to make cash contributions through mobile phone text messages.

The use of these connection technologies, as some now call them – applications that encourage user collaboration, interaction and contribution – have been carried over to the Obama administration, most notably as part of White House and State Department public diplomacy programs.

In January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a major address on internet freedom, articulating a US policy that would have the effect of assuring access to internet resources and social media in places like China and Iran, where governments block some content and tools.

“The Chinese bristled at the speech, seeing it as an invasion of their sovereignty,” said Jared Cohen who serves on Clinton’s policy planning staff and advises the secretary of state on the role technology can play in advancing foreign policy objectives. But since the speech, he told ISN Security Watch, Chinese Uighurs have made their presence felt on the internet and have begun advocating for their positions in internet forums.

During the aftermath of last year’s Iranian elections, Cohen himself called Twitter CEO Evan Williams, asking him to keep the site up despite scheduled maintenance so that Iranian dissidents could continue to communicate with the outside world.

Keeping up with the game

But the program to use web tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to influence international public opinion actually found its start in the waning days of the Bush administration, when a team of White House and State Department operatives initiated a program attempting to defeat international terrorists in the same cyber venue in which they had achieved so much success in propagandizing, recruiting, organizing and fundraising.

“It was a source of frustration in the Bush administration that we were being outdone by terrorists by means of a technology that we had developed,” Juan Carlos Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, told ISN Security Watch. “Putting out talking points to our ambassadors was not effective when dealing with viral messages emanating from al-Qaida.”

At the initiative of James Glassman, a former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, a program centered at the State Department called Public Diplomacy 2.0 was inaugurated (on Glassman, also read “Are Glassman and Doran right on Iran?” by Daniel Florian). Implicit in the program’s philosophy was the recognition that the US could best al-Qaida in a Web 2.0 setting.

“Standing at a microphone and preaching doesn’t work for us,” Glassman told ISN Security Watch. “Instead, we are facilitating a conversation.

“Anyway, we Americans believe in the marketplace of ideas,” he added. “Our idea was to use technology and social media to promote a conversation in which our views would be aired.”

Al-Qaida was more successful in a Web 1.0 world but suffered when its views were subject to a Web 2.0-type of discussion, noted Zarate. The image of Aiman al-Zawahiri, a top Osama Bin Laden lieutenant, was tainted after an internet discussion of his views “because he could not deal with all the questions about killing Muslims,” he said.

Among other things, Glassman, Zarate and their crew started the first US government social networking site called Exchanges International, dealing with educational exchanges. “It was quite benign,” said Glassman, “but there was definite opposition to it because we could not control this dot-gov site. People could go on and talk about whatever they wanted.”

Control and partnerships

This lack of absolute content control is indeed one of the characteristics of Public Diplomacy 2.0. Another is the forging of partnerships with private-sector, civil society players, whose views align with that of US policy.

“There is a fear that if we can’t control the message, then we are giving the enemy more space to exploit internet tools and propagate their message,” said Cohen. A better approach is to “realize that the 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak and to understand that maybe we can’t control the message but we can influence it. Technology is not the answer, it is a tool and there is always a risk that comes along with using it.”

The efforts of Glassman and Zarate “planted the seeds” that led to Clinton’s internet freedom address, according to Cohen. “In the last six months of the Bush administration, they began asking questions about how technology can be used as tool to enhance civil society.”

The Bush people were moved in this direction at least in part by the recognition that US government voices were no longer considered credible on the world stage. This led them to seek out voices on the internet that aligned with US policy, said Zarate. Among the voices they found were private, anti-terror groups such as the Alliance of Youth Movements and Sisters Against Violent Extremism.

“These groups were aligned with our interests,” said Zarate, “but they were not the voices of the US government.”

“Governments can best advocate for things like civil rights and against politically motivated censorship by empowering and expanding the discussion to this broader civil society,” said Cohen. “You can think of statecraft as a specialized form of troubleshooting. When you’re troubleshooting anything you want to have as many stakeholders in the room as possible.”

Ultimately, the private sector is an important partner with government in enhancing and preserving internet freedom. “The Google-China issue,” said Cohen, “is an example of the shared responsibility of government and the private sector.”

Spreading technology

For Glassman, the biggest challenge facing Public Diplomacy 2.0 is “spreading the technology.” “The more people in Iran have technology that is working and not blocked by government,” he said, “the better for freedom and democracy in that country but also for American security.”

