In 1956, President Eisenhower faced a new kind of threat to world peace. The postwar balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union led to the emergence of regional proxy wars, international espionage and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The Cold War required a different approach to diplomacy, one that leveraged interpersonal relationships as a means around the intransigence of adversarial governments.
One of Eisenhower’s strategies was novel: the establishment of a “sister city” program in which local government leaders could serve as citizen diplomats and share ideas and information to deepen cultural understanding. These exchanges between cities essentially created dozens of localized lower-level diplomatic connections beneath the intractable threatening postures of the great nuclear powers. The sister cities program has widely been considered a great success because it used grassroots leadership to affect international outcomes. We stand at a similar moment in time.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke remotely to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Reno and described a new geopolitical framework that requires a new set of solutions. Instead of a world defined by nation states, we live in an era where social networks can spur political movements, a world in conflict over human values where individual voices can have a measurable impact.
