Hello friends,

We have invited you all here to St. Louis to discuss the future of the North American Accord. We thought St. Louis to be an appropriate choice of city due to its proximity to nearly everyone on the continent.

Frankly, we think the Accord was a good idea, but it failed for two reasons - it was both too strong yet also not strong enough.

The Accord was pretty strong. Within a year of its founding, it had a unified military command structure for all who chose not to opt out, and even featured a unified intelligence agency. It functioned more like an alliance than a forum to discuss North American issues and foster cooperation. Though an alliance may be a desirable end goal, we think that we may need to start with something lighter first and grow into an alliance later.

Yet it also was not strong enough. It did nothing to prevent Midwest military action against Orleans, and continued to do nothing as that conflict escalated into one that encompassed the whole continent and involved nuclear weapons. While we do not have a solution for this, we would like to discuss ways we could make the organization stronger.

Titles 1, 2, and 4 of the Accord seem worth keeping to us. They fostered political and eocnmic cooperation by tying us closer as a continent, and thus, seem like a good place to start. However, at least for the near term, we are of the opinion that Title 3 needs to be scrapped.

Any other ideas for Accord reform are welcome here too.