The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, fascinations, encounters, observations, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them.
They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns. Many of these stories eventually find their way into the book — others insist on staying a little wild.
Stay tuned. The road is still unfolding.
NATO and the Street
Not exactly the stage I pictured for the finale of my consultant career – if I ever pictured one at all. And yet there I was, stepping out of the Arab Spring straight into the NATO headquarters in Brussels, a fortress of 28 nations. What did I bring to the table? Network theory, a crowd of activists and ordinary people NATO would never have access to, fresh memories of individuals risking everything for freedom, and the audacity to believe I might leave a mark on a machine built to resist change.
I didn’t know it then, but NATO would be my final official paycheck. There’s a certain delicious absurdity in the timing, a dark comedy in the choice of stage. Maybe it was meant to be this way – the universe’s subtle way of saying: Enough. Stop. Move on.
Two Women, Two Systems, One Conversation
In the late spring of 2011 – still cold at night, but warm and sunny by day – Kabul felt like a city of ghosts and gates. I was with a Dutch NGO, working to bring mobile learning to remote areas. We stayed on the Oxfam campus, which led the project, living under the heavy shadow of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Every movement was a tactical operation: codenames, gate protocols, armored cars. The most agonizing part wasn’t the danger; it was the smell. Just next door, a vendor sold Periki – golden, crispy flatbread stuffed with potatoes and cilantro. I could smell the chili and green onions on the breeze, but the security protocol meant I couldn’t walk ten feet to buy one. I was a prisoner of ‘protection.’
At the DLD_women conference later this year in Munich, I crossed paths with Stefanie Babst. She was Head of Public Diplomacy at NATO at the time, having just returned from a NATO mission in Afghanistan. We sat down to talk amidst the quiet, curated halls of an art museum – a surreal backdrop for two women dissecting the mechanics of a war zone. The stillness of the art felt unreal, a stark contrast to the ghosts and dust of Kabul that seemed to follow us.
Surrounded by art, our conversation quickly shed its formal skin. We spoke with a bluntness that bypassed diplomatic niceties: about the daily reality for women in Afghanistan, and Stefanie mentioned the looming NATO Summit in Chicago in May 2012, where President Obama would take center stage. It was a strange juxtaposition – and for a moment these pieces of art felt like an absurd bridge between the unpolished truth of life on the ground in Afghanistan and the inner sanctums of a global power, the NATO.
Stefanie and I obviously had very different backgrounds. My image of a high-ranking NATO official was a person of ironed-out opinions and impenetrable formality – the human equivalent of a fortress. But Stefanie defied the caricature. She was candid where I expected caution, and curious where I expected complacency. It was jarring to find an insider so willing to question the very architecture she inhabited. Perhaps she could afford this radical honesty because she was already an anomaly — a woman operating at the highest, most testosterone-heavy levels of a military machine that still struggled to speak to anyone without a rank on their shoulder. This unexpected openness acted as a bridge; she was drawn to my network of activists in the Middle East, and I was drawn to the curiosity of her personality.
She invited me to Brussels for an interview.
The Inner Sanctum
A few weeks later, I arrived in Brussels under a curtain of relentless rain. The sky was a cold, wet slate, with strong winds lashing at my coat as I approached NATO Headquarters. This was no ordinary office check-in; it was a transition into a high-security vacuum. No laptops, no phones, every bag meticulously scanned, every ID scrutinized. The air pulsed with a quiet, sterile tension.
Once cleared, I was instructed to walk across the campus to another building. Inside, a colleague of Stefanie’s led me through a maze of low-rise wings. It felt like a ghost town divided into silent ‘quartiers.’ Some hallways were modern and bright; others were dim, oppressive corridors lined with heavy, characterless doors. There was no trace of spontaneity here – no breakout corners, no signs of the collaborative life I was used to. Everything was compartmentalized and closed off.
The architecture is the message, I thought: Power is structure. Order is absolute. Spontaneity is a security risk.
