The Pentagon Just Declared War on Convening

You can’t lead the world if you’re afraid of the room. And the events industry can’t stay silent while the rooms are being dismantled.

The Pentagon didn’t just cancel appearances. It’s canceling the very idea of open engagement.

Nancy A. Youssef’s recent piece in The Atlantic, titled “Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Is Becoming a Bubble” (August 4, 2025), makes it official: under Defense Secretary Hegseth, the Pentagon is pulling senior military leaders from major strategic convenings like the Aspen Security Forum, Halifax, and Munich. The rationale? These events are said to “undermine the values” of the current administration.

But this isn’t just a Pentagon problem. It’s part of a broader pattern—a chilling shift we’re seeing across multiple corners of government. Thoughtful engagement is being rebranded as risk. Dialogue is being treated as disloyalty. And convening itself—arguably one of the most powerful tools of American influence—is under assault.

This isn’t strategy. It’s shrinkage.

What’s being protected isn’t national security—it’s narrative control.

And when a government starts avoiding rooms it doesn’t control, what it’s really doing is retreating from reality.

I’ve spent decades in the business of convening—across media, diplomacy, and culture. As the founder of BizBash, Washington Dossier, and now GatheringPoint.News, I’ve built platforms to celebrate, analyze, and elevate how we gather—because I don’t just believe in the power of the room. I believe in its necessity. Convening, done right, is how leaders sharpen. It’s how blind spots get exposed before they become failures. It’s how ideas evolve before they ossify into doctrine.

You don’t gather to echo. You gather to expand.

I helped lead the $23 million campaign to endow the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. State Department—an architectural jewel box, yes, but more importantly, a deliberate stage for intellectual engagement. It was created for diplomacy to be both beautiful and dangerous: a place where conflict, contradiction, and perspective could collide under chandeliers instead of on a battlefield.

At one of those events, I watched Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton share the stage for a rare, candid dialogue—two Secretaries of State from vastly different eras engaging not in performance, but in perspective.

And in the middle of that conversation, Kissinger offered a piece of advice that stopped the room and gave me one of my. most important reasons for why I think the event industry is so critical:

“When you’re Secretary of State, you’re drinking from a firehose,” he said. “That’s not when you’re learning—that’s when you’re spending. You have to take the breaks to build your intellectual capital—by studying history, working with academics, attending events, and listening outside your comfort zone—so that when the crisis hits, you’re not running on empty.”

It wasn’t a quiet aside. It was the whole thesis. And it landed with the weight of experience.

Because the firehose moment doesn’t give you time to think. It drains whatever reserves you’ve already built. And if you’ve failed to build them—if you’ve skipped the breaks, skipped the books, skipped the rooms where you might’ve learned something uncomfortable—then you don’t lead under pressure.

You default. You react. Or you fail.

That’s the real danger of what’s happening now.

Some defenders of the policy claim this isn’t about banning thought. Just about avoiding “hostile” venues. Only go to aligned events. Stick to “safe” conversations.

But filtering for ideological comfort isn’t caution.

It’s curated fragility.

And fragility in statecraft is a liability.

Real leaders don’t wait for consensus. They face dissent, absorb complexity, and recalibrate with clarity. If you’ve never had your assumptions tested, how can you claim to be prepared?

Global forums like Aspen aren’t junkets. They’re rehearsal rooms. They’re where you hear the friction, not the feedback. They’re where you pick up weak signals before they’re headlines. They’re where future crises whisper before they roar.

To pull people out of those rooms is to pull them out of their own situational awareness.

To do it across government is to embrace a strategic blackout.

And if the justification shifts—as it often does—from ideology to budget optics? That doesn’t hold either.

Some critics will say conferences are too expensive. That sending leaders to Aspen or Munich is a waste of taxpayer money. But that argument has been debunked by history—twice in recent memory.

After the 2008 financial crash, when travel and conference budgets were slashed, the cost wasn’t just missed meetings—it was a collapse in cohesion. Teams drifted. Agencies lost alignment. People stopped knowing who was in their world, and critical coordination suffered.

We saw it again during the pandemic. A generation of decision-makers made high-stakes choices in total isolation—disconnected from informal networks, missing context, unaware of who was still in the room or who’d left entirely. The strategy gap wasn’t technical. It was relational.

And when leaders stop knowing each other, everything slows down, breaks down, or blows up.

Conferences, meetings, conventions and premium gatherings don’t just deliver content. They deliver context. They compress timelines. They forge familiarity. They prevent the fragmentation that turns operational silos into strategic blind spots.

What’s expensive is isolation.

What’s wasteful is forgetting how to work together.

What’s dangerous is budgeting for optics instead of outcomes.

Smart convening doesn’t cost us. It saves us.

What scares me most isn’t that the Pentagon pulled its leaders out of Aspen.

It’s that across Washington, fewer and fewer decision-makers even see the value in being there in the first place.

So let me say it plainly: when a country stops gathering, it stops leading.

When we close the doors to disagreement, we close the pipeline to strategy.

Let the generals go to Aspen.

Let the thinkers go where the friction is.

Let the leaders re-enter the rooms where something unpredictable might happen.

Because unpredictability is not the enemy.

Stagnation is.