00:01 – Lauren Anderson
Welcome to the Steady State Sentinel. I’m Lauren Anderson, and I’ve spent more than four decades working in the fields of national security, intelligence, and geopolitics, including nearly 30 years with the FBI. I’ve often joked that I tend to run toward the things that most people run away from.
Our guest today, Nina Hachigian, recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “The Autocrats’ Worst Enemy: Why Despots Hate Cities and the Mayors Who Run Them.” Although we don’t often think about it, local communities – both in the United States and around the world – are where much of the real governance and day-to-day work takes place. Using Nina’s Foreign Affairs article as our jumping-off point, we’ll explore why local leadership matters in parts of the world that are experiencing growing authoritarianism and democratic erosion, how communities can strengthen democratic resilience, and frankly, why we should care.
We’ll talk about why people continue to place so much trust in those closest to their communities, and what role each of us can play, if we choose, in strengthening democratic resilience where we live.
I’m delighted to welcome Ambassador Nina Hachigian. Nina is the founder and CEO of the Alliance for Local Leaders International, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to supporting and connecting mayors and governors globally to solve shared challenges. She’s had an extraordinary career spanning diplomacy, local government, and international affairs, serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Deputy Mayor for International Affairs for Los Angeles, and the first U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy at the U.S. State Department. Nina also served on the staff of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. She’s the editor of Debating China: The US-China Relationship in 10 Conversations and co-author of The Next American Century: How the US Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise.
Nina, welcome. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you with us.
02:23 – Lauren Anderson
And I’d love to ask our guests to start off a little bit about themselves and their origin story because we’re all so much more than our titles and our resumes. So if you would share a little bit about how Nina became Nina, that would be terrific.
02:37 – Nina Hachigian
Well, thank you, and thank you so much for having me and having this conversation. I grew up as the daughter of an immigrant on my mom’s side and then a second generation on my dad’s side. I think my interest in foreign affairs and foreign policy started at a very early age when I went to visit my Armenian grandmother – who had, as many Armenians fled the genocide – it was like visiting another country. Everything smelled different, looked different, different language. And I just loved her so much and relished those times.
And then on my mom’s side we went to Germany every year, every other year to visit with my grandparents. She had left Germany because of the class constraints, the gender constraints, and at the time when she grew up, just a lack of acknowledgement about what had happened in World War II.
I grew up in New York City, so I already had pretty close association with cities until I was twelve or so, and then suburbs after that. Long circuitous route, including a one-year stint as a lawyer, which I realized quickly was not my thing.
04:25 – Lauren Anderson
Well, that’s great. And so what was your first role then in government?
04:35 – Nina Hachigian
Well, it depends on how far back you want to go. I was an intern at the State Department in law school. Then I worked for a judge for a year. Actually, my first role in government was as a legislative correspondent to Congressman Bruce Morrison right after college. Then I did a stint in law school as an intern at the Legal Advisors Office in the State Department. Then I worked for a judge, and then I worked for the Federal Trade Commission. And then I worked for the NSC when I was – I guess it was like 1999-ish under the Clinton administration. And you’ve said everything else.
05:31 – Lauren Anderson
That’s actually something we share because I’m also born in New York City, which we didn’t talk about before, and started school there and then out to the suburbs in New Jersey. So like you I had the urban experience and then the suburban experience. I love that public service was something that was a part of who you were from a very early part of your life. I think it’s so important, and I know we’re going to get into this, but thank you for your service starting at such a young age because it matters. I think it’s a great thing to be modeling for everyone out there since I think we both agree there’s not enough attention focused on the importance of public service or community service – how whether that’s in a local town or at the federal government level, it makes such a difference in terms of your participation and how you understand the importance of participation.
So let’s move into our first substantive question. I’m curious about what inspired you to write this article for Foreign Affairs and why do you think that local leadership matters in parts of the world that are experiencing growing authoritarianism and democratic erosion?