Finally, we reached Stefanie’s office, and the atmosphere shifted. The room was spacious and polished, clearly designed to carry the gravity of high-level diplomacy, yet it didn’t feel like a cell. Alongside the formality, there was a personal touch – shelves lined with artifacts and souvenirs from her travels that whispered of a world beyond these reinforced walls. These small objects served as a ‘humanizing’ counter-narrative to the institution.
Stefanie greeted me with a genuine, bright smile that cut right through the lingering chill of the rain. She radiated a warmth that made me feel truly welcome, rather than ‘processed’ – like at the main entrance. There was a practiced grace to her – a poise polished by years of routine – yet it lacked the mechanical coldness I’d felt in the hallways. She truly was mastering a delicate balance: She carried the authority of a high-ranking official with a disarming sincerity. It was public diplomacy with a heartbeat.
The Architecture of ‘We’
As we settled into our conversation, I carefully outlined the essence of my mission: For this interview I wanted to explore her vision for bridging two alien worlds: NATO and my network. I described my ‘crowd’ as a constellation of activists and rather left-leaning intellectuals who lived far outside the usual strategic circles of NATO – and proposed a wider dialogue. I called it “enhancing the ‘We’ of NATO”: an alliance that listened as much as it led.
Stefanie leaned in, defining the foundational ‘We’ of NATO as a collective of like-minded democracies committed to shared values, evolved from a Cold War relic into a broader, interconnected network of 28 nations. Then, she let the mask slip with a sharp, unexpected laugh. “Very often, these approaches are just words on paper,” she admitted. “They’re hardly ever practiced – mainly because of a lack of leadership. Everyone is looking after their own interests.”
I wondered if the laughter was a way of checking if she had spoken too freely – or if she was simply acknowledging the absurdity of the machine she inhabited. Either way, her boldness was a whiff of fresh air in that pressurized building.
When I asked for a defining ‘We-moment’ at NATO, she pointed right away to to 9/11. She described the immediate, unquestioned unity of invoking Article 5 – the “attack on one is an attack on all” oath. But she was equally candid about the fracture that followed, when the consensus dissolved in the dust of the Iraq invasion.
Her vision for a ‘Greater We’ within NATO went beyond military partners to include the very people NATO’s boots were treading upon. She argued that every operation needed a civil component – specialists who could build trust with locals and NGOs. Just what I was witnessing in Egypt as well. She was refreshingly honest about NATO’s failures in the Balkans, framing them as scars that became lessons.
When I asked how far NATO had actually progressed in these ‘human’ skills, she didn’t give me a PR answer. “We’re just starting,” she said. “Five years ago, these steps were unthinkable.”
With that interview Stefanie earned my trust. Her willingness to stand in the shadow of the institution’s past while reaching for a different future was convincing. I left Brussels with a new, complicated ‘feeling’ for NATO. It wasn’t that I suddenly believed in the machine, but I finally believed in the person trying to find its heart.
Puncturing the Bubble: The Birth of we_NATO
Our interview became the blueprint for we_NATO – an online platform we designed to puncture the organization’s bubble for the NATO Summit in 2012 in Chicago. Before our conversation, Stefanie had only a vague idea of how she wanted the summit to be prepared and presented to the world. Now, a framework was finally shaping into a plan. She grew increasingly determined to bridge the gap between her world and mine, preparing for a move that was, in NATO’s buttoned-up history, a radical departure.
Over the following weeks, I teamed up with a member of her staff to flesh out the concept for we_NATO.org. The core idea was deceptively simple: Connect NATO officials with outside experts, critics, and activists who could bring fresh, unfiltered perspectives to the summit’s high-profile topics such as Afghanistan, Russia, and the Middle East.
“Why don’t we use open, interactive formats?” I suggested this during one of our brainstorming sessions. “We could host live video chats with network thinkers like Joi Ito from MIT or David Weinberger. These people understand how the digital world breathes; they’ll spark conversations your NATO people aren’t used to having.”
Stefanie’s colleague paused, her pen hovering. “That’s bold. Do you really think they’d participate?”
