Government Speaker Withdrawals Put Nonpartisan Convening at Risk

The Aspen Strategy Group was created in 1984 at the height of the Cold War, but its founding premise was not simply that foreign policy required expertise. It was that American leaders needed a setting in which partisan identity would not overwhelm the work of forming a coherent policy position.

Niamh King describes an earlier Rockefeller Foundation– and Ford Foundation–supported predecessor focused on arms control, including SALT I, SALT II, nuclear weapons, and international weapons policy. The founders judged that work to have become too academic and “wonky,” she says. Their response was to convene political figures from both parties alongside people who could bridge government and scholarship: Democrat Bill Perry, Republican General Brent Scowcroft, and Joseph Nye, the program’s first executive director.

Nye, who had served in the Carter administration and the Defense Department, brought a practical view of how a forum could operate. King says the group’s purpose was to “leave politics at the water’s edge”: not to eliminate disagreement, but to establish a basis for Americans across party lines to present policy abroad without appearing incoherent at home.

Aspen’s physical distance from Washington was part of the design. King portrays it as a venue where participants could step away from the capital’s daily pressures, spend informal time together fishing or whitewater rafting, and test their views against people with opposing positions. The point was not social harmony for its own sake. It was to sharpen an argument against real disagreement and identify what a broader set of American leaders might support.

That aspiration does not assume that political differences are a flaw. King argues that polarization has always existed in the United States; the consequential question is how people manage it. The group’s theory is that participants who respect one another’s intelligence and integrity can agree to disagree, probe the reasons for disagreement, and sometimes revise their own positions.

That intellectual flexibility is sufficiently central to the program that its Rising Leaders selection process asks applicants whether they have ever changed their minds, and what caused the change. King says the question is intended to identify people capable of honestly considering another person’s perspective.

Lorelle Atkinson raises a concern about a thinning policy infrastructure in Congress: in her account, members increasingly have communications staff rather than legislative or policy staff, while public-facing political demands make sustained policy work harder.

King’s experience since arriving in Washington does not dismiss that concern, but it adds a limit to what public conflict reveals. Behind closed doors, she says, members of Congress are often more cordial and collaborative than their public portrayals suggest. The relationship is not the conspicuous personal rapport associated with earlier political eras, but she sees real camaraderie among people trying to solve problems.

She recalls seeing Senators Jim Risch, John Cornyn, Chris Coons, and Mark Warner—two Republicans and two Democrats—appear together in Aspen. In King’s view, the exchange was strikingly cooperative. Risch later expressed frustration that press coverage rarely attends to the matters on which lawmakers agree.

King sees an incentive problem in that gap. Attention is “heavy currency,” she says, and conflict attracts it. The result can be a public account of Congress that obscures quieter cross-party work. That does not negate polarization or electoral pressure; it helps explain why the Strategy Group puts value on settings where participants can sustain contact outside public performance.

The program’s influence is difficult to evaluate by conventional institutional metrics. King can count media mentions, fundraising, newsletter subscribers, or program applicants, but she does not think those figures add up to impact. Influence may appear in a participant’s later trajectory, in relationships that persist across institutions, or in decisions that cannot be traced cleanly to one meeting.

A photograph displayed during the discussion showed Condoleezza Rice at what King identified as her first Aspen Strategy Group meeting in 1984. King said Rice was about 29 or 30 at the time and working as a Soviet scholar. The image supported King’s account of the group’s long horizon: some people enter its orbit before becoming influential, while others arrive after their public careers. She also cited the group’s work on the India civilian nuclear deal in the early 2000s as an area of significant impact.

For King, these examples illustrate both the value and the difficulty of the model. A convening organization can create conditions for relationships, exposure, and reconsideration; it cannot easily isolate its own contribution from the careers and institutions around it.

The sharpest recent test of the model came when, King says, the Department of Defense withdrew 14 speakers from the Aspen Security Forum, including five combatant commanders. She says she learned of the decision through a text from a friend and was told that the forum had been characterized as a gathering of “evil globalists.”

A New York Times front page was displayed during this account. King’s concern, however, was less the coverage than the practical consequences. The loss was not only the absence of senior officials from the stage. It disrupted planned connections among military, technology, government, and policy participants. King singled out Admiral Paparo’s planned trip from Hawaii and the possibility of meetings with AI companies while he was in Aspen.

The withdrawal created a broader cascade. Other government participants reconsidered attendance, including officials outside the Defense Department. Senator Cornyn’s participation also became politically difficult, King says, because he was facing a primary challenge in Texas.

The forum rebuilt by placing former members of Congress, former military officials, and other participants on the agenda. King says attendees noticed there was “not as much brass on stage,” but that the program retained substantial expertise and competing perspectives because people in the group’s orbit stepped in quickly.

King does not say the Strategy Group held a formal, dedicated deliberation on the episode. Its annual meeting came soon afterward and had a demanding agenda focused on AI. She has had individual conversations about it, she says, but not a specific group-wide discussion.

Her concern is the politicization of convening itself. If officials or institutions conclude that participation in an open, nonpartisan forum is disqualifying, the loss reaches beyond one event. King calls that prospect troubling because freedom of expression, openness, and constitutional checks and balances have, in her view, made the United States a beacon for people seeking refuge and opportunity.

King’s defense of the forum rests partly on a practical observation: participants would not seek out Aspen if they regarded it as partisan. The aim is not to establish one acceptable viewpoint, but to preserve a place where arguments about the Indo-Pacific, China, AI, the Middle East, and other difficult subjects can be tested in the presence of people who disagree.

