“What do we owe each other?” This question, notably the University of Notre Dame's 2024-2025 annual forum theme, does more than encapsulate a worldwide debate; it cuts to the very architecture of international alliance, mutual obligation, and the shared commitments that uphold democratic partnership. It is a question that has occupied political philosophers, statesmen, and ordinary citizens alike, and one that takes on particular resonance in an era defined by the simultaneous fragility and necessity of multilateral cooperation. It is precisely this tension between national interest and shared responsibility that framed my experience at the 2025 NATO Youth Summit.
This article offers my remarks and reflections on the summit one year after its completion, examining not only its implications for my personal development, but situating those reflections within the context of an ever-shifting geopolitical landscape that has, in many ways, made the question of what we owe one another more urgent than ever.
In early April of 2025, an unexpected email arrived in my inbox from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: an invitation to attend the 2025 NATO Youth Summit in person, in Budva, Montenegro. The summit took place at a pivotal moment for the alliance, one in which questions about the future of transatlantic cooperation, the durability of collective defense commitments, and the broader framework of democratic governance were very much alive. I found myself aware not only of those larger currents, but of the particular weight that comes with representing a country whose relationship with multilateralism has always been, to some degree, a subject of ongoing national debate.
As an undergraduate fellow of the Nanovic Institute of European Studies, the O'Brien Notre Dame International Security Center, and the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, I recognized the opportunity for its singular engagement, a rare convergence of everything I had been studying, now unfolding in real time and in person.
My journey to Budva began in the early hours of Wednesday, April 20th: departing at four in the morning, connecting through Chicago O’Hare, then Istanbul, before finally landing in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital. From there, NATO representatives shuttled groups of summit attendees along the Adriatic coast to Budva. It was somewhere on that drive when the weight of the experience and representation of my nation began to settle in. I’ll admit my initial headspace was not entirely geopolitical. Somewhere between my jet lag and anticipation, I was acutely aware that I was missing my residential hall’s spring formal and that final exams were less than a week away.
My fellow van passenger, however, offered an immediate and humbling sense of proportion: she was a Ukrainian soldier who had been granted special permission to leave Kyiv for the weekend, traveling to Budva to advocate for her country’s continued security interests on an international stage. This contrast was not lost on me. My position was one of academic curiosity and diplomatic privilege, and hers was one of lived urgency and unwavering purpose. Before the summit had even commenced, the distance between academic inquiry and lived reality had already collapsed, and the forum’s central question of reciprocal obligation became something I could feel rather than simply argue.
The three days that ensued were among the most formative of my life. Attendees represented a remarkably diverse range of nationalities, extending well beyond NATO’s member states, with a particular emphasis on delegates from the Balkan and Caucasus regions. The conference also drew a noticeable cohort of digital content creators, reflecting NATO’s broader effort to engage younger, public-facing voices in the alliance’s communication strategy. Panels addressed topics that were both timely and substantive, such as the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, the role of artificial intelligence in cyberwarfare, emerging frontiers of space exploration, and the state of democracy as a lived principle of governance rather than a static ideal.
The networking booths offered an equally rich dimension, connecting delegates with representatives from member states, partner organizations, and civil society groups in an environment where formal diplomacy and candid conversation occupied the same space. Taken together, the summit felt less like a ceremonial exercise and more like a genuine forum for exchange across lines of nationality, experience, and perspective.
Navigating the summit as one of the few American delegates carried its own complexity. With noticeable shifts in foreign policy, notably the revival of tariffs, April of 2025 was not an uncomplicated moment to represent the United States on an international stage. For a nation so central to NATO’s founding and continued operation, the American delegation and featured panelists were both, I found, strikingly thin, a fact that was not lost on fellow attendees. There were moments where I found myself in the unfamiliar position of defending not specific policies, but the underlying continuity of American commitment to the alliance, affirming peers that the institutional relationships, the shared values, and the mutual obligations that NATO embodies were not as malleable as headlines might suggest.
What struck me, however, was that fellow delegates were less interested in relitigating political developments than in understanding the American people beyond them. The questions I received were genuine and searching, covering everything from civil society and university life to how ordinary Americans understood their place in the world. What the summit offered, in that sense, was something formal diplomacy rarely makes room for: representing a country not strictly through its government's positions, but through the texture of lived experience and honest dialogue. Whatever the external complexity of the moment, I never lost sight of the privilege it was to be there as an American and the profound responsibility of representing my country in this capacity. I left those exchanges with a clearer sense that the alliance’s durability rests as much on those moments of honest dialogue as on any formal commitment.
One year later, the summit’s legacy is one I’ve continued to sit with. I’ve learned recently that the future of the NATO Youth Summit is uncertain. A casualty, it seems, of broader budgetary restructuring within the alliance. That news carries a particular weight for me, not only out of personal fondness of the experience, but because I witnessed firsthand what that forum made possible: an element of cross-cultural, candid exchange that no policy brief or article can emulate. I’ve found that what it means to represent one’s country is less of a conclusion than an ongoing question, and one that has quietly shaped how I read the news, how I engage with my academic work, and how I think about my own responsibilities as a citizen. In writing this reflection, I find myself drawn to our University’s most recent forum theme: “Cultivating Hope.”
There may not have been a youth summit this year, but the conversations it generated between a Notre Dame undergraduate and a Ukrainian soldier, between those insulated from conflict and those living inside it, between the present moment and the one we are collectively responsible for, do not require an institution to continue. They only require the willingness to keep asking what we owe each other, and the conviction that the answer still matters.