“I’ll leverage my network if you leverage yours,” I replied with a grin. “Let’s aim high. Let’s get Secretary General Rasmussen on a live stream. Let’s bring in external experts to challenge NATO’s positions on drone use – right out in the open.”
She tapped her pen on the table, the gears turning. “What about personal stories? Frontline troops, for example?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Unfiltered experiences. We should include Afghan women, Middle Eastern activists discussing new collaborations, and real-time discussions with the public.”
We spent several sessions refining the vision, stripping away the diplomatic jargon to find the human core. By November 2011, Stefanie and her team gave me the green light to lead the initiative. We had six months until Chicago to see if the sapling could actually grow in the fortress.
A Deal with the Devil?
The choice was finally mine to make: seize the opportunity and take this job or let it pass.
As the NATO offer sat before me, it forced a final, sharp confrontation between my corporate past and my newly discovered purpose of work. I found myself grappling with whether I could remain true to my beliefs about global justice while embedded within the world’s largest military alliance, or if I was simply finding a sophisticated, professional way to dress up a sell-out.
Having witnessed Tahrir Square, I was haunted by the fear that I might be compromising the very soul I had reclaimed, trading the raw agency of the streets for a seat at the table of the old guard. I had to face the uncomfortable question of whether I could actually influence such a rigid system from within, or if strategic impact was just the latest hype I was using to justify returning to a world of power and hierarchy.
These questions followed me into late-night chats with my peers, leading us into murky, uncomfortable territory where ideals collided with reality. Where was the line? Some responses were blunt: “No, you can’t work with them.” Others were more nuanced: “Go and see what you can learn.” None of it offered clarity. It was a friction that refused to be smoothed over.
Eventually, I said yes. Despite my skepticism, I believed in the possibility of building something from the inside – something small, but real. I knew about the risks – but I was determined to rally my network of activists and critics, bringing them into an experiment that could bridge the gap between military high command and the people on the ground.
I wanted to see if we could spark conversations that usually weren’t allowed – a broader sense of ‘We’ that might actually reduce the distance between sides.
Culture Clash: The Script versus The Street
As we moved forward, it quickly became clear that we_NATO was a head-on collision between two incompatible worlds. We were attempting to graft the decentralized energy of grassroots activism onto the most rigid military hierarchy on the planet.
NATO was a finely tuned machine – predictable, top-down, and allergic to spontaneity. In their world, every action followed a chain of command where failure was a liability to be eliminated. In my world, failure was a necessity for growth. This tension became the defining feature of our work, testing the patience of everyone involved.
By early 2012, the weight of the task felt immense. Our interactive formats demanded a total surrender of control. On the open web, you don’t get to curate your answers or hide behind 48-hour approval loops. Real-time engagement requires an authentic, uncensored voice, yet NATO’s DNA was programmed for absolute message discipline. We were asking staff members to stop waiting for permission and start acting as individuals. It was empowering, but for a hierarchy built on ‘need-to-know’ principles, it was an existential threat.
The logistical hurdles were just as steep. Our team was a patchwork of members from different departments, many of whom reported to superiors who viewed interactive dialogue as a security breach. Stefanie spent her days fighting for her team’s autonomy, pushing against an internal onslaught of skepticism that never quite receded.
To prepare the team, I brought in Peter Kruse to map out the friction between hierarchies and networks, but we were all painfully aware that theory only goes so far. As the launch date loomed, the tension was undeniable. We were about to find out if the institution could handle the very transparency it claimed to value.
The Empire Strikes Back
At launch, we_NATO.org featured our summit roadmap and my interview with Stefanie. Immediately, the NATO PR machinery roared to life. And when that machine roars, it roars. Press releases were fired off, and social media announcements were pushed through every channel with military precision.
But the buzz was a hollow one. The NATO engine was firing on all cylinders, yet it was strictly following the old, top-down protocols. Our vision of an open, eye-level dialogue barely saw the light of day before being smothered. For every video, every live event, every article, we found ourselves wading through a bureaucratic swamp. Approvals languished in endless loops; requests for ambassadors to engage with ‘my’ public were met with stony silence.
