In 2018, artificial intelligence was advancing faster than could be regulated by any government. Private companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft were defining the pace of progress, while governments struggled to understand or coordinate responses. This presented the risk of a patchwork regulatory landscape, with restrictive regimes in some regions and unregulated development in others.

To address this, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—historically known for economic policy rather than technology governance—quickly responded to convene governments, industry, and experts to create the world’s first intergovernmental AI framework in 2019. Through its Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC), the OECD embedded technologists and business leaders directly into the standards‑setting process. In less than six months, member states reached consensus on five guiding principles: human‑centered values, inclusive growth, transparency, robustness, and accountability. This quick and rigorous response proved that global alignment was possible when technical expertise is built into the decision-making process.

By May 2023, over 1,000 policy initiatives in more than 70 jurisdictions referenced the OECD framework, and the G20 had formally adopted it. More recently,  regulatory leadership consolidation among major technology economies, has rendered the OECD principles less central to shaping new AI policy. For governments outside the G7 and Action Summit processes, however, the framework remains a vital reference point—especially for those seeking inclusive participation in global technology governance.

What made this successful: American technology leaders recognized that early, upstream engagement during policy formation is far more effective than downstream advocacy that seeks to modify established rules. By participating in the standard-setting process itself—not as lobbyists, but as experts bringing legitimate technical knowledge—they shaped outcomes that reflected both innovation interests and governance values. The OECD process also revealed an important structural tension: when governments lack in-house scientific and technical capacity, norm-setting risks becoming one-directional. Researchers and academics bring independent perspectives on safety, ethics, and long-term societal risk that commercial actors may underweight. Embedding STEM expert personnel within government—through programs such as the Jefferson Science Fellows program, which places academic scientists and engineers at the State Department, and the Embassy Science Fellows program, which deploys federal scientists to diplomatic posts overseas—helps ensure that government negotiators can independently assess technical claims, engage universities and research institutions as well as industry, and ask the questions that profit-driven actors may not raise.

The enduring legacy of the OECD AI Principles lies in the process, not the product. The OECD demonstrated that international decision‑making can keep pace with digital transformation when it embeds technologists, accelerates deliberation, and treats cross‑sector collaboration as a design principle rather than an afterthought. Even as newer frameworks, like the EU’s AI Act, face mixed reviews, the OECD model remains proof that agile, inclusive governance is achievable at a global scale.

The Cold War formally ended in 1991, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left open fundamental questions about how the United States and Russia would redefine their relationship. One of the most consequential answers emerged in space. The Clinton administration recognized that competition in space risked a renewed arms race and that, ultimately, cooperation was the necessary approach for this extraterrestrial frontier. This cooperation required the creation of mechanisms to enable tens of thousands of American and Russian scientists, engineers, and technicians to work together daily, building trust at the technical level even when diplomatic relations remained strained. This need for partnership led the U.S. to invite Russia to join the International Space Station (ISS) program.

The ISS project presented economic, financial, scientific, foreign policy, and national security risks, as NASA and the Russian Space Agency would have to embed teams in each other's countries and manage an unprecedented degree of technical interdependence. Key station functions—from propulsion and attitude control to power, life support, and data networks—depended on hardware and software provided by multiple partners, making safe operations contingent on mutual confidence in each other’s engineering and procedures. The question was: Could this technical trust survive political turbulence?

Russian cosmonauts trained in Houston while American astronauts trained at Star City near Moscow. The partnership launched its first joint ISS module in 1998 and has maintained continuous human presence in orbit since 2000, an unprecedented feat of international cooperation. Over time, the ISS grew to include 15 nations, but the U.S.–Russia technical relationship remained its backbone.

What made this successful: The ISS model operated on the principles of genuine technical partnership rather than public-diplomacy theater. Both nations benefited from the arrangement. Russia received resources and technological engagement, while the U.S. gained Russian expertise. The partnership was sustainable because it served genuine interests on both sides. It also worked because the United States government provided the initial diplomatic opening and resources, but then got out of the way. Scientists and engineers, working on technical problems that were genuinely shared, built the trust that diplomacy alone couldn't create.

