Foreign Affairs March/April Issue Launch: Letting Go -Trump, America, and the World

6:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Reception

6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. | Meeting 

SPEAKERS

Sarah Margon, Washington Director, Human Rights Watch

Jake Sullivan, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Former Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State; Former National Security Advisor, Office of Vice President Joe Biden

PRESIDER

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Executive Editor, Foreign Affairs

Sarah Margon is the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. In this role, she serves as the organization’s main point of contact with the US government and provides strategic and advocacy guidance, including legislative and policy development. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Margon was associate director of sustainable security and peacebuilding at the Center for American Progress. Margon also served as senior foreign policy advisor to Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and as staff director to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs. She has been a guest on various national and international media programs and has published in a wide range of outlets from the Washington Post to USA Today to Foreign Affairs. Margon holds a graduate degree from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University (Connecticut).

Jake Sullivan is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Geoeconomics and Strategy Program and a Martin R. Flug Visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School.

Sullivan served in the Obama administration as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, as well as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was the senior policy adviser on Secretary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and previously served as deputy policy director on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign and as a member of the debate preparation team for Barack Obama’s general election campaign.

Sullivan has also been a senior policy adviser and chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar from his home state of Minnesota, worked as an associate for Faegre & Benson LLP, and taught at the University of St. Thomas Law School. He clerked for Judge Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Sullivan holds undergraduate and law degrees from Yale and a master’s degree from Oxford.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan became Executive Editor of Foreign Affairs in October 2017. He previously served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and, before that, as a senior editor at the magazine. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and his narrative history of George Marshall’s post­–World War II mission to China, The China Mission, will be published by WW Norton in April 2018.