Former Sen. and Ambassador to Turkey Jeff Flake stood on stage in a divided America and made a case for a political artifact: bipartisanship. In a Tuesday evening conversation with President Julie Kornfeld hosted by the Center for the Study of American Democracy (CSAD) in Archon Auditorium, Flake argued that trust and compromise are not signs of weakness, but rather the essential currency of functional government.
Flake was born and raised in Snowflake, Arizona, named in part after an ancestor of his; he studied international relations for his Bachelor of Arts at Brigham Young University before obtaining a Master of Arts in political science at the same school. After a mission trip to South Africa, Flake worked in public affairs during the ’80s and ’90s. Flake entered the House of Representatives in 2001, representing his home state of Arizona, and in 2013, won one of Senate seats reserved for Arizona, which he held for a single term. He chose not to run for office in 2019. In 2021, he was nominated for an ambassadorship to Turkey — in his own recounting: “When the White House came to me, they said, ‘Would you consider an ambassadorship somewhere?’ I said, ‘Yes, as long as it’s a consequential post, not, you know, just [the] Bahamas or whatever else.’ But then they came out and said [Turkey] and I thought, ‘Well, maybe a little less consequential.’”
Flake always considered himself a conservative Republican, but as of late he has become a figure of bipartisanship for his commitment to civility in government. He was a member of the “Gang of Eight,” made up of four Democrats and four Republicans who co-sponsored an immigration reform bill in 2013. “As soon as I joined the Senate, my colleague, John McCain, a senior senator, came to me and said, ‘Let’s do immigration reform. It’ll be fun,’” Flake recalled. “He lied.”
The bill ultimately failed, but Flake described the process as an exercise in trust that is now rare in Congress. The eight senators, he said, swore a “blood oath” to protect their delicate compromise.
“I had to vote against [amendments] I liked, some I had even introduced in earlier bills,” Flake said. “But I knew if they passed, it would endanger the entire negotiation.”
Early in the discussion, Kornfeld chose to bring up the topic of political violence. This was a personal subject for Flake, who was a member of the 2017 Republican congressional baseball team and was practicing in Alexandria, Virginia, when a man opened fire on the field, shooting four people. Flake reflected on the absurdity of it all for the audience: “What sticks with me more than anything that day was running to the dugout and seeing bullets pitch off the gravel in front of me and thinking, ‘Why? Why us?’ How could somebody look at a bunch of middle-aged men trying to play baseball … and see the enemy?”
To end the discussion, Flake responded to questions from the audience, who pressed him on his policy decisions and foreign policy work. Notably, during his time as ambassador to Turkey, Sweden applied for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Membership required authorization from every member, and Turkey remained a holdout due to Sweden’s history of sheltering members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Coincidentally, this was a major policy position of Kenyon graduate and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme ’48, who maintained a policy of not joining NATO precisely to protect political refugees of the PKK. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Swedish government made joining NATO a priority, and Turkey would not allow Sweden to join until it made constitutional amendments allowing it to restrict the freedom of assembly for terrorist organizations. Flake discussed this among many challenges he faced during his time as an ambassador, and the moral qualms he has had with Turkey’s government led by President Recep Erdoğan. However, he applied the same principles of bipartisanship abroad as he had domestically, and attributed his successes as an ambassador to his ability to compromise, meet people where they are, use trust as a currency and show humility and respect.
In a message to the Collegian, CSAD Associate Marielle Musick ’27 reflected on the talk: “It was an honor to host Jeff Flake. I thought that he was a very engaging and personable speaker. I really appreciated how candid he was about his opinions on bipartisanship. He and President Kornfeld did a fantastic job. “