Soon after the launch, I was on a call with Stefanie. “We’re trapped,” she said, her voice heavy with the weight of the institution. “The old system has us completely boxed in.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. “The Empire is striking back,” I replied. “It’s showing us exactly how it thinks things should be.”
Stefanie sighed. “We’re drowning. My management colleagues aren’t giving the team the space to breathe. They won’t grant them the time to actually commit to this.”
The team was struggling to stay afloat. Texts were revised until they were meaningless; videos were polished until their message was dull. Critical voices? Not allowed. Open discussion? Impossible.
The breaking point arrived when we planned a live chat with Secretary General Rasmussen. “We need the questions submitted in advance,” a senior official informed me with the flat finality of a judge.
“What?” I leaned forward, incredulous. “It’s a live chat. The whole point is a real-time conversation.”
He simply shook his head. “That’s not how we do things!”
It was a farce. we_NATO wasn’t just being ignored; it was being metabolized by the very structure it tried to change.
The script had already been written, and it never included us.
The Price of a Narrative
I finally canceled my contract with NATO on March 8, 2012. It was International Women’s Day – a day meant to celebrate women’s achievements, but for me it became the day I reclaimed my own.
The night before, I had sat hunched over my laptop, editing a video I felt truly proud of. It was an unpolished portrait of rural Afghan women fighting for their daughters’ education. Their words were simple but carried the weight of a mountain. One woman, her hands worn from years of labor, looked directly into the camera. “We face so many obstacles,” she said, her voice steady. “But we do this because we want a better future for our children.”
She wasn’t a professional activist or a government plant; she was a mother who had decided to act. It was the most authentic piece of content I had – a sincere attempt to reach beyond NATO’s glossy messages. By the time I finished editing, dawn was breaking. I uploaded the video on the platform as agreed and leaned back, exhausted but satisfied. “This,” I thought, “is what we_NATO was supposed to be.”
I couldn’t wait to send the link to the women in Afghanistan to show them their voices finally had a stage. But the next morning, I opened the site and froze. My video was gone. In its place was a glossy corporate reel of NATO generals shaking hands with what looked like actors. There were children in pristine uniforms standing in front of freshly painted schools – a staged, feel-good montage that erased the grit and truth of the struggle I was going to show.
At that moment, a line was crossed. It was that quiet but crucial boundary in my inner compass – where compromise stopped being practical and started becoming betrayal. When the real voice of a woman risking her life for education is replaced by sanitized optics, something fundamental breaks.
Values are not negotiable, especially not for the sake of image or narrative control. I slammed my laptop shut and tried to reach Stefanie. When I couldn’t get through, I sent a blunt email: “What happened to the video?”
“It doesn’t fit the narrative NATO wants for Women’s Day,” was her reply.
I felt my chest tighten. Fit the narrative? These were real women. Their lives weren’t a script. I sat in stunned silence before typing back: “This isn’t what we signed up for. This isn’t the vision we shared.”
I spent the rest of the day in a haze of mounting frustration. Months of effort had been watered down into nothingness. What was I expecting? I had hit a brick wall that wouldn’t move. By evening, I made my decision and wrote one final email to Stefanie.
“I’m done,” I wrote. “I’m canceling my contract. This isn’t about money; it’s about values. I won’t sacrifice mine to be a cog in the NATO PR machine.” I stepped away from a project that held extraordinary potential but was being crushed by a hierarchy that preferred a comfortable lie to a difficult truth.
International Women’s Day became a bittersweet reminder of the fight for authenticity – and the strength required to walk away when it’s lost.
A Bridge to Nowhere
By the time the Chicago Summit drew to a close, we_NATO.org was still limping along, but only as a ghost of our original vision. Polished statements and sterilized videos flooded the platform, but the interactive bridges we had fought to build never materialized. The conversations with locals in affected regions? Nonexistent. The project had been hollowed out, leaving behind nothing but a glossy digital brochure: NATO was in full control of its narrative.
