You were at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in late April. Our readers will be envious. What was that like?

Very special indeed — certainly for a European. I got to attend because I am on the Board of Advisors of FiscalNote, and I was going to be in Washington anyway for the Council’s Spring Executive Conference and meetings with my U.S.-based team. I was at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 2024 as well, and these were two very different events. The 2024 event was with a lot of politicians and celebrities and the traditional roast — then-President Joe Biden — and, of course, an after-dinner speaker. That year it was Colin Jost, who is married to Scarlett Johansson. He joked that he could identify with former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, because every time he walked into a room with his wife, everyone would be looking at her.

And in 2025?

This year was different, but I think there’s something to be said for how the dinner was handled. The White House, as you know, objected to the fact that the comic Amber Ruffin was going to do the after-dinner remarks, so she was canceled — and then President Donald Trump didn’t attend anyway (similar to the first term when he didn’t attend). It had become the so-called “nerd prom” with all the glitz and glamour, but that was very much absent. But again, an argument can be made for the dinner being more about the profession of journalism than about Hollywood and the red carpet. In the end, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is to stand for the freedom of the press, and it is a fundraiser for journalism students. I think this is especially the case at a time when journalists feel beleaguered.

How glamorous was the Council’s Spring Executive Conference?

I’m happy to report that there was no red carpet there either. But there was a lot of thoughtful discussion of the “uncertainty” that organizations feel these days, especially in the first months of the Trump administration. But something that we need to remember is that the instability we’re experiencing did not happen overnight, and it is by no means confined to the U.S. The same thing has been developing in Europe as well, with the erosion of the political middle and the rise of parties on the left and the right for the past 20 years or so. China and the U.S. have been in an increasingly intense systematic rivalry for a decade now. And the COVID crisis and the Russian war in Ukraine have created a lot of uncertainty in the markets and impacted supply chains. So in that sense, the political uncertainty is not new, but perhaps the intensity is. All of this, of course, makes the work we do in public affairs all the more important.

Tell us about your time working as a diplomat.

Sure. I began my career as a diplomat in the Dutch Foreign Service. I was active at the EU and U.N. level in Brussels, Geneva and New York, and was director of communications for the Dutch Minister of European Affairs at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in the Netherlands. People often romanticize the job and think of European diplomacy in terms of royal courts and pageantry and Versailles and all of that. And there is some of that, of course. But the world of diplomacy has changed dramatically even since I began my career. Historically, the role of diplomats was to observe what was going on in another country and report what they observed back home. That aspect of the job is no longer so relevant. When I began my career in 1997, we didn’t have social media. Diplomats don’t need to perform this classical political reporting function the way they once did. Their real function these days is in serving their citizens with consular support, businesses with market access and trade protection, and at a political level analyzing the political drivers and trends.