Description
Education exchange constitutes an essential tool in public diplomacy toolkit and has been long treated as a means to political ends – peace. It softly but legitimately lifts bilateral relations between participants’ host and home countries through signalling, attitude change, intercultural competence and network formation. The U.S., a sponsor of multiple education exchange schemes, has made expansion of people-to-people ties its core foreign policy goal in Asia-Pacific. Situated in such a strategically important area, Vietnam is always ranked in the top five or six among the Asia-Pacific countries in attracting U.S. government spending on its public diplomacy activities, of which the majority goes toward education. The number of Vietnamese exchange participants sponsored by U.S. government and immersed in the first-hand cultural milieu of the host country has reached approximately 1,500 since the launch of Fulbright program in Vietnam in 1992. In reality, U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic relations have witnessed national-levelled historic advancements from being former enemies to comprehensive strategic partners. Whether U.S.-Vietnam educational exchange activities foster peaceful relations between these two old enemies remains unanswered. Seeking the answer, this research employs a multivariate data analysis tool, Structural equation modelling, to study roughly 300 Vietnamese academic sojourners’ survey responses. The findings reveal the U.S. exchange schemes’ ability to win Vietnamese participants’ hearts and minds, train these intercultural mediators and possibly multiply their effects. However, that the programs contribute to peace is still a “strained” assertion due to their long-term effects and methodological hindrances.