He sees Public Diplomacy 2.0 as the best hope toward forestalling Iran’s eventual deployment of nuclear weapons. “The chances of a diplomatic solution appear to be slim,” said Glassman. “The chances of military action may be growing every day but are quite frightening. If instead we use tools of public diplomacy and strategic communications to help the Iranian dissident movement, we might not be able to change the regime, but we might be able to change the regime’s behavior.”

About this text: This text was first published by the International Relations and Security Network at the ETH Zurich under a Creative Commons license.

Foto: Jenny Solomon – Fotolia.com

Last week, I had a brief Twitter dispute with Matt Armstrong (@Mountainrunner) on James K. Glassman’s and Michael Doran’s Wall Street Journal article on what kind of diplomacy the USA should use to “undermine the regime in Tehran”. In this article, Glassman (who was George W. Bush’s last Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and gained a great reputation for his clever use of social media tools) and Professor Doran argue that rather than using force to eliminate thre threat of a nuclear Iran, the US should use its soft power.

Obviously, I am all for this approach, but it nevertheless seems to me that some of their proposals are too far reaching and rather resemble clandestine operations than public diplomacy instruments or soft power.

While Glassman and Doran rightly suggest that tightening sanctions and better access to independent media outlets may increase public pressure on the government, I believe they overshot the mark when suggesting that the US should use third parties to “provide moral and educational support for the Green Revolution”. I am also not quite sure about the benefits of supplying dissidents with “reports on what worked (during the coloured revolutions) in Ukraine or Georgia” or to provide “documentaries on the fall of Ceausescu, Milosevic and Pinochet; the transitions in South Africa and Poland; and the achievements of the U.S. civil-rights movement”.

This will certainly be seen as US intervention in internal affairs by the Iranian government and will make it impossible for US negotiators to find a solution for the Iranian nuclear programme at the green table. It will also strengthen the Iranian propaganda and may even reduce popular support for the Green Revolution. These tactics resemble the CIA’s covert action programmes in South America, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere and as Tim Weiner pointed out in his best-selling book “Legacy of Ashes”, they failed to succeed in any of these cases.

To be clear: I agree with Matt who argued in a tweet that public diplomacy was no “beauty contest”. It is a means to pursue a state’s foreign policy interests abroad – and I have indeed argued that way in my article on public diplomay. But if public diplomacy becomes a synonym for regime change, it will loose the broad support it needs in order to be successful.

Surely, the West would prefer another leader than Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly called for the annihilation of Isreael, supresses the opposition on the street and in show trials and who obviously does not do much to improve the living standard for a broad majority of his people. But teaching the Green Revolution to overthrow their government will not lead to a more stable situation. Western diplomacy should keep a door open to the “official” Iran and try to negotiate with the Iranian administration. It should be our primary concern to protect the Iranian dissidents from repression by making it clear to the Iranian government that the West closely watches any violations of human rights.

It is also important to invite Iranians to the US, to Europe or to other parts of the free world through exchange and education programmes – just as Glassman and Doran suggest. This will certainly have a positive effect on their desire to achieve real reform in their own country and to elect another government. But sending out revolutionary leaflets as Glassman and Doran suggest is not the smart kind of soft power which made the US so attractive to most parts of the world. It’s like using a hammer to apply a screw to a wall.

Foto: Hamed Saber, Iranian dissidents, Lizenz: CC BY 2.0

What happens to US intelligence when the president doesn’t like to read?

Producing the President’s Daily Brief degenerates to the level of a tabloid newsroom, with reporters – or in this case, intelligence analysts – scrambling to attract the chief’s attention with sensational stories and headlines.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened during the administration of George W Bush, according to a report released last week by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The incurious Bush was loathe to immerse himself in details. He also didn’t want to hear about issues, such as climate change, which didn’t interest him.

This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Bush’s was, after all, an administration that failed to act on intelligence that al-Qaida was about to attack the US, proceeded with an Afghan adventure without an elementary knowledge of the political or human landscape, invaded Iraq on false pretenses, and bungled those overseas operations perhaps beyond repair.

Milking information

The President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, has been considered the premiere analytical product of the US intelligence community since 1964, when it was first presented to then-president Lyndon Johnson. But under Bush, the importance of the PDB soared as never before. Intelligence analysts understandably did what they could to get their issues before presidential eyes.

