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Russia’s Brain Drain, Putin’s Brainwashing & the Lame-Brained U.S. Immigration Apparatus

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Putin’s approval rating has jumped from a not-so-bad 77% to a much better 83% according to a recent “state-backed” opinion poll. So says the Wall Street Journal, while noting that “experts have cautioned against taking current Russian polls on face value, given that Russian authorities have pursued a crackdown against dissent, including a media blackout of any reports contrary to the Kremlin’s narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine.” Anyone calling the war a war or impugning the military is liable to receive harsh punishment. The muzzling has been so effective that Russians are refusing to believe first hand accounts of death and devastation from their own relatives and friends in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported the results of a recent Gallup poll: 20% of the Russian population are eager to leave the country. This tranche of unhappy Russians skews young, male, educated and urban, which suggests an ingenious way for the West to undermine the Putin regime. Lure the dissatisfied element to the U.S. and the E.U. by making immigrant visas easy to obtain. Think of it! Russia could lose a generation of its best and brightest!

Unfortunately for that bright idea, multitudes of desperate people are waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration act together, some with deservedly high priority, particularly the thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. throughout America’s military adventure in Afghanistan.   Also already in line for adjudication are the long-suffering refugees from violence, corruption and climate change  in Central America.  Although Ukrainian refugees belong on the list of worthy immigrants, most of them seem to prefer accommodation in Europe, to make it easier to return home as soon as they can.  [Update:  Still thousands are at the border.  Even as we do our best to help them regain all of their country, we need to give them temporary shelter.]

Deceptively promising for would-be immigrants to the U.S. is the nationwide labor shortage that has been pushing wages and salaries to higher levels.  Employers are desperate for employees in nearly all categories.  Without workers, the economy is in danger of tanking.  Yet the immigration pipeline is clogged with able and willing foreign workers who can’t get a hearing.   Such being the sad case, what's the possibility in the near future of anything like a comprehensive immigration reform bill being drafted, let alone passed, by stalemated U.S. legislators?  Zilch.

All of which raises another question: given the sorry state of U.S governance and the frightening odds of a much worse future, why should anyone want to emigrate to the U.S. anymore?

 

 

Valieva's Final Olympic Performance: Another Possibility

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Maybe Valieva got tired of being a pawn of the Russian system and did the best she could do, but in a surprising way.

Maybe she threw the race.

First the Russians put her through the ice skating mill, including a very clever and complex doping regimen. Then they forced her to skate under the pall of the usual Olympic dithering and indecision.  Finally, confident that the Olympic authorities would, eventually and as usual, bow to Russia, Valieva's handlers expected their star skater to dazzle in the finals.

But Valieva had other ideas.  She didn’t crack.  She took responsibility and she did the admirable thing, faking a sloppiness that began with the clumsy quad.  And so the gold went to a skater who was tainted only by association with a rotton system.   

Yes, Russians received both gold and silver medals, but the 2022 prizes will never have the sheen of medals won under more savory conditions.

And speaking of nastiness, isn't it possible that the coach who scolded Valieva as she left the ice wasn’t berating her for failing the system, but for rebelling against it and doing the ethical thing?  This explains the peculir optics, the lack of warm words and consoling hugs.  Both Valieva  and her handlers knew what had really happened.  And so, once the torture of waiting for the score was over, Valieva ran off, in tears and essentially alone.

This being the case, I wish her well, although her prospects in Putin's Russia look less than promising.  

And my sympathies to all the fine skaters forced to perfrom in a farce.

 

Joe Biden: Speak Softly and Stand Your Ground.

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

(Background reading: “Did the War in Afghanistan have to Happen?” in the NYT: https:// www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-deal-united-states.html

Let me be the first to congratulate Joe Biden for his handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

He had the guts to make a tough decision and stick to it. This is leadership. This is courage. Joe Biden is a hard truth guy, a guy you can trust.

