Özet:

America experienced the failure of traditional diplomacy practices in foreign policy at an early stage, and for this reason, it has been trying to influence foreign peoples through public diplomacy for many years. America, which gave importance to public diplomacy studies at a time when security concerns increased, established the Creel committee during the First World War and the OWI during the Second World War. However, with the emergence of the Soviet Union as an important post-war threat, the American Government, which needed a more sophisticated institution to accelerate public diplomacy efforts in foreign policy, established an information agency called the United States Information Agency. While USIA was equipped with educational, cultural, media and information-dissemination missions to win the "war of hearts and minds" by opening offices in many parts of the world, American public diplomacy efforts began to be carried out independently from a single source. However, USIA's struggle against communism by revealing the failures of the Soviets and the weaknesses of the communist system within the framework of anti-communist ideology turned the agency into a propaganda institution. In this study, the place of the agency in American foreign policy is discussed while the struggle of the USA against communism through public diplomacy through USIA during the Cold War period is discussed.