The repercussions hit me with a force I hadn’t fully anticipated. My online peers, particularly in the Arab community, were watching – and they were unforgiving. Some accused me of failing to deliver; others claimed I had sold my soul to the enemy. Most didn’t even realize I had walked away. To them, the failure of the platform was simply proof of what they already knew: NATO was an immovable machine of Western interests, a backer of the very repressive regimes they were fighting to topple. The chance for a real dialogue hadn’t just been missed – it had been killed, and in its place, a toxic mix of frustration and resentment was brewing.
In late March 2012, less than two weeks after I quit my job at NATO, I found myself in Tunis for an activism conference. I was there to speak about the experiment that had just imploded.
Tunis was a city vibrating with the raw energy of the Arab Spring. Ben Ali had been ousted, and the country was struggling to reinvent itself. Next door in Libya, NATO had intervened against Qaddafi’s forces – an intervention many locals saw not as protection, but as another opportunistic power grab. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the fall of Mubarak had shown that the street could overpower even the most entrenched regime, despite the Western support it had enjoyed for decades. Tensions were high, and the sense of empowerment was even higher.
I knew I was walking into a room full of people who felt betrayed by the institution I had briefly represented. But after the polished lies of the NATO PR machine, the only thing I had to offer was the unvarnished truth.
Attack. Apprehension. No Anger.
When I arrived in Tunis, a friend picked me up from the airport. We walked across a plaza toward the venue where I was supposed to speak, the sun warming our backs as the sound of distant traffic blended with the hum of a city in transition. We were deep in conversation, debating how the audience might react. Suddenly, two men rushed at us from the side.
I barely registered the glint of steel before the world dissolved into chaos. One attacker lunged at me, his knife sinking into my upper arm. My friend stepped in instantly, fighting them off with a ferocity that likely saved my life. He yelled for help, but by the time the attackers were pulled away, the pavement looked like a battlefield.
Later, in the sterile silence of the hospital, I sat by my friend’s bed. He was pale, his life permanently altered; he had lost his leg. Guilt and gratitude tightened my chest until I could hardly breathe. “I don’t even know what to say,” I whispered, the tears finally breaking through.
He managed a weak, dry smile. “You’ll figure it out,” he said. “But let’s be clear – I lost my leg defending NATO!” Even in the wreckage of that moment, his humor cut through the weight. We were alive, but the cost was staggering.
The attackers were detained, and the conference was canceled. The next morning, I insisted on returning to Germany for treatment. But before leaving, I wanted to face the men who had done this. I pulled every string I had to arrange a visit to the prison.
The prison visit was cathartic. Separated by a glass wall, we faced each other in silence. At first, they avoided my gaze, their eyes fixed on the floor. When I finally spoke, my voice trembled but held. “I’m not here to accuse you,” I said. “I just need to understand.” I kept talking for minutes, the words spilling out in a blur of raw honesty — fragments of fear and questions, circling again and again around why I was there and what I needed to understand before I could leave.
They looked up, startled. Slowly, the atmosphere shifted. I pressed my palms to the glass; after a long hesitation, they did the same. As I felt the warmth of their hands through the barrier, the fear and the adrenaline finally vanished. At that moment, I felt a strange, quiet peace. That was the moment I was hoping for – I wanted to leave Tunis in peace. And I was able to. It was my way of overcoming the shocking event at the square.
We talked frankly, stripped of anger. They explained their hatred for NATO and their fury at decades of Western support for the dictators who had oppressed them. “To us,” one of them said, “you were the enemy. A traitor. An easy target.”
I nodded, absorbing the reality of being a symbol rather than a person. “I see where you’re coming from,” I said. “But I hope you can see why I did what I did, too.”
I couldn’t stop the gears of justice – they were both sentenced to ten years – but I submitted a request for clemency. It was the only way I knew how to honor the ‘We’ I had tried to build. Years later, I learned their paths diverged: one was released during the pandemic and now lives a quiet life with his family in Tunis; the other, tragically, took his own life during his first year behind bars.
