Then: Junior Fellow, South Asia Program (2011–2012)
Now: Clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Supreme Court of the United States
As a junior fellow in the South Asia Program, I researched, analyzed, and wrote about Asian strategic issues, including topics as varied as the military balance between India and China, Pakistani terrorist organizations, and Chinese naval aviation. I also had the incredible opportunity to work with Ashley J. Tellis on The Crux of Asia: China, India, and the Emerging Global Order, in which we brought together Chinese and Indian scholars to present the different visions of the next iteration of the global order offered by Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington.
After my year at Carnegie wrapped up, I went to Harvard Law School, where I was Supreme Court Chair for the Harvard Law Review and an oralist on the school’s winning Ames moot court team. Before starting my current clerkship, I first clerked in the chambers of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and served as a Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense.
My experience at Carnegie solidified my desire to stay involved in international affairs and national security policy, and it helped me do so even as I went through a more traditional law school curriculum. Thanks to Carnegie and the work I was able to accomplish there, I had the chance to contribute regularly to the National Interest while in law school. Once a month, I took a break from my law school studies in order to focus exclusively on researching some pressing policy issue and producing a short piece about it. That process required bringing to bear all the skills I honed at Carnegie, and I found that it often brought new meaning and insight even to seemingly unrelated legal issues which I was grappling with.
Carnegie also shaped my professional interests in a lasting way. While at Carnegie, I gained a greater understanding and appreciation of realism from Ashley—a master of the field—and that knowledge has stayed with me to this day. Scholars and policymakers often debate the value of the international order without clearly identifying the purpose it is meant to serve; that omission has led to errors on all sides and jeopardized the existing international system. In response to that problem, and based largely on interests developed at Carnegie, I am currently working extracurricularly on a book about U.S. foreign policy from the time of the Monroe Doctrine to World War II. I am focusing in particular on telling the story of how the United States consolidated hegemony over the Western Hemisphere and used it as a springboard for the creation of the postwar international order. By telling that story, I hope to help reorient contemporary political discussion toward a lesson central to my time at Carnegie: Designed carefully and executed well, the international order advances American interests at home and abroad.