David Wendt
1944-2026
David Wendt (1944-2026) was the co-founder and founding president of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs.
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David was born in New Jersey in 1944 and raised in Haddonfield. A talented young man from the start, David was the state’s spelling bee champion in 8th grade and an eagle scout by age 13. After winning a national essay competition at age 14, David was sent by Boy’s Life magazine to Switzerland to climb the Matterhorn which he was believed to be the youngest American to climb at the time.  David graduated as his high school class valedictorian.Â
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David attended Harvard, where, as a student of political science, he studied under Henry Kissinger. Between his junior and senior year, David spent a year in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, teaching English. There, young man adventures included swimming with hippos; climbing Mount Kilimanjaro without a guide, and with all of his companions peeling off due to the altitude, finding himself alone at the summit. His friend group in Dar Es Salaam included Eduardo Mondlane, who was the founder of Mozambique’s front for liberation and the nation’s founding father. Returning to Harvard, David graduated Phi Beta Kappa.  After Harvard, David received his doctorate at Columbia, where his thesis advisor was former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
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Over his career, David was involved for over 40 years in building consensus among groups concerned with global issues. As program officer in 1975-76 for "A Declaration of Interdependence," a U.S. bicentennial program of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, he coordinated the annual meetings of a dozen national professional associations around themes of global interdependence. During the 1980s David was responsible for the programs and budget of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in Washington, D.C. The Center's budget more than doubled during this period, growing from $5 million to $12 million.
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As founder and director of the CSIS program on International Economic and Social Development in the 1990s, David developed numerous policy reports addressing key issues of global health, population, and the environment. These reports were based on the discussions of working groups bringing together leaders from diverse sectors. Chairs of these working groups included Rep. Tony Beilenson (D-CA), Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA), Sen. Al Gore (D-TN), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), and Sen. Al Simpson (R-WY).
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The U.S.-Chongqing Task Force in Energy-Environmental Cooperation, developed by David in cooperation with the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), in Seattle, was the forerunner of JHCGA's current U.S.-China Clean Energy Initiative.
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After leaving CSIS in 1998, David served for 8 years as Special Assistant to the President at Idaho State University. In this capacity he had responsibility for developing the University's institutional relationships with universities abroad. In 2002, while still serving in this capacity, he co-founded the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs. He served as President until early 2021.
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David was the intellectual firepower and initial strategist for JHCGA's ongoing work. Â
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He first came to Jackson Hole in the 60's, as head wrangler at the White Grass Ranch.Â
FINAL ESSAY
A New Common Interest
Reflections inspired by a lifetime of thinking on interdependence, psychology, and global affairs
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The greatest mistakes in global affairs rarely begin with bad intentions. They begin with certainty.
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Nations, like individuals, rely on symbols to make sense of the world—sovereignty, security, identity, destiny. These symbols are necessary. But when they harden into unquestioned truths, they become dangerous. History shows that wars are often not the result of unavoidable necessity, but of stories taken too literally, fears left unexamined, and identities confused for destiny.
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At moments of profound uncertainty, societies are often tempted to retreat inward, to defend inherited meanings rather than reconsider them. Yet it is precisely in such moments that a new common interest can emerge—not from the erasure of difference, but from the recognition of shared vulnerability. The search for security, dignity, and continuity is not unique to any one nation. It is a human constant. When acknowledged as such, it can become the basis for cooperation rather than conflict.
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Security, when rooted in fear, tends toward enclosure. Enclosure narrows perception. Narrowed perception forecloses possibility. What begins as a search for safety ends in claustrophobia—political, psychological, and moral. True security, by contrast, emerges not from isolation, but from confidence: the confidence to remain open in a world that cannot be fully controlled.
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Interdependence is not idealism. It is a discipline. It requires imagination, restraint, and the willingness to accept uncertainty without retreating into myth. It is built slowly, through repeated choices, shared risk, and institutions that remember—not triumph, but restraint. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the learned refusal to resolve conflict through force.
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The international system falters when it treats states as purely rational actors and ignores the human psychology that animates them. Nations carry memory. Memory carries trauma. When humiliation becomes institutionalized, it governs unconsciously. Unexamined history does not stay in the past; it becomes policy.
The future, then, is not something we enter freely. It is something we remember ourselves into.
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What offers hope is not dominance, but shared investment in each other’s futures. Not the erasure of difference, but the recognition of mutual vulnerability. Interdependence works when it is understood not as dependence, but as dignity shared across boundaries. In this sense, it becomes a new common interest—one rooted not in uniformity, but in the understanding that stability is something no nation can secure alone.
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The task before us is neither to abandon sovereignty nor to worship it—but to reimagine it as compatible with openness, humility, and cooperation. The courage required today is not the courage to win, but the courage to remain open—to resist the seduction of certainty, to tolerate ambiguity, and to build institutions that reflect our better understanding of ourselves.
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In a world shaped by fear, generosity creates space. In a world driven by memory, reflection creates freedom. And in a time of profound uncertainty, the most radical act may be the refusal to mistake our symbols for reality. It is here, in this refusal, that a new common interest can take root—one grounded in shared restraint, mutual recognition, and the quiet confidence to build a future that none of us can secure alone, but all of us must inhabit together.