At the moment the departure is not a wholly appreciated decision. Especially its culmination at the airport in Kabul. But anyone who thought that the extraction of tens of thousands of foreigners and anti-Taliban Afghans was going to be smooth and painless is living in fantasy land. The Taliban were wise enough to facilitate (more or less) the departure of diplomats and other foreigners, but they have little to gain from easing the scampering of the hordes of Afghans who preferred reform to be imposed by outsiders, not won and held by their own efforts. Winners, not surprisingly, prefer their unpopularity to be less visible.

I don't understand why the speed of the Taliban takeover has astonished observers, including those who should know better.  It’s been obvious for years that the Afghan army couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hold a position without solid American support. Don’t listen to the ex post facto propaganda machine. Recall what’s been happening on the ground. Whenever, in the past, the U.S. has pulled out from a town or a position, that space has been occupied—rapidly!—by Taliban elements lurking in strength in the countryside.

The idea that outsiders had to train an Afghan army to recover the country from the Taliban was absurd from day one. Afghans know how to fight Afghans—and when they’re motivated, they’re fearless and creative. Did the Taliban have tanks and heavy artillery? No. They had machine guns and pick up trucks. Fast and lethal. Did they have sophisticated missiles? No. They had RPGs. They also had motivation. They believed in what they were doing the first time around, and they wholeheartedly believe in the form of Islam they intend to re-impose, which won’t be ideal for women, even if it’s a trifle less restrictive, which I doubt.

Here’s the crux: the Taliban believe more strongly in a society that severely sequesters women than their secular counterparts believe in a world of women’s liberation. So don’t blame Americans, meaning Joe Biden, for abandoning Afghan women. Blame their own fathers, brother, sons and husbands. These non-Taliban men saw how gloriously women flourish when released from patriarchal tyranny, but they weren’t willing to risk own their lives to preserve that interlude of opportunity for their own sisters, wives and daughters.

As for the so-called Afghan government during the American occupation, it’s never been anything but an oxymoron, a sand castle, a money dump for billions of American dollars, a profit-making operation for American contractors. (Talk about corruption!). Hamid Karzai tried to govern the ethnic, religious and tribal agglomeration that’s Afghanistan. For all his grave imperfections and inclinations toward nepotism, he tried to represent Afghans to Americans who couldn’t bear contradiction or resistance. So the Americans dumped him, supporting instead Ashraf Ghani, an American-trained academic without a political bone in his body, which means he lacked leadership instincts as well. What did Ghani do when things got tough? He abandoned the ship of state. And who stuck around to deal with the Taliban? Hamid Karzai.

And the Russians!

President George W. Bush turned a clear cut mission into a morass. President Barack Obama didn’t have the guts to get us out. Neither did President Donald J. Trump. Joe Biden did—and history will praise him for it.

Gifted Greek: the Enigma of Andreas Papandreou by Monteagle Stearns, A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

Being US Ambassador to Greece is not easy and it was particularly difficult from the end of World War II until 2004 well after the US military presence had been withdrawn following the Cold War’s end, and N-17 - a domestic terrorist group that had killed three Americans between 1975 and 2004, wounded another and murdered multiple Greek conservative politicians and newspaper editors as well as a British defense attache -  was finally rounded up.  Its members were tried, sentenced and imprisoned just before the 2004 Olympics opened.

Ambassadors come and go and although Greece’s sunny Aegean beaches have tempted many the political appointee as well as career diplomat, in reality, that position belongs in the hands of a professional – one who speaks the language, understands the politics and knows the country’s personalities, society and culture, as well as how the State Department and Embassies function.  

I was an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer and Executive Director of the Hellenic American Union (then our binational center) and my late husband William (Bill) Kushlis was a political officer in the Embassy during the first three years of Ambassador Monteagle Stearns four-year tenure as Ambassador.   I later served as Country Affairs Officer for Greece, Turkey and Cyprus from 1986-7 at the US Information Agency and Bill headed the Greek desk at the State Department from 1985-87.   

