A friend told me recently how he had been disappointed by England. Not because the English players were crashed out of the World Cup on penalties, for he is least interested in the 'crude and unsophisticated' sport. Rather, he did not find the country as gentlemanly as he had been educated to believe for years. The reality bit when he visited England early this year.

Should I be surprised? After all, I was encouraged by my English teachers in high school to read books by Jane Austen, who represents the beauty of Victorian literature, rather than Charles Dickens, who loved to dwell on the dark realities of Victorian society.

I mean, Our perceptions of certain country are, more often than not, shaped and manufactured, consciously or unconsciously, by what we study in school or read in the press. State propagandists, especially, love to sweep brashness and vulgarity under the carpet.

One only has to look at the knee-jerk response of the Malaysian government over the Reader's Digest findings that Kuala Lumpur was almost at the bottom of the league of unfriendliness. The emperor is certainly not amused at being told of his ugly naked body.

Despite efforts by the White House to brush up its image across the globe, a YouGov survey , published ironically on America's Independence Day, found that the British now have the lowest regard for the sole superpower, something unprecedented. The informants also express their lack of confidence in the US when it comes to handling wisely present world problems.

Some, like me, may dislike the US because of the type of leaders that it now has but not the country in general. Only one percent of the respondents think George W Bush is a great leader, far outweighed by those who find him "pretty poor" or "terrible".

However, apart from the usual stuff that critics of the US around the world today complain about from the War on Iraq to Guantanamo Bay - the poll also shows that the uneasiness of the British goes deeper. That 75 percent of them say they never find blue jeans, baseball caps and Budweiser beer tempting is instructive.

Rice to the rescue

The task to spruce up the US image abroad has fallen squarely on the shoulders of Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. In fact, she had fired the starter pistol way before the YouGov poll.

In her speech at Georgetown University in January this year, Rice made it crystal clear that it would no longer earn them promotions should diplomats choose only to sit comfortably behind their desks or sip at an American-franchised cafe hoping to come up with an in-depth analysis of local politics. To move up their career ladders, they would have to know how to project the cultural image of the US, as well as to run aid and democracy-assistance programmes in foreign countries.

Entitled ' Transformational Diplomacy ', Rice spelt out in the speech her ambitions of not simply being a gardener, as George Schultz, one of her predecessors, has famously said of the state secretary job, but an architect with clear designs and outlooks for the garden of US diplomacy.

Calling on current and future diplomats to take up dangerous assignments and serve in hardship posts aside, Rice has also envisioned the strategic roles played by emerging powers such as India and China, as she is prepared to expand US diplomatic presence there at the expense of Washington's traditional allies, including France and Germany.

To tie the fight against global terror into the objectives, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, has and will continue to receive greater attention. Unlike last year, when her absence was sharply criticised in some diplomatic quarters, Rice has also announced her attendance at the Asean Regional Forum to be held in Kuala Lumpur end of this month.

Among the eye-catchers is a range of other innovative initiatives, from lone-gun outposts in major cities that lack a US presence to 'American Presence Posts', operated by one diplomat living and working outside of the embassy and representing America in other key regional population centres (beginning with Medan in Indonesia).

Internet interaction

To showcase its mastery of information technology, the State Department has also created Virtual Presence Posts, which provide internet sites enabling local citizens, particularly young people, to interact with US embassy personnel. This could be hugely useful in Muslim countries. If Washington wants to deal effectively with anti-American sentiments in the Muslim world, such provision would facilitate direct dialogue and communication between US officials and the local population, rather than the archaic practice of talking to the national leaders, who for political purposes may need more, not less, antagonistic language. In this time and age, youths are more techno savvy and eager to hear for themselves.

But what remains a concern for certain foreign countries is that Rice has not de-linked her new diplomatic endeavour from the aim of democratic transformation, as she pledged unequivocally in her speech to achieve Bush's mission of seeking and supporting "the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world".

This latest effort, fresh and bold it may be, will invariably be interpreted as euphemism for propaganda, with a view to ushering in 'peaceful subversion' most feared by, say, Beijing. Even Riyadh, a traditional ally, may feel some whiplash should Arab youths spend more time online chatting with US officials and begin to question their own leaders.

However, as the YouGov survey has shown, while Rice is busy moving US diplomats out of the comfy capitals of Europe and posting them to the hazardous areas of East Asia and the Middle East, she must not lose sight of the Europeans' loss of trust in America. If the root causes of this faith erosion are not critically examined and addressed, transformational diplomacy is doomed to failure before it can transform itself.