As NASA expands its Artemis program and international lunar collaborations under the Artemis Accords, the ISS model remains a perennial template: when diplomacy is fragile, shared scientific missions can sustain engagement. The model also provides a clear lesson that durable international partnerships grow from genuine collaboration, not symbolic cooperation.

When David L. Cohen served as U.S. Ambassador to Canada from 2021 to 2025, he recognized that hockey—Canada's national sport—offered unique opportunities for diplomatic engagement. Rather than viewing athletic exchanges as peripheral to his mission, Cohen created a comprehensive "hockey diplomacy" program at Mission Canada, strategically leveraging sports to advance foreign policy priorities, including inclusion, youth empowerment, gender equity, health and wellness, conflict resolution, and entrepreneurship.

Cohen's hockey diplomacy program operated on multiple levels. He attended professional games across Canada, enthusiastically supported the newly established Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL), and engaged with local college sports teams. The program also included work with the Ottawa Condors, an adaptive hockey team, demonstrating the transformative power of sport to bring people together regardless of abilities or backgrounds.

His most visible initiative was the inaugural Ambassador's Cup Challenge in January 2024, which brought together members of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC and the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa for a friendly hockey competition. The event brought diplomats, military personnel, and hockey enthusiasts from both nations together in a display of team spirit and good-natured rivalry.

Beyond symbolic gestures, Cohen became influential in the creation of the PWHL, demonstrating his commitment to gender equity in both sport and business. The PWHL, established in August 2023 with backing from Los Angeles Dodgers co-owner Mark Walter, represented a watershed moment for women's professional hockey. The league features six teams (expanding to eight in 2025-26), includes a comprehensive collective bargaining agreement ensuring minimum salaries of $35,000, housing and food stipends, and health insurance—benefits that previous women's hockey leagues lacked the financial stability to provide.

Cohen's advocacy for the PWHL connected directly to broader diplomatic themes about gender equity as a national security imperative. According to the 2023 report “Let her play: An analysis of Title IX and the development of the modern female,” Title IX's impact extends internationally, with 1,886 international women participating in NCAA Division 1 sports in 2021. Post-secondary education and high-level sports participation for these international women benefits them, their families, and the environments they choose to work in. Skills learned in competition on and off the field transfer to advance issues of gender parity through experience and direct application in ways previous rights movements haven't achieved.

The timing of Cohen's advocacy proved significant. In March 2017, the U.S. Women's Hockey team threatened to boycott world championships in protest over grossly disparate policies compared to the men's squad—including differences in travel accommodations, support for families, and basic resources. The public outcry over such inequities supported positive changes, demonstrating how advocacy at the intersection of sports and diplomacy can drive meaningful reform.

What made this successful: Cohen understood that sports diplomacy is uniquely powerful because it bridges divides, connecting people across languages, cultures, and borders. By choosing hockey—a sport with deep cultural resonance in Canada but also a fervent following in the United States—he leveraged shared passion to strengthen bilateral ties. His focus on gender equity through the PWHL demonstrated American values in action, not through policy statements but through tangible support for women athletes. The program succeeded because it treated sports not as entertainment but as a strategic diplomatic tool, using athletic competition to facilitate relationship-building, champion shared values, and create platforms for sustained engagement between the two nations.

Andre Huynh, an International Relations student at Oral Roberts University, discovered a pathway into sports diplomacy by combining two passions: competitive basketball and foreign service. Rather than waiting for official diplomatic programs to engage him, he created his own path by recognizing that athletic participation abroad is inherently diplomatic. Since 2023, Huynh has competed annually in basketball tournaments across Vietnam as an International Basketball Player with the Vietnam Basketball Federation. Simultaneously, he pursued formal diplomatic education through fellowships and internships with the Vietnam-Oregon Initiative Network, U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, working on trade, education, and exchange programs.

