Getting Out There in 2025: Foreign Policy Lessons From Global Atlanta’s Reporting in Four Countries 

When we covered the establishment of the city’s international affairs office more than a decade ago, Kasim Reed, the mayor at the time, always said: “You can’t sell Atlanta from 55 Trinity Avenue.” 

The city’s leaders, he believed, needed to get beyond City Hall, out into the world, where they could present its charms to investors and visitors at the point of decision — before they’d selected some other, better-known locale.  

The same can be said for Global Atlanta: we can’t cover the impacts of the global economy from our digs on Auburn Avenue, or even by sticking in the metro alone. First, we need to get out around the state to see the ripple effects of major foreign manufacturing investments, and, sometimes, to escape the city’s echo chamber of boosterism. 

Beyond that, we look for the ground truth that comes only from seeing, feeling, touching a place, as well as nailing down impactful interviews with top officials that may be hard to come by back home. 

I’ve been privileged to work in about 30 countries for our publication over many years, some of them more than once, and I’m consistently amazed at the openness of foreign leaders to a journalist from little ol’ Atlanta. 

These trips yet again reminded me that with intentionality and the right relationships, any of us can make waves in the big, wide world.

Trevor williams, managing editor

I don’t let it get to my head: I understand that they’re drawn more by the growing economic and political heft of our city and the surrounding region than by me personally. But it’s still satisfying, after more than a decade hearing leaders bemoan relative global ignorance about our city, to now see their interlocutors clamoring to be sure they get a piece of the action.

This year’s travels took me to four countries, mostly in Asia, where I was able to put Atlanta front-and-center for people like S. Jaishankar, India’s minister of external affairs, whom I interviewed many years ago at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, as well as India’s vice president. 

In Taiwan, alongside a bevy of visiting journalists, I met with the foreign minister and his deputy; the latter agreed to a brief interview that I conducted back at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a pin marking the TECO office in Atlanta on the huge world map behind him. 

In Japan, funnily enough, I was able to sit down for a half-hour interview with Gov. Brian Kemp, who was traveling in the region on a business mission, first to South Korea and then to the annual SEUS-Japan conference in Tokyo. At a later dinner, to my surprise, I sat across from the chair of YKK Corp., a huge Japanese company with a deep half-century of history in Georgia. 

These trips underscored what I’ve long known — that, even doing this every day, we still barely understand the breadth and depth of the city’s international connections, which carry import for millions of people around my home state.

They also yet again reminded me that with intentionality and the right relationships, any of us can make waves in the big, wide world. That’s what we will continue to do in 2026. 

JUMP TO: India | Czech | Taiwan | Japan

India — A Timely Fellowship

I remember exactly where I was, standing on the steps at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, wiping sweat from my brow as our cohort awaited a photo op with the housing minister, when I heard that the hostilities between India and Pakistan had ended. 

Word came in the form of an alert on my phone: The Wall Street Journal announced, in typically U.S.-centric fashion, that President Trump was claiming, via social media, to have mediated the dispute.   

The idea seemed laughable given what we’d been hearing from a parade of scholars and top thinkers in a deeply enriching program organized by the India Foundation. 

They presented a self-assured India, a civilizational state comprising one-fifth of humanity and the world’s largest democracy, striding onto the international scene with increasing confidence. While open to deeper partnerships with the U.S., India’s modus operandi was “strategic autonomy.” Traditional alliances, with their mutual assurances and resulting encumbrances, seemed too constraining for a power now coming into its own.

Before India launched airstrikes into Pakistani territory, we’d listened as speakers from the conservative-leaning, Hindutva-promoting foundation gave us the philosophical underpinnings of India’s foreign policy, shot through with post-colonial skepticism of multilateral institutions and a sense that interests, not ideals, have always guided global affairs, despite platitudes.

And Pakistan? Well, its economy was more than 10 times smaller than India’s. Yes, it held nuclear weapons, but so did India. And the time for the “nuclear blackmail” — escalation fears stymying India’s willingness to strike back — was over after the brutal Pahalgam terror attacks of April in India-controlled Kashmir. 