“A lot of recent media attention has focused on how the intelligence community collects information, and rightly so,” report author Kenneth Lieberthal, director of Brookings’ John L Thornton China Center, told ISN Security Watch. “This report focuses on what you do after you collect the information. How do you effectively milk your information in order to understand better the realities out there and how are you able to take that product and insert it into the policymaking process.”

Under Bush, inserting intelligence into the policymaking process meant inserting it into the PDB, according to Lieberthal. Under Bush, the PDB was elevated “to an unprecedented level of importance,” he said.

This, in turn had the effect of skewing intelligence production “away from deeper research and arms-length analysis to being driven by the latest attention-grabbing clandestine reports from the field.”

Much as a newspaper reporter wants his or her story printed on page one, Bush’s exaggerated reliance on the PDB made getting an item into that document a major career goal of intelligence analysts. “In the CIA,” the report notes, “analysts who got an item into the PDB that President Bush found interesting or useful were rewarded, and the intelligence community as a whole came to see much of their raison d’être as centered on the PDB product each day.”

These attitudes, goals and incentives had the effect of distorting the development of intelligence products to be consumed by the president and other senior policymakers.

“Analysts may define issues in sharper terms than warranted and use somewhat hyperbolic language in order to make the item sexy enough for inclusion in the PDB,” the report said. “The PDB format allows only short items on specific topics. It therefore can skew the type of analysis done in the intelligence community away from the more complex and thoughtful work and presentations that are critical to policymaking.”

In other words, the US intelligence community was, in some perverse way, feeding the president what he was able and willing to digest.

Dubious reality

The tendency of analysts to emphasize information gleaned from classified sources was also problematic and stemmed from the same tabloid atmosphere of sensationalism. Analysts perceived items captured by clandestine means to add value to the story, and this make it more likely to be included in the PDB.

“But such information is often incomplete,” said Lieberthal, “may be less timely than open source materials, lacks important context, and is occasionally of dubious reliability.”

The primacy of the PDB has also had a negative impact on information sharing, an intelligence community value promoted since 9/11. “In some unfolding situations, IC analysts sometimes save useful information for PDB use, and only disseminate it to non-PDB policy users later,” the report found. “Withholding less sensitive information for hours or days so it appears first in the PDB is dangerous.”

Superficial knowledge

If all this were not enough, the report also found that other aspects of US intelligence analysis to be severely wanting.

Of particular relevance to the ongoing fiascoes in Southwest Asia, the report found country knowledge among US intelligence analysts to be superficial. “Many … lack the deep immersion in the country’s political system, economy, and modern history necessary to produce nuanced, insightful analytic products,” the report said.

The National Intelligence Estimates, one of the major analytical products of the intelligence community, “are frequently too late, too long, and too detailed to serve high-level policy makers well,” the report found. The quality of the estimates are also often compromised by the effort to achieve a unified position, “producing reports that can become the lowest common denominator statement that is able to obtain agreement” across the various segments of the intelligence community.

The Brookings report also found that, ever since the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fiasco, US intelligence analysts have been gun shy; the analysts are actually refusing to do any analyzing. Instead, the report found “a tendency for analytical products to focus on amalgamating all potentially relevant data and to leave it largely to policy makers to draw the analytic conclusions.”

New direction

The pendulum may now be swinging in the opposite direction under the Obama administration, as the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, announced that opportunity analysis – the identification by analysts of unanticipated windows of opportunity to advance US policies – would become a key component of intelligence products.

The Brookings report noted that presidents take briefings and use intelligence reports in a highly individualistic manner. No doubt, Obama is not relying on the PDB the way Bush did.

But for all of his reliance on the PDB, Bush didn’t always pay heed. After all, what was the PDB headline on 6 August 2001? “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

About the author: Peter Buxbaum, a Washington-based independent journalist, has been writing about defense, security, business and technology for 15 years. His work has appeared in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, Chief Executive, Information Week, Defense Technology International, Homeland Security and Computerworld. His website is www.buxbaum1.com.

About this text: This text was first published by the International Relations and Security Network at the ETH Zurich under a Creative Commons license.

Foto: Daniel Florian, via flickr.com. Lizenz: Creative Commons

Demos is one of the most unusual think tanks in the UK. Founded by radical Marxists, the Demos staff were influentual advisors to New Labour. But Demos argues it’s not affiliated with a particular party and is now working on a project with the Conservative Party. I spoke with Demos’ spokesperson Peter Harrington on the power of story telling, involving people in think tank research and the dissemination of ideas.

Read the full interview on thinktankdirectory.org