Huynh blended his love for athletics with career growth by leveraging basketball tournaments as crucial annual events in Vietnam. These tournaments were opportunities to forge meaningful connections with local athletes, coaches, and communities, allowing him to gather valuable insights about Vietnamese society that would influence his official work with the State Department.

In 2025, he returned to Vietnam over the summer to compete in national tournaments with the 2024 U20 National Basketball Champions. He also spoke at study-abroad workshops and cultural exchange programs, showcasing for Vietnamese students and parents how sports had helped him navigate American culture and develop leadership skills.

What made this successful: Huynh understood that global impact doesn't require an official designation. His annual returns to Vietnam created sustained commitment, and his decision to pursue formal internships, alongside his athletic participation, meant he could contribute meaningfully to international relations while maintaining authentic engagement in athletics.

Most importantly, Huynh recognized that the intersection of formal diplomatic education, authentic athletic participation, and commitment to strengthening a bilateral relationship created an exponential impact. His work was not performative; he was living it through the integration of his authentic interests and professional development.

Dizzy Gillespie was already an internationally recognized trumpeter by the mid-1950s when he became one of the first artists to test whether jazz could do what formal diplomacy could not. In March 1956, Gillespie led an 18-piece big bandon the U.S. government’s first major jazz tour—a roughly ten-week State Department itinerary through the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The band’s music director was a young Quincy Jones. In Athens, where students had recently protested at the U.S. Information Service office, many of those same students ended the night lifting Gillespie onto their shoulders after his concert. In Karachi, he asked that children waiting outside be allowed in—a small act that communicated inclusion more powerfully than any prepared remark.

The 1956 tour became the template for the formal Jazz Ambassadors program. Over the next two decades, more than 100 jazz groups would follow Gillespie’s footsteps to 80-90 countries, including Dave Brubeck behind the Iron Curtain, Louis Armstrong in newly independent Congo, and Duke Ellington across the Middle East and South Asia.

The Jazz Ambassadors model has never stopped. Today, the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz—a nonprofit partner of the State Department—carries this tradition forward with striking contemporary reach. In 2022, Hancock led a weeklong delegation to Amman, Jordan, for master classes and community performances, working alongside the same U.S. Embassy that later hosted the Pinning Dreams wrestling program. In 2024, Hancock and vocalist Dianne Reeves visited New Delhi and Mumbai as part of the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, performing as a deliberate statement about artistic freedom. In January 2025, the Institute made its first-ever visit to Saudi Arabia—a market with virtually no prior musical footprint for American cultural diplomacy. What began as Dizzy Gillespie improvising for students is now a living program, adapting its instruments to the geopolitical moment while staying true to its core logic: that jazz, with its built-in ethos of listening and responding.

What made this successful: Jazz embodied values the U.S. wanted to highlight: individual expression within a shared framework, listening and responding across differences, and renewal through improvisation. Gillespie did not deliver scripted messages; he answered questions honestly and let the music carry the argument. That combination of artistic excellence, openness, and respect for local audiences built credibility that formal outreach often cannot replicate. The model endures in programs like NextLevel, which sends U.S. artists and musicians overseas under the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and in the Herbie Hancock Institute’s ongoing global tours—proof that the logic Gillespie established in 1956 remains the most effective script available.

