CHICAGO—One theme touched on during yesterday's sessions at the SIOR 2013 Fall World Conference was branding. Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, for example, spoke to the opening general session on America's brand, both what it is and how it has been damaged in recent years. “We've got this incredible piece of real estate,” he said, referring to the US, its economic resources, and its rich cultural and ethnic diversity. He then asked, “if that's the product, what's the brand? Why is the idea of America very appealing?”

Ridge, who was also the first US secretary of homeland security, said he found it striking that many foreigners he spoke with during those years, even ones strongly opposed to many of the Bush Administration's policies such as the Iraq War, “still loved the idea of America. There's a level of expectation that we conduct business in a certain way.”

And things like the prison at Guantanamo Bay have hurt those expectations. Although Ridge was careful to say he did not disagree with the establishment of the prison, he had foreign friends disturbed by the notion that the US would take accused terrorists away “and leave them there forever without formal adjudication. It wasn't location, it was adjudication.” A top official in the interior ministry of an American ally, for example, once told him, “you can't keep them there forever because that's not the American way.”