In the fall of 2013, I arrived at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna. Shortly after, I remember sitting down with my colleagues and asking them, “what work of ours is most likely to end up on the front page of the New York Times?” I intended the prompt to start a creative conversation, and most of them received it as a somewhat quirky and absurd question—the fifty-seven-state OSCE was not often in headlines. Yet within the next year, a democratic revolution in Ukraine began and Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by seizing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine. The team at the U.S. mission led negotiations to send OSCE monitors to the conflict zone (where they remain to this day, six years later), and their reporting on the war in Ukraine was on the front pages of newspapers around the world.
That experience taught me many lessons—certainly about the value of smart, hard-working colleagues and teamwork but also about the importance of the United States playing a role that I call “cooperator in chief.” I also learned how policymakers—understandably—too often find ourselves reacting to events rather than thinking prospectively.
A United States of America that is committed to playing the role of cooperator in chief has many challenges and opportunities ahead. While the rise of China is certainly the most significant geopolitical shift of the current era, the values-based political and economic partnerships between North America and Europe remain the densest networks for cooperative efforts to achieve foreign policy goals in the decades to come.
My work at Carnegie is premised on the belief that the transatlantic relationship must evolve with the times, but it must endure. For transatlantic cooperation to be effective over the next decade, we must clarify the intricacies of policy questions that North America and Europe are likely to confront together—climate change, migration, global pandemics, corruption, the future of NATO in the context of evolving threats, engagement with China, and development in sub-Saharan Africa, among others—and the ways of working that likely lead to success.
Whether I was teaching business ethics to MBA students at Georgetown, leading a U.S.-Vietnam human rights dialogue in Hanoi, or working to open access to financial aid for students enrolled in Colorado’s public colleges and universities under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, I have been inspired by the political and moral proposition that fairness is a prerequisite for stability and resilience in human society. As we look to the future, we see a world that has grown smaller and more complicated because of advances in globalization and technology that have challenged the efficacy and legitimacy of legacy political structures. The central question is whether we can work together—within and across societies—to build a fairer world.
There is no fairness without freedom. There is no fairness without respect for the dignity of each person. The United States must bring a principled, realistic, confident, and appropriately humble approach to our efforts at making the world fairer and safer for human flourishing.
I’m thrilled to join a global network of distinguished colleagues at Carnegie who are thinking about big questions—the answers to which will define our world in the years ahead.