The Next Billion

Ambasssador David M. Abshire.

Many people know the work of Ambassador David Abshire. Nick Cull, the world's leading historian on public diplomacy and author of the forthcoming, "The Cold War and the United States Information Agency American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989," describes Abshire's role in public diplomacy over the past 40 years in these words:

"David Abshire is a unique figure in American public diplomacy. Look at the key turning points and he is there. In the early 1970s he was the critical figure in devising a parent structure to save Radio Free Europe and Radio Libery from being closed, allowing those stations to live on and play a key role in the 1980s. He has been a key part of numerous investigations of American public diplomacy over a thirty-five year period and a tireless voice for reform. But above all, as Ambassador to NATO in the mid-1980s he led crucial public diplomacy campaign to rally European public opinion to permit the deployment of Intermediate Nuclear Forces - the move that many anaysts now believe to have been the winning move in America's Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union."

When I recently met the man in his Washington office, I was amazed by the framed black and white still shots that show the faces of his legacy—decades of American presidents and countless heads of state, many of whom were old when Abshire was still green and some of whom are now young while he only seems to get, well, younger. He is not a man who changes to match the changing times. He sets the agenda for the many of those changes, and how they are framed in the global philosophy. Activity swirls around him while people with notebooks and steel-trap minds attempt to document his every word and thought at a breakneck speed.

On June 13 DIP attended a roundtable discussion at Meridian International entitled, "Accelerating Global Engagement: How Technology, New Media and Collaboration Can Strengthen International Understanding" at which David Abshire gave the introductory remarks. His main idea bears repeating. In the year 2000, there were only 360 million internet users. Now, there are 1.4 billion, with an exponential newbie rate.

“The next billion,” he said, “will happen virtually overnight.”

There are currently 3.4 billion cell phones in the world. Cell phones, David Abshire noted, are computers, and will increasingly be used as such.

“The sea is shifting in a way that provides great opportunities,” he said.

Abshire does have a Second Life avatar.

“…Lots of bushy hair,” the ambassador boasted at the roundtable, “enormous muscles, and is extremely good-looking…”

“Well,” said Ambassador Stuart Holliday, President of Meridian International, “I’m sorry he, or she, couldn’t be with us today.”