06:53 – Nina Hachigian
When I worked as the deputy mayor in Los Angeles for international affairs, that really exposed me to the power that cities have to improve the lives of their residents. At that time we were connected to lots of cities around the world for various reasons – whether we were trying to learn something from them or solve a shared challenge together or it’s a trade opportunity.
I had heard about the city of Budapest and how the mayor there was really trying to preserve democratic space while being attacked constantly by Viktor Orbán. Mayors and governors are really on the front lines of protecting freedoms and renewing democracy. The work of building it, the work of protecting it really happens at the local level – or can happen at the local level when it’s not going well at the national level. Cities after all invented democracy way back when. So they are now the ones who are also holding it and protecting it.
08:13 – Lauren Anderson
You mentioned a couple of other great examples in your article from other cities and countries. I wonder if you might, in addition to Hungary, touch on a couple of the others – whether it’s Venezuela, Turkey, your choice. I think they’re really informative because they show the extremes of just trying to stop somebody from being your competitor to throwing them in jail or worse.
08:36 – Nina Hachigian
It can be very unsafe to be a mayor in an autocratic system if you are not towing the line. In Poland, the mayor of Gdańsk was assassinated by someone who analysts thought was very spun up by the campaign of hate that the national government was conducting against him because of his support of LGBTQ rights.
Mayor López of Caracas was prevented from running for higher office and also thrown in jail because of his role in leading protests against the Maduro regime. The prosecutor said that he had subliminal ways of inciting people to protest.
In Istanbul, the very popular mayor there, İmamoğlu, who’s an opposition party figure – the day after he said that he would run as a candidate for president, his university degree was revoked, which made him ineligible to run, and then he was thrown in jail. Recently he has had a sham trial, and there are charges filed against him that would keep him in jail for two thousand years – sedition, corruption, spying – everything they could think of.
In all those cases, what the mayors were trying to do was to give people their rights – their rights to protest, their rights to love who they loved, their rights – in the case of İmamoğlu, he was very focused on poor women and children’s nutrition.
11:05 – Lauren Anderson
One of the things I’m curious if you agree here is that because they’re mayors – and we see this in the U.S. – there’s a personal relationship between community members and their elected or appointed officials that we don’t get on a national level. I’m sure you saw that in Los Angeles, and I wonder if you could comment on that dynamic and why you think that might create more effectiveness and better communication and be able to move away from polarization because of that personal relationship.
11:40 – Nina Hachigian
I think it does a few things. You can run into your mayor in the grocery store or at your kids’ soccer game – they cannot be insulated from their residents and neighbors. I think that brings familiarity – this is like a real human. It brings accountability, importantly. So if the mayor says they’re going to do something and then they don’t do it, you can usually see that it’s not done or it is done. That accountability is a key feature of democracy.
Transparency is another one. Cities generally try to be pretty transparent about how they are spending their budget dollars, or some cities are measuring all kinds of things – how many minutes it takes to answer a 911 call, how many trees, how many miles of street have been paved recently. That’s another really important feature of democracy – transparency.
13:02 – Lauren Anderson
I think too that something some people don’t talk often enough about is that what goes on in cities and towns and at the state level tends to have a greater degree of trust. We both know there’s been a very disheartening erosion in trust in our institutions in the United States at all levels – including where I came from, where the FBI largely was a respected organization and regrettably, in the past few years, that’s not been the case. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that having that public trust absolutely feeds into national security. And a lot of people may think, “Well, I’m in this small town over here, it doesn’t matter to me,” but it really does. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, especially from your role in LA, about how what is going on outside the community absolutely impacts the security in the community.
14:03 – Nina Hachigian
Cities and towns – mayors and other public servants at the local level – are really on the front lines of a lot of international challenges. It could be extreme weather events from climate change, it could be COVID or another pandemic, it could be a terrorist attack. Recently a bunch of cities’ utilities were shut down by cyber attacks. So it absolutely matters.
When you talk about trust, mayors are the most trusted level of government. 70% of residents trust their mayors – a really extraordinary figure that has been the case for decades. Whereas trust in national government has plummeted in the last decade or so.