This was Ambassador Stearns third posting to Athens.  We all arrived during the summer of 1981 as political power was about to shift from a Conservative government to the center left and one led by the charismatic, enigmatic, and mercurial Greek politician Andreas Papandreou, a former economics professor and department chair at the University of California Berkeley, Harvard PhD, son of the Greek liberal and anti-monarchist politician George Papandreou and neighbor of the Stearns from 1959-61 in Psychiko, a near suburb of Athens.

In this book, Stearns describes Papandreou’s history as well as writes about the time during his first assignment to Athens as a political officer when he and his wife Toni (Antonia) were part of the boisterous crowd on Syntagma (Constitution) Square watching the George Papandreou rally the evening before the national elections of October 1961, an electoral contest that Andreas’ father George Papandreou lost to the conservative politician Constantine Karamanlis.

What Stearns does not say, however, is that he and several Embassy officers including the then chief of the political section, and my husband and I watched the enormous rally unfolding in this central square from a room in the Grande Bretagne Hotel that preceded Andreas Papandreou’s victory the next day in the November 18, 1981 elections twenty years later.   

Stearns notes in Gifted Greek that he had predicted the Conservatives would win by a thin margin in 1981, but then gives credit to his “first rate political section (whose members) heartily disagreed, and of course, they were right.”  In fact, PASOK, Papandreou’s party which had replaced his father’s Center Union Party, won by a comfortable margin. (p.99)   

In this newly published book and Stearns’ final one – not finished when he died in 2016, but completed by his wife Toni who had accompanied him throughout his Foreign Service career - he (and she) provide a first hand recounting of their relationship with the Papandreou family from their first meeting as neighbors during Stearns initial assignment to Greece to his final meeting with Andreas Papandreou not long before he died.  

In this book, Stearns describes some of his interactions with Papandreou but most importantly uses them to make sense of Papandreou’s seemingly complex dual or Janus like personality and sometimes consequently difficult to understand decisions.   As he tells the story Stearns also provides a crystal clear, perceptive, objective and concise description of modern Greek politics and US-Greek relations even after he concluded his Ambassadorship in Athens.

In so doing, he raises questions that troubled that binational relationship and others elsewhere for decades:  the over-reliance on the US military, the too close relationship between the CIA and the conservatives – in particular the monarchy, and consequently the too strong support for the political right including the Fascist right in the name of anti-Communism without recognizing the importance for the country to develop a cohesive non-Communist center left rather than driving them into a closer relationship with the Communists as happened too often.  In an ADST and DACOR virtual book launch video with Antonia Stearns and Dr. Constantine Arvanitopoulos now online, it was suggested that Papandreou’s fiery anti-EU, anti-NATO and anti-US Bases populist rhetoric could be seen as a part of the Greek nationalist backlash at the time.   

In this excellent book (although the chapter on Papandreou’s generally illustrious academic career was slow going for this non-economist), Stearns did make two observations that I question.

First, he dates the terrorist threat against Americans as beginning in 1975 and says it came from the domestic political left.  And second, he describes Andreas’ relationship with his father as stormy. I don’t dispute the overall difficult father-son relationship which Stearns describes as continuing into the next generation– it’s well documented and unsurprising.   Yet I also remember father and son Papandreou attracting a huge crowd at a campaign rally they held together in downtown Thessaloniki in 1965-6, the year I worked at Anatolia College as a Teaching Fellow, so the break between the two may not have been as immediate or abrupt and likely more complex than seen from the outside.     

With respect to the terrorist threat to official Americans, I know that the Embassy had already been threatened by two Greek Cypriot terrorists in late August 1970.  This occurred during my first tour at the Embassy in Athens as a very junior officer in the US Information Service.  Fortunately, the Cypriots succeeded only in killing themselves in their car in the Embassy parking lot due to their ineptness at handling explosives.  This as opposed to destroying the Embassy as they had planned.  I had just walked through that lot and behind their car twenty minutes before the bomb exploded blowing up the two young people along with their car as well as damaging other cars in the lot.

