“Public diplomacy” is primarily intended to support the goals of U.S. foreign policy, economic aims, and protect national interests and security by influencing the public abroad. In this, cultural and educational promotion plays a mostly subordinate role to geopolitics. The US ECP system reflects the privatized national understanding of culture, which is intended to be largely independent of the state. While such a system could create incoherence in other circumstances, the US has the luxury of falling back on its private sector sources of soft power. Indeed, even without a coherent ECP, the US dominates most of the world’s cultural, educational, and scientific fields.