Nathaniel Greenberg, The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Nathaniel Greenberg (NG: There has been very little written about American propaganda in Arabic and I wanted to do a book that would cover the full scope of the United States’ information strategy towards the MENA region, going back to the Cold War and extending through the current day.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NG: The promise of this book is that it offers a comprehensive account of American public diplomacy in Arabic. For people who are unaware, public diplomacy is an official practice whereby governments effectively try to go around, or sometimes collaborate with foreign governments to engage directly, or via proxy, with foreign publics. “Public diplomacy” is also basically a euphemism that emerged in the 1960s to describe government propaganda. Propaganda is a dirty word in the American idiom, but the United States spends a lot of money on it and a lot of public diplomacy, including things like cultural exchanges, are not propagandistic by nature. So in the book I carve out a focus on the interagency and collaborative aspects of US public diplomacy, in particular the information programs like Al-Hurra, Radio Sawa, and so on, after 9/11. For readers unfamiliar with these names, Al-Hurra was a 24/7 satellite news station in Arabic that the United States created for the purpose, essentially, of rivaling Al-Jazeera. Radio Sawa replaced Voice of America in Arabic and was a 24/7 pop music station that also included news and information. Both stations, along with others, broadcast throughout the Arab world for approximately two decades following 9/11.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NG: This book is really a culmination of everything I have done before. Public diplomacy represents in some ways the epitome of the so-called applied humanities and writing about it, in earnest, required mobilizing all my academic training, from linguistics (French, Arabic, Spanish) to comparative literature, MENA studies, hermeneutics, discourse analysis, aesthetics, translation theory, film studies—you name it. I doubt I have another book in me like this one.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NG: Future foreign policy leaders may gain something from reading this history. I am also interested in helping students of literature, film, and cultural studies discover a new line of inquiry in the study of propaganda. It is a subject that does not receive enough attention in a disciplinary sense and I think humanities scholars are better placed, or as well placed, to tackle the nuances of propaganda as are students of communications or data science. Somewhat by default, that academic set tends to fill the role of subject matter expert when it comes to disinformation discernment (still a thing in Europe) or propaganda studies. But from what I have seen, the study of propaganda, which is often the product of vast, state-funded cultural industries, requires linguistic as well as formal expertise (as in the formal structure of cultural products). Understanding the numbers, i.e. the number of hits a post receives or the number of times certain terms are repeated, is only useful to the extent that they can be contextualized, deconstructed, and articulated as part of a socio-political agenda.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NG: I am continuing to research European models of public diplomacy towards the Middle East and Latin America.
J: What was the most surprising discovery during your research for this book?
NG: There are so many. Apart from the discovery that so few Arabists have written about American propaganda in Arabic, I was amazed to find the archives of Al-Sadaqah. This was a weekly newspaper in Egypt published by the United States Information Agency that ran from about 1952 to 1967 with a break in between. It had a circulation of fifty thousand copies a week and records show that it was widely read in Egypt at the time. There exists, to my knowledge, just a single (very fragile) archive of the newspaper (which I digitized) and it represents an incredibly rich depository for understanding the ideological prerogatives of successive US administrations towards the Middle East, much of it counterintuitive. The book has some surprising revelations about post-9/11 propaganda, but I will not give those away here.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 3)
“Before 9/11 it was all about making peace” Larry Schwartz, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Press and Public Diplomacy at the State Department, said to me on the anniversary of the attacks, in 2020. “After 9/11 it was all about making war.” A career Foreign Service Officer (FSO) who was the State Department’s Press Spokesperson in Tel Aviv immediately prior to 9/11, Schwartz was among those FSOs pulled from the work of globalization and repurposed for the work of war. Watching the attacks unfold on TV before senior level meetings at Foggy Bottom on the morning of 9/11, he could never anticipate the scale of changes ahead. Twenty years on, with an approximate $8 trillion in federal spending exhausted and some 900,000 lives gone, the changes that affected Schwartz’s realm of operations have been among the most enduring but also, in many ways, among the most difficult to measure.
A tsunami of funding flowed towards public diplomacy following 9/11, an enterprise which, prior to the mid-1960s, was known interchangeably as the “information and educational exchange program,” “psychological warfare” or more simply, “American propaganda.” Soft power dollars in the war on terror slushed into the Beltway and across industries. The money bled over borders and inundated creative entrepreneurs far and wide. At the center of these efforts was the reconstruction of American public diplomacy proper, which, in the years before 9/11, had been laid waste by a Washington consensus that saw little need for compelling hearts and minds in the absence of the Berlin Wall. Piecemeal at times and drawn often from a motley combination of enterprising media men, Foreign Service Officers, and foreign-based reporters, no single vision, philosophy or policy emerged to explain the country’s vast and jumbled mass of Arabic language communications. Yet there the body lay. Discerning the threads of continuity—through aesthetics, firstly, but also the technological, strategic, and logistical models that have persisted across this brief but dense chapter in American history is the primary aim of this book. Shedding light on the hardworking and unsung voices that have contributed to the American government’s peculiar songbook in Arabic is another. This book represents an attempt to better understand who shaped the United States’ propaganda apparatus in Arabic following 9/11, what their legacy is within the annals of American public diplomacy, and how their vision has contributed to the amelioration or escalation of conflict in this most volatile part of the world.
As I discuss throughout the book, the continuity of major tropes within the canon of American public diplomacy towards the Arab and Muslim world speaks to the ingenuity of America’s Cold War information warriors but also the relative paucity of US information strategy in the years since. At its core, the history of American propaganda in Arabic raises fundamental questions about the ideological prerogatives of State Department officials, the relationship between public and private actors in the sphere of foreign communications, and the extent to which propaganda, in any form, may be an effective tool for influencing public opinion, especially, if not exclusively, on foreign soil. Through vast resources and with the participation of some of the country’s biggest players in the realm of information and communications technology, innovations in American public diplomacy helped set the stage for what Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa have described as the “New Cold War.” In addition to the showcasing of advanced technologies, the narratives born of the battle for hearts and minds became paradigmatic of a new class of information warfare. As I describe in the book’s final chapter, the Middle East remains at the crossroads of this conflict, the origins of which are that vivid September day.