15:08 – Lauren Anderson
It feels at times that there’s weaponization going on. You and I talked before this about the fact that it came out in court filings that the administration had withheld already appropriated funds that impacted infrastructure in states that didn’t vote for the president. I wonder if you could comment on that a little bit and how you see that expanding even beyond that.
15:45 – Nina Hachigian
It’s troubling. It’s very typical of governments tending toward or admiring authoritarianism – defunding state and local government is one of their key tools. It’s absolutely horrible because this is affecting regular everyday people. Without fixing infrastructure or SNAP benefits – not feeding children – at the end of the day, it’s local government that has the responsibility to do those things, and they typically do it with federal dollars.
There’s a proposal from the administration to change the rule and allow political appointees to veto any funding that’s going from the federal government to state and local governments – a recipe for political meddling.
I’ll say that in general at the local level, mayors are not partisan political figures for the most part. They’re just trying to get solutions and make lives better for their residents. You will see with the U.S. Conference of Mayors that when they’re issuing statements about SNAP benefits or about tariffs, it’s on a very bipartisan basis – Republicans and Democrats and independents all signing on.
17:44 – Lauren Anderson
That’s an important thing. I wonder if you could expand on that – I would guess that a lot of our listeners are not aware that there is a national organization for mayors and a national organization for governors and the degree to which they collaborate. I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about that, because I think the average person thinks they’re in a silo – that their mayor is just dealing with what’s going on in their town.
18:22 – Nina Hachigian
The U.S. Conference of Mayors – there are two actual city and town organizations that are national. One is called the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the other is called the National League of Cities. They do slightly different things, but essentially they are bringing mayors together to learn from each other about all kinds of things they care about – using drones with your police force, AI and how to use that to make government more efficient or is it too dangerous, water infrastructure – all kinds of things. They’re constantly learning from each other.
That happens across borders also. There are various international networks of mayors and regional heads that work on all kinds of issues. The most well-built out area is around clean energy and climate solutions. There are several networks – a network of big cities, a network of smaller cities, a network of cities and states and businesses. What they’re all doing is sharing solutions, working with technical experts. Mayors like to learn from other cities that have figured out a solution to something. As my mayor used to say, “Good mayors borrow, great mayors steal” – meaning ideas from other places.
20:19 – Lauren Anderson
Your work – I’d love for you to talk now building on that. You chose to found this organization. You’re neither of us is in our twenties. I love the fact that you’ve made a decision after all that you’ve accomplished, instead of sitting back, to keep going. What drove you to do this, and where do you hope to fill gaps? How is Alliance for Local Leaders International doing that and what is your vision?
21:10 – Nina Hachigian
I’m worried about our democracy and about our country. I am psychologically in the best place when I feel like I’m making a difference and I’m part of the solution. If I were sitting back and writing, I think I would be pulling my hair out. At this point in my life, I’m most interested in action and in change.
Mayors are this critical element of democracy that is really overlooked for the most part. They’re the ones who get people to participate in civic life and issue permits for protests and help to administer free and fair elections and protect vulnerable groups to make sure they have their rights. That’s all democracy. And they’re the ones doing it.
So we at Allies – Alliance for Local Leaders International, or Allies for short – want to support local elected leaders in their building and in their defense of democracy. One way we do that is by making sure they are talking to each other so that our mayors here in the United States can learn from experiences that others have had. We’re also collecting their knowledge – we’ll be releasing that in a few months – about all the innovations in the way cities are building democracy.
There’s all kinds of innovation that happens at the local level. One popular but relatively new phenomenon is participatory budgeting, which is when a city will give a chunk of money to the community and they have to decide how to spend it. There’s a whole process around how they do that.
23:25 – Lauren Anderson
Can you give us an example? Would that be a park or a town square?