Their goal, we were told at the time, had been to protest US policy towards Cyprus by destroying the Embassy from the inside.  So it is quite likely that at least some increased security had already begun before CIA station chief Richard Welch was murdered outside his home in 1975 in the first of the multiple N-17 (November 17) attacks.  However, obviously not enough because we had one military attache murdered and another seriously wounded by N-17 while I worked in Athens.  Another became a victim of N-17 after I had left.

 By 1981, it was difficult to fathom why the Greek security forces had not rounded up N-17.  I at least still cannot find an answer to that question to my satisfaction.  In the end, they turned out to be a small band of ultra Greek nationalists led by a Trotskyite professor. Three were from the same family including an icon painter. Their fatal mistake was made by one member who was carrying a bomb down a street in the port city of Piraeus in 2004. The bomb exploded injuring him badly enough for him to be hospitalized.  This led to the group’s unraveling, arrests, subsequent trial and imprisonment. 

But back to the Stearns.  Stearns was not only a consummate Greek hand but also the most experienced Ambassador I ever worked for and his expertise is once again demonstrated in this final book.   It is quite possible that had the US been represented by someone less expert and without his extensive knowledge of Greece, his personal contacts and his diplomatic finesse that the tenuous US-Greek relationship could have unraveled entirely before the Cold War’s end and with ensuing recriminations.   This book, then, should be read not just by Greek hands and Greeks but also by those who want or need to know how to be a successful US Ambassador faced with a troubled relationship in difficult times.

Monteagle Stearns, Gifted Greek:  the Enigma of Andreas Papandreou, An ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Book, Lincoln: Potomac Books, in imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2021.   

Whirled View is changing RSS subscription feeds

Dear Subscribers and other WhirledView readers. 

This is just to let you know that we are in the process of moving from the Google Feedburner email subscription service to Feedblitz's.  Please be sure to add Feedblitz  [email protected] to your list of safe senders to continue receiving our posts. 

Thank you so much for your loyalty and for staying with us over these many years.   Patricia Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe.

 

Cheap Labor: an Old American Tradition

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Red state leaders have decided to starve their citizens into accepting underpaid jobs instead of persuading employers to offer a living wage.   They are cutting off those $300 per week unemployment benefits. Unskilled labor, it seems, is getting uppity. The peons want more money. They want benefits. They want to work, studies show, but not for the crumbs of a rich society.

They may be out of luck.  That’s not the American way. America has always run on cheap Labor. Let’s take a look at history.

Slavery:  The story begins in 1619, a date that racists are trying to erase from children’s history books. That’s when slavery first contaminated the territory that was to become the United States. The descendants of those enslaved Africans continue to be subject to a systemic racism that keeps the majority of them poor and most of them fearful of the police. As if cheap cotton produced by enslaved people weren’t a big part of what made America rich.

Indentured workers:  Simultaneously, white laborers from the British Isles and elsewhere sold themselves into a form of time-limited slavery. They indentured themselves for the cost of passage across the Atlantic.  Unlike black people, they couldn’t be stigmatized once they’d worked off their contracts. In fact, many of them eventually acquired slaves of their own.

Chinese workers:  Once the railroads spanned the continent thanks to the hard labor of Chinese workers, many of whom died in the process, laws were passed to prevent further immigration from China.

Immigrants:  Unversed in English (except for the Irish) and unschooled in American ways, the first generation usually worked for low wages. Their children, unlike people of color, tended to disappear into the privileged white population. All too often, by this time, they had learned to scorn black Americans as much as their native born friends do.

Spanish-speaking undocumented workers:  These days they do the ill paid, really tough, dirty work in America. Because they are undocumented and can’t complain, they come cheap.