The Red Line
Back at NATO, the institutional guillotine dropped shortly after the summit. Stefanie was reassigned to a new role – a quiet, unmistakable demotion.
“They told me before Christmas that they had a job for me, and that I had to step down as Head of Public Diplomacy,” she confided during one of our last conversations. There had been no grand trial, no formal list of grievances. “Just… ‘your services won’t be needed in this capacity after the summit.’ I assume we_NATO went a step too far. It was too challenging, too ‘liberal.’ I overstepped a red line.”
I shook my head, the bitterness of it echoing my own experience. “That’s brutal,” I said. But I wasn’t surprised. This was simply how the machine handled dissent: it didn’t argue; it just reorganized you out of existence.
“I won’t lie – it’s a blow,” she sighed.
Yet, even as her authority was stripped away, I watched her resilience with a sense of awe. Throughout the build-up to Chicago, she had continued to push the limits, advocating for ideas she knew would be met with the stony silence we encountered. She had occupied the space between the fortress and the street as long as she possibly could.
I looked at her and realized that while the project had been crushed, her integrity remained intact. She had fought the good fight, proving that even inside a monolith, it was possible to maintain a heartbeat – even if the institution eventually stopped listening.
She took her new role and kept her spirit until she retired and left NATO in March 2020 – eight years after I had quit my contract. That was her choice. A legitimate one. After more than two decades with the alliance, she ended her NATO career and moved into the private sector as a strategic adviser, consultant, and public commentator.
Blind Spots
The sun beat down as I stepped off the plane in Tunis in the summer of 2024. The familiar warmth of the Mediterranean air wrapped around me like an old, soft blanket. It had been years since the attack, but the memories always came flooding back the moment I returned.
I sat in a café near the old Medina, scrolling through the pages of Stefanie’s new book, ‘Blind Spots.’ She didn’t hold back. “NATO is strategically challenged,” she wrote. “It’s failing to adapt to the changing nature of global conflicts, stuck in a loop of institutional inertia.” Her analysis cut deep, especially for someone who had seen the inner workings of this machine. I could see the ghost of we_NATO in every line she wrote; it felt right to read those words here, at the very place where I had been attacked. It provided a strange comfort for the difficult task ahead.
I had come to honor the friend who saved my life that day in the plaza. He is gone now, brutally killed in one of Assad’s prisons. After surviving the attack in Tunis, he had traveled to Syria to help locals set up an online platform – a way to make their voices heard. He was doing exactly what we had dreamed of, right up until the moment he was arrested.
At his memorial service, the air was thick with grief. His family and friends gathered in silence, their faces etched with a pain that felt permanent. I stayed back at first, letting them have their moment. When I finally approached his wife, she took my hands in hers.
“He believed in something bigger,” she said, her voice trembling.
I nodded, struggling to hold back my own tears. “Yes. And he gave everything for it.”
Later that night, I sat alone in my hotel room, staring at the ceiling. Memories of that day in the plaza blended with the brutal reality of his death. The trip took its toll. The emotional weight of it all – my friend’s death, the memories of the attack, and the struggles my peers faced – it all pressed down on me. And I was asking myself: At what point did the cost of authenticity become too high? I looked at the scars on my arm and thought of the space where my friend’s leg used to be, and the permanent silence where his voice should have been.
There was no easy math for this. But as I sat in the fading light of Tunis, I realized that the ‘safe’ world I had almost stayed in – the world of sanitized optics, corporate reels, and polished lies – was its own kind of death. It was a slow, comfortable erosion of the soul.
My friend didn’t die for a PR strategy; he died for a truth that couldn’t be managed. Stefanie didn’t lose her position because she failed, but because she succeeded in showing exactly where the light could get in. I had walked away from NATO not to find safety, but to find myself.
And while the world beyond the fortress gates — outside the safety of rank, role, and controlled language — was far more dangerous, it was also finally, painfully, real. I had stopped trying to fit into the narrative. I had decided, instead, to simply be the story.