WASHINGTON—In my nearly four years working at the Atlantic Council, I’ve come to appreciate that our experts are everywhere. Our staff, fellows, and board members travel extensively. Many are based abroad. Even more are adept guides to what can sometimes feel like the most foreign of all places—Washington, DC. From bomb shelters in Kyiv to cargo planes over Gaza to diplomatic backrooms in Brussels, our experts are where world-changing events are happening. They are in the rooms as major policy decisions are discussed and made. They are behind the scenes as international crises arise and breakthroughs occur.
That’s where Dispatches comes in. In the Atlantic Council’s new flagship section, our experts will aim to bring readers along with them. We’ll provide reports from the front lines of global policy—by the experts shaping it. Think of it as policy with a human pulse.
We’ll do all this with the Atlantic Council’s signature approach for the last sixty-plus years of nonpartisanship and a mission to galvanize US leadership and engagement in the world, in partnership with allies and partners, to shape solutions to global challenges. At a time when polemics and ad-hominem attacks are all around us, Dispatches will embrace what is, regrettably, an increasingly rare idea: treating serious issues seriously.
You will, I hope, find something else in these pages: a spirit of optimism. “I am often asked whether I am an optimist or a pessimist,” the late US Secretary of State and Atlantic Council International Advisory Board member Madeleine Albright once said. Her reply: “I am an optimist who worries a lot.” Our experts worry about what they care about, and they care enough about what they worry about to believe that they can achieve real-world improvements through their work on policy. It’s an optimistic assessment based on what is realistically possible. The world changes. Humanity can shape that change. And there are more preferable and less preferable directions for that change. Who better placed to push in those more preferable directions than the experts who know their issues better than anyone else does?
I believe in the unrivaled power of words to shape the world. On many Atlantic Council platforms—including Dispatches—you will encounter brilliant and informative video, audio, and photography. But the priority of this section will be what, in my view, is the most effective delivery system for complex, nuanced ideas and policy recommendations yet known: one word after another.
Nearly eighty years ago on a shiver-inducing February evening in Russia, a then-unknown US diplomat rattled off a five-thousand-plus-word telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow to Washington, DC. The core idea contained in George Kennan’s missive—containment of the Soviet Empire—stemmed from what he saw on the ground and what his experience told him was needed. That idea went on to shape US policy for several generations. Here you will find dispatches of a humbler length but, I hope, of no less ambition.