Meeting with Stanford Alumni Supporting and Reporting on Democracy in D.C.
This is the first in a series of blog posts written by the Fisher Family Honors Program class of 2024 detailing their experiences in Washington, D.C. for CDDRL's annual Honors College.
In September 2023, we traveled to Washington, D.C. for CDDRL's annual Honors College. Our first stop was at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), where we spoke with Damon Wilson, the President of the NED, John Knaus, Senior Director for Asia at the NED and a Stanford alum (BA ‘93), and David Angeles, Program Officer for Southeast Asia. We heard about the NED’s work supporting individuals and organizations working on democratic development around the world.
Throughout our discussion, Wilson emphasized his vision of the NED’s position as a supporting rather than a prescriptive actor. For him, the NED does its best work when enabling people on the ground to deepen democracy in contextual and situated ways. Downstream of this, the speakers stressed the importance of interpersonal, long-term relationship-building between the NED and grantees, often facilitated by program officers. I found their intention to resist the bureaucratization of funding relationships meaningful, especially when they shared recent anecdotes about how the organization reacted flexibly and quickly to unprecedented challenges faced by some of their Ukrainian grantees.
This visit was exciting for me (Susan) as I spent this summer working on a project funded by the NED to strengthen deliberative citizen forums in Latin America. Wilson actually spoke about conversations within the organization regarding the risks around the integrity of deliberative forums, a concern that my colleagues and I had been discussing throughout our work. It was a fascinating and somewhat surreal experience to meet the funders on the other end (who often feel far away in practice work) and to discover such precisely shared concerns.
Our second stop of the day was with Tarun Chhabra, a Stanford alum (BA ‘02) and current director of the Emerging Technologies team for the White House National Security Council. This stop took place in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which neighbors the White House. Here, we focused on understanding the role of the NSC in the US government's national security apparatus.
Much of the discussion was dominated by student interest in the transition between the Trump and Biden administrations and how that change specifically impacted NSC operations and even policy. It was interesting to learn that, for example, a Republican NSC is more likely to group Russia policy into the domain of their Europe team, whereas a Democrat NSC is more likely to separate them. We also heavily discussed the East Asia policy pivot that took place under President Obama and how that has remained consistent across administrations as the national security focus since then.
I (Samantha) found this discussion particularly interesting due to my work experience in emerging technology policy. I enjoyed hearing Tarun’s perspective on how artificial intelligence is impacting their internal dialogues on how not only to approach strategic competition with the PRC but also their policies with global swing states and middle powers. Tarun spoke at length on the Biden NSC’s extensive work to convene the Quad Leadership Summit to be hosted by India in 2024.
We closed out the day with Marianne LeVine, a Stanford alum (BA ‘13, MA ‘14) and reporter currently covering the 2024 election at The Washington Post. She shared her experiences covering the election on the road, her thinking on the “horserace” tendency of election coverage in the US, and wisdom on career trajectories post-Stanford. It was great to meet an alumna closer to us in age, and our conversation gave me a clearer idea of what life in D.C. might look like post-Stanford.