While wrestling has an ancient history in the Middle East, participation by women and girls has faced significant cultural barriers, limited infrastructure, and an absence of role models. In September 2025, the U.S. Embassy in Amman partnered with Wrestling for Peace and the Jordan Wrestling Federation to launch "Pinning Dreams," which brought two accomplished American women wrestlers to Jordan for clinics, trainings, and cultural exchange:

Nicole Tyson—Junior World Champion and first female head wrestling coach at Oklahoma City University, having guided teams to three national championships and 55 All-Americans—and Sally Roberts—CEO and founder of Wrestle Like A Girl, a U.S. Army veteran, two-time World Medalist, World Cup Champion, and three-time U.S. National Champion in wrestling. Together, over five days, they organized a two-day train-the-trainers workshop with 30 participants; provided teenage girls with their first wrestling experience and first direct exposure to female athletic role models; supported the launch of new boys and girls wrestling programs at the middle and high school level; and concluded with an intensive training session for the Jordanian National Women’s Wrestling Team.

A critical but less visible dimension of the program was Sally Roberts’ engagement with male community leaders and elders. Through time spent listening, building personal rapport, and approaching conversations with openness rather than advocacy, she earned the trust needed for families to feel comfortable allowing girls to participate. In this way, Roberts functioned as a cultural diplomat as much off the mat as on it—helping create the social permission that made the athletic exchange possible in the first place.

What made this successful: “Pinning Dreams” worked as a sports diplomacy tool because it treated women’s wrestling as a core embassy event, not an ancillary gathering, and paired that institutional backing with two world-class athletes who showed, rather than told, what authentic female leadership in a male-dominated sport looks like. But the program’s deeper impact was cultural: by letting girls simply participate on their own terms—meeting and observing women who embodied both athletic excellence and personal confidence—the program disrupted assumptions about what girls were capable of and allowed to do. The wrestling was a vehicle; the goal was to shift cultural perceptions about girls’ participation itself. That distinction between teaching a sport and changing an attitude is the difference between a clinic and cultural diplomacy.

The Diplomatic Culinary Partnership—often referred to as the American Culinary Corps—was created to test a simple proposition: that chefs could serve as effective cultural emissaries for the United States. Launched in 2012 in collaboration with the James Beard Foundation, the initiative enlisted dozens of prominent U.S. chefs to help plan menus for official events, travel abroad on behalf of the State Department, and host visiting delegations in their home communities, using what appeared on the plate to complicate fast‑food stereotypes with a more regional, immigrant‑influenced, and constantly evolving portrait of American life. In 2023 the program was relaunched with an 83‑member American Culinary Corps, again in partnership with the James Beard Foundation, explicitly positioning food, hospitality, and the shared dining experience as diplomatic tools for engaging foreign dignitaries and civil society alike. Even as the formal contract underpinning that collaboration came to an end in 2025, many participating chefs have continued the work through their own restaurants, pop‑ups, NGO partnerships, and appearances at cultural festivals, treating culinary diplomacy as a practice rather than a line item.

One mission to Pakistan illustrates how this can look in human terms. Under the Diplomatic Culinary Partnership, the State Department sent an American chef to collaborate with Pakistani television personality Chef Shai; together they visited markets, cooked in one another’s kitchens, and filmed a four‑part miniseries for Masala TV. For viewers, the series offered a textured glimpse of American ingredients and traditions refracted through a Pakistani lens; for the chefs, it became a two‑way exchange of techniques, stories, and identities that neither could have staged alone.

What made this successful: It treated chefs as substantive partners in public diplomacy rather than as decoration. By elevating culinary professionals as cultural ambassadors, the partnership showed how American identity can be communicated through the mix of traditions on a table and the biographies of the people cooking, not only through formal political channels. That insight extends beyond government programs, whether through chef exchanges, refugee‑led dinners, or programs pairing cooking demonstrations with conversations, they all rely on the same basic mechanism—using food to lower defenses, humanize complex issues, and build durable goodwill in ways that complement more formal diplomatic formats. Popular spaces like Disney’s Epcot World Showcase, where visitors “taste their way around the world” at a ring of national pavilions, underscore the point that many people’s first exposure to other cultures comes through cuisine, and that thoughtfully designed food‑centered encounters—whether in a theme park, a neighborhood kitchen, or an embassy residence—can spark curiosity about the wider world that lasts long after the meal is over.