AT THE DAWN of the 21st century, US foreign policy is conducted on a giant global stage where any open diplomatic foray — such as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s public indictment of Saddam Hussein at the United Nations — has colossal and nearly instantaneous ramifications. The US’s argument for war, made by the nation’s top diplomat, can be beamed worldwide and shape global opinion from Pyongyang to Paris to Phoenix in an instant.

Yet when it comes to winning the battle for hearts and minds across the globe (better known as "public diplomacy"), a single sharp incident can prove to be a thorn in the paw of the United States.

Take what happened to Ejaz Haider, an editor at an English-language weekly newspaper, the Friday Times, published in Lahore, Pakistan. Pakistan is a crucial yet erratic US ally with immense geographic importance in the war on terrorism, so Haider is exactly the sort of figure at which smart US public diplomacy should be aimed. Until last week, America’s aim was true. Haider (who had visited the US on multiple occasions) was visiting again as a research scholar at the Brookings Institution. He was participating in the dialogue about American values and policy that public diplomacy aims to encourage.

Just outside the Brookings building on Tuesday, January 28, however, Haider entered into a different dialogue — with a pair of armed agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They scooped him up for not attending a registration meeting required of temporary visitors from Pakistan and two dozen other nations under tight new immigration laws, and dragged him off to an INS detention center in Virginia.

Timely intercession by various authorities — not available to the usual INS detainee — saved Haider from spending a night in jail. The story was a page-one feature in the January 30 Washington Post, where various officials (including Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri, who just happened to be in town) let fly with invective about Haider’s detention. "If this is the sort of person that can be nabbed," Kasuri told the Post, "then no one is safe."

A personal account by Haider himself, published on the op-ed page of the February 5 Post, kept the issue alive. "As a visiting scholar from Pakistan," wrote Haider, "where I am an editor, I had visited the State Department and attended functions with senior US officials. But as far as the Justice Department was concerned, I was someone to be stalked and brought in by burly federal agents."

The headline of Haider’s piece: wrong message to the muslim world.

Richard Kauzlarich, who heads the Special Initiative to the Muslim World of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), argues that exchanges such as the one that brought Haider to the US are the meat and potatoes of US public diplomacy. "This sort of incident can have a chilling impact on reciprocal exchanges," says Kauzlarich.

LITTLE MORE than a decade ago, American policy and values were not such a hard sell. And the sell involved pitching more than the proverbial Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse, and blue jeans. The flowering of democracy in Eastern and Central Europe and the eventual exhaustion of Marxist revolution in Latin America signaled an embrace of American policy and values on a global scale.

But all that’s changed. Figures from a poll on global attitudes released in December 2002 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press tell a sobering tale. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed people in 44 countries — among them the predominantly Muslim countries of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. In two of the three Muslim countries in which previous polling data from 1999/2000 was available (Turkey and Pakistan), the percentage of respondents who viewed the United States in a positive manner dropped dramatically. In Turkey, the number slipped from 52 percent to 30; in Pakistan, it plunged from 23 percent to 10. Uzbekistan alone saw a rise in its people’s estimation of America — from 56 to 85 percent.

In countries where no previous data was available, the numbers were, again, stark. In Lebanon, only 35 percent of those surveyed had a favorable view of the United States. That total in Jordan stood at 25 percent. Egypt weighed in with a meager six percent "favorable" rating for the United States.

The Bush administration’s forthright unilateralism on environmental issues, international justice, the war on terrorism, and regime change in Iraq has exacerbated this dismal appraisal of the United States. Throw in the White House’s impotence in brokering peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and anger toward the US has intensified into a wildfire.

The September 11 terrorist attacks — and the genuine sympathy for the US they aroused worldwide — provided an opportunity to reverse the trend toward highly negative public perceptions of this country. The ferocity of the attacks — and their roots in radical Islam, which is increasingly popular in Muslim countries and elsewhere — certainly convinced the Bush administration that it needed to re-examine how the US was perceived abroad. After all, even a superpower can’t do everything alone. The US military needs safe bases in far-flung lands, peacekeeping partners in lands torn by war, and law-enforcement help to hunt down terrorists outside US borders.

So, mere weeks after the attacks, the Bush administration settled on a solution based on that most American of institutions: advertising. The White House tapped crack advertising executive Charlotte Beers — most famous for reviving the fortunes of Uncle Ben’s rice — as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Secretary of State Colin Powell noted that Beers had converted him into a fan of Uncle Ben’s — and that such salesmanship would be important in public diplomacy.

Beers’s mission was nothing less than to learn why the Muslim world hated the United States, then to deploy all the tricks of her trade to reverse that trend. Her task was a daunting one even in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. In the 17 months since the attacks, however, the US has redoubled its unilateralist foreign policies and escalated its rhetoric. Against a backdrop of unrelenting violence in the Middle East, America insists on pushing forward with its war against Iraq. It is publicly sniping at once-staunch allies (including Germany and France) that dare to stand in its way. Far from reshaping the image of the United States, public diplomats such as Beers can do nothing more than try to stem the swelling tide of anti-Americanism — with little ammunition and little help from the Bush administration, which seems intent on antagonizing and bullying anyone who stands in its way.