The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

60 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL We deployed every single public diplomacy tool available in our toolkit to reach new audiences and tell America’s story to millions who would never make it to the U.S. We partnered with the private sector: with Disney on memorable program- ming, with the PepsiCo Foundation on a new young leaders program for the region, and with SpaceX on a replica 1-1 model of the Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket replica was the tallest object of any country on the expo grounds and remains in the UAE as a legacy item. We partnered with the Library of Congress for a loan of Thomas Jefferson’s Quran and with NASA for a touchable lunar sample and Martian meteorite sample. The National Endow- ments for the Arts and the Humanities supported cultural programming and research. We created a virtual navigable USA Pavilion visited by more than 300,000 people that is still online, and we archived our cultural speakers and performers on our website (www.usapavilion.org ). On the ground in the UAE, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim Sean Murphy and Consul General Meghan Gregonis had mobilized the entire mission so that the pavilion was a platform for sections and agencies to achieve their goals through more than 50 U.S. government visits. A Living Legacy Those of us who were involved will never forget Expo 2020 Dubai, a world’s fair for the ages. Perhaps the greatest satisfac- tion, though, is knowing that the USA Pavilion in Dubai served as a successful proof of concept and U.S. senators, representa- tives, and congressional staff were able to experience it and draw their own conclusions about its importance. Congress had passed legislation not once, but twice, authorizing and then appropriating funds to be spent on a pavilion at a world’s fair. It was a watershed moment. With bipartisan congressional support, planning for the U.S. pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan—the next world’s fair—is now underway. The world’s fair wasn’t a trade show, our pavilion wasn’t a tent in the desert, and the entire endeavor was worthy of federal funding to tell America’s story. n