ECA is pleased to announce the 2012 Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF), which aims to harness the leadership capacity of exchange program alumni worldwide. AEIF awards up to $25,000 to winning teams of alumni to fund projects tackling issues from human rights to women’s entrepreneurship to interfaith understanding.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been busy reassuring European allies that the U.S. was not drawing down its commitment. Panetta even went so far as to claim that Europe is the “security partner of choice for military operations and diplomacy around the world.”

Even if the politics of India-United States ties sometimes falls short of the hoop, the two nations continue to score slam-dunks in terms of bilateral sport diplomacy. This week the U.S. State Department announced that the second round of people-to-people exchanges under its Sports Visitor programme...

The Sports Visitor program will begin in Washington, D.C. where the delegation will meet with U.S. basketball coaches, work with young American athletes, participate in a basketball clinic with Special Olympics athletes, and engage in activities focused on teambuilding and injury prevention.

The United States government has quietly gathered a collection of tech and media superstars to advise on propaganda and public diplomacy. Just think of the new Broadcasting Board of Governors' Commission on Innovation as the Justice League of Public Diplomacy...

20 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell. Twenty years have gone by, several countries have graduated into market democracy, into the international institutions – the EU, NATO – and we felt it was time to sort of normalize the assistance for those countries in the regular budget so that we no longer have a separate carve-out.

The administration is proposing to trim assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia in order to bolster spending in areas given higher priority by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Middle East would gain, with the creation of a special $770 million fund to support political and economic reform in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.