Skip to content
Search results
Load More
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst

Coffee with Ali Wyne

As a kid, RAND analyst Ali Wyne hated to read.

Words: Laicie Heeley
Pictures: Holson House
Date:

Everyone has that friend on social media — the one who shares the best stuff. A photo essay that makes you think or an article on productivity that’s actually worth your time. For me, Ali Wyne is that friend.

But Ali has enriched my feed, and my life, in so many other ways. He’s the first to shout out a friend’s good work — or even just their birthday — and, when it’s needed, he’s the first to reach out and offer support.

He’s also a voracious reader. Which is why it’s funny that, as a kid, he says he hated to read — you might have been able to force him to pick up a copy of Goosebumps, but not much else.

Ali’s life — and worldview — was impacted heavily by 9/11. As one of the only Muslim-American families in the rural Virginia town where he grew up, he remembers not only the shock of that day but the fear. For Ali, that was the day that everything changed.

Today, Ali is a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute.  He also serves as rapporteur for a US National Intelligence Council working group that analyzes trends in world order.

His resume includes stints at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a team that prepared Samantha Power for her confirmation hearing to be US Ambassador to the United Nations.

But for all of his accomplishments, Ali has his priorities straight — near the end of an hours-long coffee that easily could have stretched hours more, he told me sincerely, “More than anything else, I want to be able to look back on my life and at least be able to convince myself or believe that I was a loyal son, that I was a devoted brother, that I was a caring friend. For me, nothing else really matters.”

Click through the photos for more from our talk, below:

ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
I grew up in the 1990s — forget about being politically conscious, I had no interest in foreign policy or world affairs until 9/11 happened. I hated reading. I was terrified of reading. My parents would implore me, “Please Ali, read a book, take some interest in the outside world. But I never really felt a sense of compulsion to do so because America was buffered by two oceans — violence happened over there. It didn't happen here. War happened over there. It didn't happen here. America was dominant. Essentially the debate during the 1990s was what do we do with this preponderant inheritance of power?
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
I think being ignorant of the outside world was kind of a luxury that we had. I'm not saying that was a good thing, but I think that it was more forgivable in the nineties than it is today.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
A lot of the discussion in the think tank community, wittingly or not, it's just this very rarefied kind of discussion. It's disconnected from the day-to-day material experiences and the lived realities of people — and not just people in the way we talk about people in rural Appalachia or people in the south or Midwest. It’s not just people in rural communities, but I think Americans in general.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
I had this kind of a moment of reckoning in which I said that maybe it behooves me to get out of my bubble and engage with people who are not party to these think tank discussions and don't go to public policy schools and actually talk with them about what they're feeling and what they're experiencing.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
You need to imbue [a lot of terms, Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal…] with a certain a certain amount of elasticity so that they can adapt as circumstances evolve and time passes. But a term that is infinitely malleable and infinitely elastic then collapses under its own weight and a term that tries to encompass so many meanings ultimately has no meaning.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
When I was growing up I remember talking with my parents and with teachers and professors and people who were in politics, I’d ask “What do you have to do to be successful if you want to break into politics?” And people would say, “You need to compromise. You need to be a bridge builder. You need to be a moderate.” Now, heaven forbid if you're a moderate or if you're a centrist, you’re basically dead in the water. Bridge builders are seen as naïve at best and disingenuous at worst.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
If civility is naïve, and if bipartisanship or nonpartisanship is naïve, and bridge building is naïve, then it makes you wonder, is our politics going in the right direction? If we can't even talk to each other? So I'm worried.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
Maybe it was very stable, but underneath this veneer of high-level stability, namely mutually assured destruction, you had civil wars, you had proxy wars, you had genocides. The Cold War, I think it's a misnomer to call it the half-century great peace or the Long Peace. Yes, we averted a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union but there were all kinds of hotspots, tens of millions of people perished, and we came so close so many times.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
I'm not sure we knew what to make of it — when something is almost science fiction gone horribly wrong, or so surreal, you almost don't know how to react. But my parents picked me up and we went home. And I remember that my dad got my mom, my sister, and myself together in the living room and he turned off all the lights in the house and in a hush, hush tone, he said he was afraid of backlash.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
We were one of the few Pakistani-American families in Fredericksburg, maybe one of only ones, but certainly one of the few Muslim-American families. And I just remember, he said, “If anyone knocks on the door don't answer it.” This is the night of 9/11. I had never seen my dad scared, and his fear was palpable.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
The community rallied around us. They embraced us and we heard from neighbors. We heard from family friends. We also heard from people we hadn’t spoken to in years. People called up, knocked on the door and said, “Hey, how are the kids doing? Do you need a place to stay? Do you feel safe? Do you need us to run some errands?” So, the community really embraced us and that to me is, when I think about why I feel so proud and so privileged to be an American… it's what makes America great, what makes America a superpower.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
At the time, I initially regretted sending him that e-mail. In retrospect, I'm thrilled that I sent him that email. I sent [Joe Nye] — who was dean of the Kennedy School at the time — I had just finished reading his book and I sent him this very overzealous fanboy kind of e-mail, and I said, “Dear Dean Nye, I just read your book. I love it. And as a result of reading your book, I've been thinking about switching my major and now I want to be a political scientist. I was just gushing.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
I remember when I hit the send button I looked at it and said, “Gosh, this seems a little bit stalker-ish. But then I said, “Well, I'm a nobody in Orlando and he's a Dean. He probably gets so many messages like this, it’s probably going to get deleted. He won't even respond. So I stopped worrying. But he responded after a couple of days and he said, “Hi Ali, I'm glad to hear you read the book and enjoyed it. If you happen to find yourself in Cambridge, let's get together.” And so I was stunned and overjoyed.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
If you had told me on Sept. 10, 2011, that today I would not be studying math, that I would have majored in political science and that I'd be interested in foreign policy, it just it would have seemed completely outside the realm of possibility but I look back and when I think about my path that I've taken, serendipity plays a very large role, mentors play an immensely important role, and detours play a large role.
ali wyne rand foreign policy analyst
My mom and dad had an arranged marriage. My mom came to this country when she was 21. So she was really young, she didn't know anybody here. Think about not only the culture shock, but the weather shock. They settled in Minnesota because that was where my dad was able to find a job in a small engineering plant and he was working really long days. My mom didn't know anybody, dad didn't really know anybody, but they built themselves up and they've now been in America for 30 plus years. But America embraced them, gave them an opportunity. I can't imagine that my sister or myself would have had the opportunities that we've had anywhere else.
Author bio

Laicie Heeley

Editor in Chief

Laicie Heeley is the founding CEO of Inkstick Media, where she serves as Editor in Chief of the foreign policy magazine Inkstick and Executive Producer and Host of the PRX- and Inkstick-produced podcast, Things That Go Boom. Heeley’s reporting has appeared on public radio stations across America and the BBC, where she’s explored global security issues including domestic terrorism, disinformation, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Prior to launching Inkstick, Heeley was a Fellow with the Stimson Center’s Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense program and Policy Director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Her publications include work on sanctions, diplomacy, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, along with the first full accounting of US counterterrorism spending after 9/11.

LEARN MORE
Donate

Hey there!

You made it to the bottom of the page! That means you must like what we do. In that case, can we ask for your help? Inkstick is changing the face of foreign policy, but we can’t do it without you. If our content is something that you’ve come to rely on, please make a tax-deductible donation today. Even $5 or $10 a month makes a huge difference. Together, we can tell the stories that need to be told.

Related articles

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTERS