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Steven Koltai of Lincolnville was the first (and last) senior advisor for entrepreneurship and creator of the Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) at the U.S. Department of State. Subsequently, as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution he wrote “Peace through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development.”
Much has been written about the importance of “soft power.” Most often, soft power is identified with cultural connectors like sports, music, film, television and other non-military tools. While these areas are indisputably examples of soft power, there is another, less obvious area of American soft power. That is our culture of entrepreneurship.
In June 2009, President Barack Obama gave one of his most important foreign policy speeches at Cairo University. Titled “A New Beginning,” it expressed several aims for his administration. One theme was that in its relations with the Muslim World, the United States needed to move beyond the constant drumbeat of countering Islamic terrorism to something more positive and forward-looking.
The authors of the speech (primarily Ben Rhodes), identified spurring entrepreneurship as one such fresh, new theme. In the one or two sentences devoted to the topic, entrepreneurship was hailed as a proven way to create jobs, which indeed has historically been true, at least in the U.S.
This principle is especially relevant given that Arab countries had, at that time, among the highest rate of youth unemployment in the world, a fact the Obama Administration believed was a key driver in recruiting Islamic terrorists. In response, the Obama Administration advocated programs to spur entrepreneurship in Muslim-majority countries. Those countries were carefully defined not to be only “Arab” countries but all “Muslim-majority” countries.
It was thus that the Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) was born. GEP eventually operated full programs in Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey (in that sequence of rollout) and smaller programs in Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories (as they were called by the State Department).
I created and ran GEP in my role as the first senior advisor for entrepreneurship at the U.S. Department of State, then headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While rolling out this program, beyond its stated primary benefit of spurring job creation and counteracting the political unrest that seems closely correlated to youth unemployment, several other benefits of bolstering entrepreneurship were discovered. Principle among these were:
The revelation that entrepreneurs are “the same personality type” the world over and thus can talk to each other above the noise of religious, ethnic, political or national animosity.
That young people especially, were attracted by programs that dealt with entrepreneurship and its possibilities.
That even in geographies where people were most hostile to the U.S., there was an almost universal respect for and desire to understand the “secret sauce” that made America the leader in entrepreneurship, and thus a receptivity to participating in an American-led program on this subject.
Coincidentally, this push to use entrepreneurship in the service of US foreign policy began just before the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2009-2011. In fact, the first country where the experiment was deployed was Egypt, whose Tahrir Square mass protests became one of the hallmarks of the entire pro-democracy movement in the Arab world.
At that time, the GEP Egypt listserv proved to be one of the best ways for the U.S. embassy to reach “non-traditional” audiences in Egypt. The U.S. supported the popular effort to end the long-running military dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Sadly, of course, the pro-democracy movement fizzled and Egypt is once again a military dictatorship, albeit with a different dictator at the helm.
The salient point here, however, is that American entrepreneurial “street cred” proved to be a force that could be used to serve American foreign policy goals. The Global Entrepreneurship Program functioned for the full eight years of the Obama Administration. It was halted in the first Trump Administration and remains dormant. Nonetheless, entrepreneurship joined the more traditional portfolio of soft power tools, and has been shown to be an important, and uniquely American form of soft power.
The Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations is sponsoring two free public events on soft power at the Camden Opera House, one on Sept. 7 and the other on Oct. 30.