23:32 – Nina Hachigian
Could be anything – whatever that group of residents and civic leaders decide is most necessary and fits in the budget. It’s a way to bring people in and feel like they are part of the process for real, that they have agency. So this volume we’ll be releasing is half about all the ways you can renew and make better our democracy – which obviously we need – and second, how you protect it. What are the different strategies that mayors and their civil society partners have used to protect rights and norms and systems?
24:38 – Lauren Anderson
One of your subheadings within the article was “Laboratories of Democracy” – which is really what you’re talking about. As we do this podcast, we want to make it clear to people about why they should care. I wonder what you would say to people who are listening who think, “Well, I’m one person, I can’t make a difference.” What sorts of things would you advise? Here’s some great ideas that you can try wherever you are – whether you’re in Los Angeles, Madison, Wisconsin, or Jackson, Mississippi.
25:39 – Nina Hachigian
This is something interesting I found when I was working at the State Department in the role of Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy – the real interest across the United States in small towns and in big cities in international affairs. At that time we were really focusing on democracy, so we brought groups of mayors and state representatives to Armenia, for example, a new democracy, talking about the role of mayors in democracy.
In terms of citizens, mayors really want your engagement. The more people that are engaged with the city, the stronger the civic fabric is, the more resilient democracy can be. When we have an opportunity to rebuild our democracy and make it better than it has ever been before, it can start in those places where people still feel like they have the right to participate and to have an opinion and to expect responsiveness and transparency and that their rights will be respected. All those citizen expectations are critical.
Check out the events, the volunteer opportunities on your city hall website. That will fortify these democratic spaces that we have now. Whether you’re cleaning a river or tutoring a kid or doing whatever it is that your city or town really needs – that civic engagement is the basis for democracy. The more people pitch in, the stronger the community becomes, and the stronger the democratic space is.
28:04 – Lauren Anderson
That then makes it stronger to withstand any outside forces that would attempt to chip away at that cohesion within the community – and allow people to unite and come together regardless of how they’re voting. The other thing I’ve noticed – when things start happening, good or bad, you usually first see it at those local levels. School boards became the place a few years ago where a lot of the discontent and concerns about certain policies started coming out first. On a federal level, nobody’s thinking about school boards, but they were the first place we started seeing a lot of change.
29:13 – Nina Hachigian
Exactly right. They are sort of the canaries in the coal mine of issues to come.
29:22 – Lauren Anderson
That’s a great phrase. So what gives you hope? You’ve talked about a lot of great things. I love what you’re doing with Allies. What gives you the most hope right now, and what would you say to everybody out there – besides some of the things you’ve talked about – some really concrete ways to be positive and move forward and make their own difference wherever they are?
30:38 – Nina Hachigian
These local leaders give me a lot of hope. They are optimistic, they’re brave, they’re innovative, they’re smart. Mayors are just great. They’re fun, actually – a lot of them. They have to have a good sense of humor because of the assault that they get on a daily basis. And then of course, the young generation – like my kids – give me a ton of hope as well.
Make it a point to try to go see your mayor and try to help. It’s very healing to make a concrete difference in your own community, even if it’s tiny. Host your neighbors for brunch or lunch or breakfast – get to know each other, talk about what’s going on on your block. Does anything need to change on your block? And then you can go from there.
31:55 – Lauren Anderson
Thanks for that. I can’t think of a better way to end. Thank you for sharing those thoughts, those hopes, the optimism, and thank you for all that you’ve done your whole career and what you continue to do with Allies. I’m going to be watching to see what happens, and I’m excited for you as you continue to build both within the U.S. and outward globally. I think you’re filling a really important niche – something that could be expanded that would make things better for everyone.
Thank you so much for being here, Nina. Great conversation.
For everyone else, thanks for listening to the Steady State Sentinel. This is Lauren Anderson. Please keep listening, give us reviews where you can, we welcome input and we welcome two-way conversation – we want to hear what you think. We’ll engage in a dialogue with you and hear about any ideas you might have for future podcasts. This is Lauren Anderson – Still Standing Watch.
32:29 – Nina Hachigian
Thank you.