Absorbing this wave of academic confidence, I have to say that the idea that the U.S., even as a superpower, could directly influence India’s decision to let up, seemed over-confident at the very least. India continues to deny that Mr. Trump (or China’s Xi Jinping) had any substantive influence on its decision to halt Operation Sindoor. 

However the flareup ended, I was relieved to be able to fly home at the end of the weeklong fellowship, though our plane did take the long way out over the Indian Ocean to avoid crossing into Pakistani airspace. 

Later that same month, we brought this context home when we hosted a Consular Conversation luncheon at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce featuring Consul General Ramesh Babu Lakshmanan. The event drew more than 100 guests. See the recap here

Czech Republic — A Dispatch

If 2024 was the year for laying the foundation, 2025 was when the Czech Republic cashed in on its growing interest in Georgia, building investment momentum that should continue into this year. 

In January, we worked with Monika Vintrlikova, the Czech honorary consul, to welcome Ambassador Miloslav Stašek to Atlanta for a briefing at the law offices of our partners at Arnall Golden Gregory. Mr. Stašek is now a regular in the state.

I followed this up with a trip in June, where I attended a smart-cities conference in Brno alongside a delegation from Curiosity Lab. This trip was part of a product we call a Dispatch, where we conduct an on-the-ground reporting trip, paired with an event, to drive a deep conversation locally about the country in question. The new Czech Business Incubator Atlanta in Peachtree Corners, visited by the Czech minister of transport weeks before I saw him at the Urbis show in Brno, underwrote my reporting trip. 

In five days, I crisscrossed the country visiting manufacturing plants in automotive, plastics, aerospace, motors and beyond, racking up miles in trains, friends’ cars and rented taxis to notch visits to the three largest cities of the Czech Republic — Prague, Brno and Ostrava. I also visited Pardubice, Velka Bites and other out-of-the-way places home to factories that are making waves in Georgia. 

In Prague, I was made to feel like part of the team at PrimeRevenue, the Atlanta-based supply chain finance platform whose CEO, PJ Bain, spoke at our briefing about the advantages of setting up shop in Prague, a cosmopolitan capital swarmed with tourists during the two days I was there. 

With the stories still forthcoming, I’ll leave it there, but suffice to say that Honorary Consul Vintrlikova and her husband, Jan, the proprietors of Albaform in Flowery Branch, are consummate hosts and tireless promoters of their adoptive home state. 

Case in point: Later in the year, they hosted a delegation from Georgia, headlined by Fulton County, at the MSV Industrial Engineering Fair, Central Europe’s largest such exhibition, also in Brno. The effects from all this activity are starting to ripple out and should extend even further in 2026. 

Taiwan — Another Trade Focused Press Trip

During a welcome lunch with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ top spokesperson for the foreign press, a small-world moment unfolded of a kind that has become familiar for me wherever I am around the globe. 

Janet Chang, who just came off a stint as Taiwan’s ambassador to Finland, heard that I was from Atlanta and leaned over to talk to me about her stint in the city in the early 2000s, before I started as a young reporter at Global Atlanta. Her children, it turns out, went to school a few blocks from the one my boys now attend. 

Atlanta, it seems, has a growing gravity in international affairs, and the diplomatic offices here, some now established for 50 years or more, continue to pay dividends in fostering awareness and relational synapses around the world. 

The rest of the trip, a press itinerary arranged by the ministry, was decidedly less focused on Atlanta. Instead, we got access to top officials and think tanks to focus on Taiwan’s diplomacy in this critical moment for global supply chains. 

As I walked the floor at SemiCon, which drew 100,000 industry leaders to Taipei, it was much easier to envision semiconductors as the island’s crown jewels, an insurance policy against Chinese invasion. Taiwan controls about 90 percent of the manufacturing capacity for the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Some call this concentration the Silicon Shield — the idea that other powers like the U.S. would intervene in a conflict to safeguard their own economic interests, given the value of chips to industries from cars to defense. 