Non-union workers:  Not having the bargaining power of unionized labor, they have to take what they can get, which often is niggardly.

Women:  From nurses aids to female executives, they get paid less—often much less—than men in the same profession. Even so, sexism has kept them out of many good jobs over the years.

 Housewives:  The cheapest labor of all. Since they aren’t paid, they don’t even rack up social security benefits.

During the 2016 election period Republicans in Florida (and elsewhere) bashed Democrats with the socialism label. Now, it seems, Republicans themselves are interfering with the workings of capitalism, which expects wages to rise, automatically, when workers for a given, too low wage can’t be obtained. Even though some companies have responded in the classic way by raising hourly pay rates, Republicans—who also oppose a minimum wage that’s  a living wage—are preventing that mechanism from working more broadly. They are ending that life-saving $300 before its statutory termination in order to force anxious people into unsavory jobs as soon as possible—including, for instance, mothers who can’t find (or afford) the child care that would allow them to return to work with peace of mind.

But then today’s Republican party is notoriously free of principle. And logic. And compassion. When it comes to underlings of any color they prefer the whip of desperation.

Who's Really Failing Afghan Women?

by Patricia Lee Sharpe

The U.S. has loaded many missions onto its agenda in Afghanistan, but the original mission has long since been accomplished. Bin Laden is dead. His Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to the U.S.

Can it be said that ambitious Al Qaeda clones don’t exist here and there? That fragments of I.S.I.S aren’t worrisome? That the Afghan Taliban are not a powerful force? Emphatically no. Islam almost everywhere is at war with itself. Some say that civil war will break out if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan. They’re wrong. Civil war has been raging for years. Robotic mission creep entangled the U.S. in a battle not ours to win or lose.

Now that the anything-but-impulsive Biden White House seems resolute about withdrawal, Americans are under attack for abandoning women to a fate they have no desire for. Let’s explore that accusation.

To the extent that the war in Afghanistan has been a war about religion as well as power, it has been about women. Their education. Their garb.  Their freedom to do simple things like shopping without a male escort. Their slow progress toward acceptance as fully enabled human beings.

The Taliban Haven’t Changed

No Taliban statement to date has given the least hope that the Taliban will ever govern less dogmatically than they did at the time of the Twin Towers debacle twenty years ago. If the Taliban are back in charge, purdah in its most extreme form will be back in style.

While losing fighters and ceding terrain here and there, the Taliban as a force have never been defeated. Recruiting new fighters, clawing back territory, they rebound. Moreover, there has never been a time when they have been unable to wreak havoc even in Kabul, where a U.S. supported government is supposedly in control. By support I don’t mean approbation alone. I mean American (and allied) troops propping it up under the guise of turning its army into a force able to whip the Taliban on its own. Thanks to this formidable foreign force many Afghan women have been able to live the relatively unconstricted lives they enjoyed (check out the pix in the archives) before the advent of the Taliban. That life style is once again in jeopardy.

Did We Fail?

Twenty years have passed, but the Afghan army as it operates today is still incapable of holding the fort against relentless Taliban offensives. Does this mean that the foreign trainers have failed? Yes, but they have failed in this way: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Unless it’s thirsty.

In other words, you can equip and drill an army all you want, but the troops won’t fight with the necessary commitment unless there’s an objective they earnestly espouse and a leadership they respect. We’re talking about motivation. The most brilliant American instructors can’t provide a hunger for victory. Afghans fight ferociously and effectively for the Taliban. Their cousins in the Afghan army are a flabby force at best. If Afghan soldiers cared as passionately about preserving the non-Taliban way of life as the Taliban care about enforcing their own interpretation of Sharia, they’d need little or no help from outside. (Competitive pay might help.)

And the Women?

In short, Americans and their allies can’t save Afghan women from the indifference (or conniving) of their own fathers, brothers and uncles, the ineptitude and corruption of their own government and the time-honored constrictions of their own culture.