At the Aspen Security Forum, King says, senior officials and ambassadors are not invited to make prepared remarks and leave. They are put into conversations—often with journalists, sometimes with audience questions—and expected to respond to real challenges.

Niamh King describes that format as a form of co-responsibility. A journalist from The New York Times, CNN, or Fox has an institutional reputation at stake when interviewing a senior official. A softball question to a figure such as a secretary of state or intelligence chief reflects on the interviewer as well as the guest. The format is designed to deny either side an uncomplicated platform: no long speech, no unchallenged propaganda, and no assumption that a prominent visitor will control the exchange.

King cites MI6 chief Richard Moore, whom she says speaks publicly twice a year, as an example of the caliber of guest the forum can draw. She also says Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng’s first public conversation in his current role was held there. Such attendees come, in her account, because they expect a serious audience, capable journalists, and useful bilateral meetings with other participants.

The forum is the public-facing counterpart to the Strategy Group’s closed-door work. It began after 9/11 with an early emphasis on homeland security and was originally associated with Michael Chertoff and Jane Harman as Republican and Democratic co-chairs. In 2018, the Institute merged the forum with the Aspen Strategy Group. King calls the two entities “symbiotic”: one creates private space for sustained exchange, while the other makes leading figures address consequential issues in public.

The program’s editorial approach is to put cross-cutting issues in context rather than let one subject absorb the agenda. During COVID, King says, there was pressure to make every session about the pandemic; more recently, there has been pressure to make everything about AI. Her preference is to ask how AI changes defense technology, China policy, or U.S.-European differences rather than treat it as an isolated subject.

For the forthcoming forum, King identified a strategic agenda more than a fixed roster: European discussions after the NATO summit, renewed attention to U.S.-China relations, and continued examination of the Middle East. She expected Nordic participation to be particularly relevant amid attention to Greenland and Denmark, and said China would require sustained attention even as Middle East events dominated headlines.

The Strategy Group formalized its Rising Leaders program during COVID after years of informally bringing younger participants into its orbit. Niamh King says it has become one of Washington’s most competitive leadership programs: more than 300 people applied in the current cycle, roughly 200 were interviewed, and 30 were selected.

The program combines an Aspen Seminar, policy-oriented visits, participation in the summer gathering, and collaborative policy papers. Participants come from media, academia, the private sector, intelligence and military institutions, and Republican and Democratic Senate offices. King emphasizes ideological range as well: the cohort includes progressives as well as conservative and Trump-aligned participants.

The selection process is meant to identify more than professional accomplishment. King says applicants are asked whether they have changed their minds about something and what prompted that shift. The underlying test is whether a participant can engage another view without treating disagreement as evidence of bad faith.

Her examples convey the breadth the program seeks. One new participant works with Senator Roger Wicker through the Helsinki Commission. Another, interviewed years earlier while working at McKinsey and preparing for military service, returned as a 29-year-old F-35 pilot who still works part-time for McKinsey.

Rising Leaders also participate in some of the group’s international work, including travel to China. King distinguishes this work through the language of diplomatic “tracks.” Track I means government-to-government engagement; Track 1.5 combines government and nongovernment figures. The Strategy Group’s China work, she says, is led by former Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun, former ambassador Nick Burns, and executive director Anya Manuel, with bipartisan leadership. Rising Leaders can join such delegations and attend summer meetings, gaining exposure not just to foreign-policy ideas but to how relationships operate in practice.

King contrasts the summer gathering in Aspen with the group’s winter meeting in Washington. Washington may be easier to reach, she says, but the remoteness of Aspen changes participants’ behavior. At Pine Creek Cookhouse, attendees are farther into the mountains and without Wi-Fi or cellular signal. That, she says, is where the most consequential exchanges can occur.

King says she heard that negotiations connected to the prisoner swap she described as the largest since the Cold War ended took place in Aspen. She specifically said she did not have proof that Jake Sullivan and Jens Plötner planned the exchange there. The anecdote, offered as an unverified account rather than a demonstrated outcome, reflects the kind of result the institution values: private discussions that may matter because participants have time, proximity, and room to speak beyond the public agenda.

King does not minimize the difficulty of following global events. She describes feeling overwhelmed herself, even while working in foreign policy. Her response is not to promise a simple filter for separating signal from noise, but to insist on deliberate source selection.

Niamh King points to the Aspen Strategy Group’s Weekly Leaf newsletter as an exercise in curation: a team chooses concise articles, significant charts, and important books for more than 11,000 subscribers. King says it has a 56% open rate, which she attributes to the time spent selecting material rather than simply aggregating links.

She also defends the value of browsing a broad newspaper rather than consuming only targeted feeds. The purpose is exposure to issues a reader did not already know to seek out: critical minerals, a typhoon in Taiwan, or other developments that may be strategically relevant but lack the scale or drama to dominate an individual’s algorithmic feed.

King’s core instruction is to understand who is producing the information. Readers should know a writer’s background and viewpoint, and should ask what institution sits behind an item encountered on social media. She gives the example of RT as Russian state media and describes encountering China Daily in a dentist’s office, calling it a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece rather than a neutral publication.

That does not mean readers should avoid all sources with identifiable perspectives. It means recognizing the perspective, challenging it, and seeking enough range to make an informed judgment. The task is especially difficult when political messages are compressed into short posts and videos. King says six seconds or 140 characters cannot explain Iran, or most other consequential international questions. But those formats are where younger audiences are, and institutions that want to reach them must find ways to meet them there without abandoning substance.