What was clear in our discussions, including with Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung, was that Taiwan sees itself as needing to showcase not only its cultural and symbolic value as a thriving democracy, but its practical value to the world.

After what played out in Venezuela this past weekend, I think that argument has even more validity. The U.S. seems to have jettisoned fostering democracy as an animating principle in foreign affairs, instead prioritizing hard-nosed economic and national security interests. 

Just before I got on my plane, the massive ICE raid took place at the Hyundai plant in Georgia. While it ensnared mostly Korean nationals, the news splashed across TV screens all over Asia. Taiwanese officials told me they weren’t concerned about what this would mean for the engineers that would be required to get access to the U.S. to commission TSMC’s semiconductor fabs in Arizona. Business leaders said the opposite; it was clear the move had cast a pall over investments from the region.

Beyond the formal program, I only had one day of exploration, which I used mostly trying unsuccessfully to go to a baseball game. Taiwan’s home run king, Ngayaw Ake (Lin Chih-sheng), was retiring on the day I visited, and the game where he belted his final home run of his career, No. 305, was sold out, leaving me stuck outside the entry gates at the Taipei Dome. 

Read our report: Taiwan’s Trump Trade Dilemma: When $165B in Semiconductor Investment Isn’t Enough

Japan — Relationship Reporting Amid Trump, Kemp Visits

The SEUS-Japan conference isn’t a cheap ticket, but if you can get it, it’s a great way to meet those influencing the trajectory of the U.S.-Japan investment relationship in a significant way. 

The annual conclave, which for nearly 50 years has alternated between Tokyo and various states in the South (Nashville’s up next year), highlights a partnership that has brought some 1,500 Japanese companies to the region, resulting in hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans. 

I was fortunate enough to have a few benefactors to underwrite my coverage of the conference, which this year was as timely as ever. (Thanks to NFP, Bob Johnson at Baker Donelson, Kajima and the Atlanta Metro Export Challenge for the support!) 

As we arrived in Japan, Mr. Trump also touched down. He met with Sanae Takaichi, the newly installed prime minister, the first woman to take up the role, with the goal of hammering out a trade framework. Japanese companies, especially the automotive manufacturers and parts suppliers in the South, were wringing their hands over stacked tariffs on cars, parts and steel, as well as the reciprocal tariffs that Mr. Trump had installed earlier in the year. Costs were rising, as were questions about Mr. Trump’s loyalty to the top U.S. ally in Asia. For decades, Japan has done everything “right” — localizing production in the U.S., creating jobs at a rapid clip. The relationship has become symbiotic.

Yet Mr. Trump has still decried the overall trade deficit and the pronounced imbalance in industries like cars. In a masterstroke of trade theater, Ms. Takaichi reportedly had a Ford F-150 waiting for Mr. Trump when he arrived, the massive truck cutting a striking figure on Japan’s narrow streets. Japan got its rate reduced to 15 percent, and Mr. Trump could claim his leverage produced future Japanese investments (although the details remain muddy).

Very little of this was explicitly talked about at the conference, which in true Japanese fashion left it to be detected in the undercurrents of discussion over partnership, friendship and cooperation. 

Those themes were evidenced in pre-conference company visits to companies like Bridgestone, the golf ball and tire manufacturer with an outsized role in hosting the conference, and Shimizu, the construction giant. Walking the halls of Shimizu’s innovation center, I ran into Japan’s new consul general in Atlanta, Kenichi Matsuda. 

But the ultimate highlight of the trip for me came in the moments with Georgia’s delegation, including a half-hour sit-down with Gov. Brian Kemp, where I was able to ask him all my burning questions on the ICE raids, electric vehicles and more, including why it has taken him until well into his second term to visit Japan, Georgia’s top investor by jobs created, with more than $8.2 billion in investment stock in the state alone. Read the full interview here

See all of our SEUS-Japan coverage, sponsored by NFP, here. 

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