Wednesday marked the halfway point for cohort three’s Morocco research trip. Team “external security” met with a local journalist, officials from the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, and the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis.
At this point, the research is coming together nicely. Each team member has commented how some of their baseline assumptions have either been proven wrong or validated.
Part of the team took another meeting a Reuters journalist who had offered useful insights to other team members earlier in the week. He observed, strikingly, that he sees a popular Moroccan desire for the United States to support democracy and “lead through values.” He explained that U.S. soft power is not just movies, but about ideas, and expressed hope that the United States might expand its educational outreach and capacity building in Morocco to expand the minds of Moroccan youth. It was satisfying to hear that a core value of U.S. diplomacy and engagement is well received in Morocco.
Part of the team then went to the United States Embassy in Rabat for a round-table discussion with U.S. officials on a broad range of issues. They learned a lot about the U.S. perspective on the bilateral relationship with Morocco from Americans with an on-the-ground perspective. It was especially helpful to dive deeper into the numerous facets of United States-Morocco cooperationand capacity building. The sheer number of these mechanisms in Morocco (among the highest in Africa) underscores the importance of U.S. ties to Morocco.
For the last meeting of the day, two team members visited the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis (MIPA) in Rabat. This relatively new Moroccan think tank was very generous with its time and engaged in a fruitful discussion about challenges and opportunities in Morocco, such as de-radicalization, Moroccan domestic policies, security cooperation, and Morocco’s national economic development strategy. From MIPA’s perspective, the top threats to Morocco’s stability are resource scarcity (water and energy), the lack of opportunity for young people entering the job market, and terrorism.
Finally, the team spotted a not-quite-SAIS (Hopkins, that is) tour bus on the highway that got some good laughs. The flare and rad lettering gave us tour bus envy.