Erin Petrey

Dec 02, 2025

Today, I am honored to be endorsed by the Alliance for American Leadership. And this is why it is so important to me.

The Trump administration has been on the warpath against diplomacy. And it is a dangerous mistake. As the sayings go, “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” and “why use salt when sugar will do?” Why spend billions on new fighter jets (that we don’t need, btw, different topic) and recruiting brave Americans to serve as cannon fodder in a lunatic’s capricious acts of bellicosity when we can spend millions for a greater return with diplomatic efforts, and save lives?

The Alliance for American Leadership is a bipartisan coalition dedicated to restoring American leadership through smart, strategic, and effective international assistance. I laud their dedication to this cause and our philosophies of American international power are aligned. Beyond this, I see no difference in how we engage at home and abroad: we must treat each other with humanity, ensure basic needs are met, and come together through constructive conversations rather than pointing guns and deploying troops. Violence is never the answer; but kindness and compassion always are.

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The Lifelong Diplomat

Growing up, I was lucky to have parents who were eager to show my sister and I the world. They wanted us to understand the importance of events and people and cultures that existed beyond the bounds of our farm in Anderson County. I was also a voracious reader of geography and history, even penning my own world atlas at age 8. (It was not very good but the effort was there!)

My first trip to DC in 1993

I continued to grow my appreciation for America’s vital role as a world leader through the growth of soft power over hard power - aka diplomacy, trade, and aid instead of guns and war. In high school at Henry Clay (a Fayette County public school), I was President of our Model United Nations club for 3 years, representing countries including Sweden and Myanmar. I loved immersing myself into other countries’ motives, histories, and customs to better understand my own country and culture, and how the world really tuns.

Even 15-year-old Erin knew the power of diplomacy (from the Henry Clay yearbook)

In Mr. Logsdon’s English class Freshman year, we were asked to make vision boards for our future. I vividly remember printing and pasting the seal of the Department of State right in the middle. I wanted to be a diplomat; that was the ultimate for me. I wanted to do nothing more than spread the word of how amazing America and our democracy was around the world and build goodwill in every corner of the globe.

My senior year at Henry Clay, I was part of our external mentorship program and I sought out the guidance of Dr. John Stempel, a legend in the diplomatic community who served during the Iranian Revolution in Tehran and was a former director of my later-to-be alma mater, the Patterson School of Diplomacy. In that project, I explored the history and challenges of democracy in Iraq. Little did I know I would be a student of his only a few years later and help him with the re-release of his book, Inside the Iranian Revolution.

In college, I studied International Affairs and Anthropology at The George Washington University. While there, I learned not only the importance of traditional statecraft and defense policy, but why it is so important to understand human rights and culture. It was an incredible experience, and not just because my freshman dorm was only a few blocks from the White House. As I made my way to class, I would walk next to professionals heading into the World Bank, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank, all neighbors of our campus. I studied abroad in an immersion program in Madrid, Spain, honing my Spanish skills but also learning how other cultures approach different issues. When I got back from Spain, I interned at an organization dedicated to facilitating international business exchanges through the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, one of the federal programs Trump put intensified scrutiny on in his war on diplomacy.

Graduation from The George Washington University

I knew I wanted to continue my education and only one institution was on my list for my advanced studies: the Patterson School. Sure, I could go explore attending Georgetown or Tufts or Northeastern, but Kentucky is where I wanted to return. Patterson felt right. And it was right.

The Patterson School of Diplomacy was the fountainhead of my academic and professional interests in international affairs and diplomacy and I believe it only fitting that it also be the source of the culmination of my formal education in the discipline. I truly love studying and learning of the intricate ways our world functions on an internationally political and diplomatic level and know that my zeal and personal ideas will greatly contribute to the Patterson School in many ways, and I will enjoy doing so more than anything. -Erin’s career goals from her Patterson application

21-year-old Erin in the Department of State Press Briefing Room on our Patterson Spring trip

I dove deeply into topics from energy security to defense statecraft to cross-cultural negotiations. I was hooked. I interned over the summer at the Kentucky World Trade Center in downtown Lexington, a place I interned during my senior year in high school, so it was a bit of a homecoming. (That didn't pay so I supplemented it with long nights as a waitress at Atomic Cafe, RIP.)

I passed my comprehensive exams with a High Pass and graduated as a class leader. I couldn’t wait to take my first FSOT (the test for aspiring foreign service officers). But once I graduated, we were deep into the Great Recession and jobs were few and far between across the country. So I looked beyond our borders, and left to take a public school teaching gig as part of a cultural exchange program in Daegu, South Korea, a city I couldn’t find anything on in 2009 Google world. But that is a story for another time.

Return to Washington

Returning from Korea - and after months of hard work and non-stop networking - I landed my first big job as Special Assistant to the Ambassador of Libya. I was charged with facilitating the re-establishment of official relations between the post-revolutionary Government of Libya and the United States from within the Libyan foreign mission. It was hard. It was new. But it was amazing.

I worked closely with liaisons from across the U.S. Government: from State to Defense to Congress to the White House to Diplomatic Security to the Secret Service. And it was my job to organize the first post-revolutionary Prime Ministerial mission from Libya after the revolution. So I coordinated with the Obama White House and the rest of the government to ensure this trip was a success. And it was. Plus, I got to ride in a motorcade!

At Libyan National Day 2012

I’ve done many things since then: from exporting U.S. goods and services overseas with the Export-Import Bank to building ports and plants through the Southeast U.S. to making Amazon’s data center sustainability reporting more transparent. But I always did it with one thing in mind: to make the lives of people around the globe better. I’m a stalwart supporter of causes in my backyard but we must never forget those across the ocean who look to us as the leaders of the free world. Though we have our daily problems, we must remember that as Americans, we come from such a privileged place of just being American.

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The Way Forward

America was once a beacon of hope in so many ways, and the saver of millions of lives in many more. The work of USAID is estimated to have saved 92 million lives over 20 years. This is through providing access to basic vaccines, antiretrovirals, and even antibiotics to those in countries without access. And you might ask: why should I care when I have my own problems here at home? Well, diseases - as we acutely experienced from COVID - have a way of traveling across borders. The more work we do to prevent the spread of preventable and curable diseases like malaria, HIV, and polio, the better and healthier our own children and people are. And beyond that, it is just the right thing to do.

My heart breaks when I read numbers that the Trump administration’s shuttering of USAID has led to the death of over 600,000 people. That is almost two Lexingtons worth of people. Gone. But their deaths were preventable.

So that is why I am dedicated to restoring the vital work of the Department of State, USAID, U.S. Institute of Peace, and other vital programs that work to build soft power across the globe. The more we invest in diplomacy, the less we must invest in the tools of defense and war. America should be a beacon of hope and freedom; not a cudgel of hate and authoritarianism. We should be building bridges not walls. We should be saving lives, not cutting them short. And we should be doing that both here at home and abroad.

As the world’s richest country, we also have a duty to help those with less. Foreign aid - especially in the form of food and medicine - must be restored. As John F. Kennedy said when he created USAID, it is both our moral and economic obligation to help those less fortunate. If we don’t, someone else - like China - will.

So thank you to the Alliance for American Leadership for believing in me and endorsing my campaign. Forward.

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