Time and time again, even in Kabul, professional women have been assassinated. Judges. Journalists. Parliamentarians. Admirable women all. And how has the U.S. funded Afghan government, whose current President is the U.S.-educated Ashraf Ghani, reacted? The culprits are never caught. Very few Afghan men on either side of the Afghan civil war are committed to full equality for Afghan women or to the social changes that would make Afghan women, prominent or otherwise, safe from religiously endorsed patriarchal violence.

Foreigners seldom succeed in regime-changing operations. Cultural change is even more resistant to outside influence. Thorough-going American control might protect ambitious, educated, strong-minded Afghan women (and gregarious housewives) from their own culture. That’s called colonialism. It’s not acceptable in this day and age. Nor has it ever been accepted in Afghanistan. I’m a woman. It hurts me to say this, but it’s time for the U.S. military to leave Afghans to regulate themselves.

A PROPOSAL FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY MARCH 8, 2021

By Joan Wadelton, Guest Contributor

Connect the American and African Peoples by Bringing Together Women Political Leaders

The global rise of women in politics offers new avenues to broaden understanding and strengthen ties between the United States and Africa.  New communications technologies can foster peer-to-peer alliances among female political leaders from both sides though ongoing virtual meetings.  Women from the local to the highest political levels could meet virtually with counterparts to problem solve and form relationships.  A biannual Women Political Leaders Forum designed to bring together all participants – both virtually and in-person - would review best practices and challenges overcome as well as expand long term people  to people ties among peers across the two continents.    

The United States and Africa have much to learn from each other.  So giving a primary role to women is an effective – and cost effective – way to do so.

Goals

• To forge closer ties between the United States and the 54 countries of Africa by fostering counterpart relationships between the two continents’ female political leaders at all levels and in all branches of government.
• To take full advantage of videoconferencing technologies – not as a substitute for in-person meetings – but as an end in themselves -- to promote professional relationships.

Background

Relations between the United States and the many countries of Africa -- despite historical and other ties -- need considerable improvement.  The dynamics of the world, changing at warp speed, offer both challenges and unique opportunities to recalibrate our interactions.  A vital element of this will be forging long term links among women political leaders from the two continents.  Because there has been a significant increase in the numbers of women in governments, parliaments, courts and various local bodies all over the world, this is an increasingly attractive and cost-effective avenue.

In Africa, there has been an impressive number of women in senior leadership for some time, including female presidents, prime ministers, ministers of every kind and judges.  And African nations have long been among the countries that lead the world in percentages of women in parliaments.

The picture in the United States is not quite so rosy.  However, there are many women in politics at the grassroots level in particular, and women have begun to permeate the highest levels of state and federal governments. 

Women around the world share similar life experiences and face the same obstacles in running for, and occupying, political office.  They have more difficulty in raising money for their campaigns than their male counterparts.  And they are subjected to a much greater degree to insults, threats, harrassment and violence than male politicians.     

Linking women political leaders to share their common experiences and discuss overcoming the challenges of their work, would be an important way to develop and deepen ties between communities in Africa and the United States.  

The United States government (through the Department of State) has for decades conducted exchange programs – bringing foreigners to the United States for education and training, to meet with peers and to introduce them to Americans and American society and values.  The State Department, USAID and the Peace Corps have also long sent Americans overseas for educational and other purposes.  All of these programs have advanced cross-cultural knowledge and created friendships.

One of the dividends of the pandemic related quarantine has been the normalization of remote interaction.  Platforms now exist to enhance interaction among peers – in this case women political leaders.  The new technologies that have brought us internet meetings should catalyze exchange programs in a virtual format. 

Program Outline

This program would bring together female political leaders from Africa and the United States for peer-to-peer discussions to broaden understanding of each other’s countries, societies and cultures.

It would create lasting and productive relationships, giving female leaders the opportunity to exchange ideas, share best practices and highlight successful solutions to common problems.

While creating relationships would be the goal, substantive outcomes would be equally important.

Discussion groups would focus on exchanges of ideas, including overcoming challenges facing female political leaders.  Topics might also include improving trade and investment relations, two-way tourism, public health, dealing with the effects of climate change and much more. 

Participants would include elected and appointed officials from governments, the judiciary and legislative bodies.  

Officials would be chosen from local bodies to the heads of national governments.

Building on the normalized internet communications of the pandemic era, the program would take full advantage of developing new technologies, tools and methods.  Even post-pandemic, the majority of meetings and activities would be virtual.

Over time, discussion groups would be expected to continue on a self-sustaining basis, without outside organization from the State Department or elsewhere.

A bi-annual Women Leaders Forum (in person and virtual) would bring together all of the participants to meet, exchange ideas and report on progress.  

Who Would Participate?

The program is designed to foster peer-to-peer relationships at all levels and in all branches of government.

Meetings at the highest levels would help highlight the program.  For example:

• a meeting between Vice President Harris and a female African President or Prime Minister;
• a meeting between the US Deputy Secretary of Defense and the various female Defense Ministers in Africa; and
• a meeting between a female US Supreme Court Justice and several female justices in Africa.

Meetings at other levels would also be sought, including:

• Members of the US Congress and national parliaments across Africa;
• US governors and their African counterparts;
• US state senators and delegates and their African counterparts; and
• Local US officials such as mayors and county managers and their African counterparts.

How Would the Program Work?

The State Department has run exchange programs for many years.  State – working with contract agencies who specialize in organizing in-person exchange programs – could be tasked with this. 

However, in this new world of meeting by video conference, new ways of constructing exchange programs will likely emerge.  While it is nicer to see people (and places) face-to-face, using the new technologies is cheaper and can reach a broader audience.

Online meetings offer several advantages:

• Budgetary – it is far cheaper to arrange an online program than to fly participants around the world; there are no travel, lodging or maintenance expenses;
• Staff numbers – State Department exchange programs normally require intensive staff work to escort foreign participants around the United States. This function would change.  Instead, they would require experts to organize the meetings, manage the technology, propose topics and much more; and
• Participant numbers – online programing allows organizers to reach a much broader audience or set up meetings as small as one on one.

U.S. participants would be identified through the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) which has decades long experience in managing exchange programs.

In Africa, in the pilot phase, identification of participants would be done by US Embassies.  Over time, existing programs through the United Nations, the African Union and others might dovetail with this program.  At a later date, African participants might nominate peers.

Meetings/discussion groups would normally be kept small.  They would consist of several Americans from around the United States and several African women from across the continent.

Because the main goal of this program is to ensure that enduring relationships are formed, participants would need to make long- term commitments to the program before admission.

Initially, the State Department through its contract agencies would schedule the meetings and provide technology assistance, a moderator, an agenda and discussion topics.  However, because this is a permanent commitment, over time the groups themselves would be expected to handle these functions. 

To begin, US political leaders with experience in Africa might be candidates – including former Africa Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright and other scholars plus others who have worked or lived on the continent.

On the African side, women with some experience in the United States and strong English language skills could be the first candidates for the pilot phase.  

The Bi-Annual Forum

Every other year a Women Political Leaders Forum would be held – alternating between the United States and Africa.  It would be both virtual and in-person.

When in Africa, it would rotate among countries.

Organizations that promote women’s political involvement would be key participants and constituents.

Agenda topics would be decided by the various discussion groups themselves.  They would highlight findings and best practices arrived at over the previous two years.

Conclusion

Women’s voices and viewpoints add substantial value to political stability and economic advancement both at home and abroad.  Building communities of American and African women with friendly and productive relationships would create a framework for mutual collaboration not only across national boundaries but also worldwide.