From July 12 to 31, 2026, Dr. Manuel served as Academic Director of the Georgetown University Foreign Policy Academy, a residential summer program in Washington for high school students. These entries, drawn from the daily account he kept during the program, follow the cohort from the first sessions to the final presentations.
Day 1 · Opening
Brazil and Human Rights
The Academy opened with 94 students from 35 states and 20 countries. A delegation from the Embassy of Brazil joined the class: Bertha Gadelha Abreu and Thayana Stocco do Amaral, newly arrived from Brasília to lead the Embassy’s educational and science and technology cooperation, whose exchange with the students showed how much diplomacy happens in conversation rather than on paper.
Ambassador Mark P. Lagon, Chief Policy Officer at Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and adjunct professor in Georgetown’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program, then led “Human Rights Promotion: Goals, Approaches and International Instruments,” moving from the Universal Declaration to the real trade-offs of advancing human rights through foreign policy.
Day 5 · Friday, July 17
How America Fights Terrorism
Anand Prakash, Foreign Affairs Officer in the Bureau of Counterterrorism at the U.S. Department of State, joined the students for a morning on how the United States actually fights terrorism: the diplomacy, the partnerships, and the trade-offs that never make the headlines. The program is built around DIME, the instruments of national power, and the students heard from someone who uses all of them in his daily work.
Day 8 · Wednesday, July 22
The Official Residence of Brazil
By invitation of Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, the Official Residence of Brazil opened its doors to the Academy, something ambassadors rarely do for a student group, and the students gathered beneath the Residence’s panoramic murals of nineteenth-century Brazil. Minister Maurício André Olive Correia, Minister-Counselor at the Embassy, led the discussion with colleagues from the Embassy’s diplomatic team, ranging across economics, the Amazon, science and technology, China, Argentina, culture and even the World Cup.
A tour of the Residence followed, along with a glimpse of diplomatic life on Massachusetts Avenue. Bertha Gadelha Abreu and Thayana Stocco do Amaral received the group with Brazilian hospitality, from the welcome at the gate to pão de queijo, guaraná and Serenata de Amor chocolates.
Day 9 · Thursday, July 23
A Cyber Crisis and the Ambassador of Ireland
The morning opened with “Code, Spies & Crisis: The Secret History of Cyber Warfare — and the Crisis Only You Can Stop,” a briefing and crisis simulation led by Maj. Anthony “AJ” Pignone, U.S. Army, a cyberspace strategic planner on the Joint Staff and a former student of Dr. Manuel’s at Georgetown’s McCourt School. The students broke into committee teams across three rooms and worked through attribution and escalation in real time, drafting their recommendations as the crisis unfolded rather than reading about one after the fact.
Geraldine Byrne Nason, Ambassador of Ireland to the United States since 2022, brought the students the perspective of one of Europe’s most accomplished diplomats. Her career includes service as Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where she led the successful campaign for a seat on the Security Council, as Ambassador to France, and as Second Secretary General in the Department of the Taoiseach, where she was the highest-ranking woman in the Irish public service.
She spoke about Ireland’s relationship with the United States, the reach of multilateral diplomacy for a small nation with a global voice, and what a life in the foreign service looks like. The students stood one after another with questions on Irish foreign policy, the European Union and transatlantic relations, and the Ambassador continued the conversation outside White-Gravenor Hall well after the session ended.
Céad míle fáilte — and míle buíochas
Day 10 · Friday, July 24
Foggy Bottom: The Department of State
The students spent the morning at the U.S. Department of State for a session on soft power, the shaping of outcomes through attraction rather than coercion. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Global Media Brendan O’Brien, who graduated from Saint Anselm College in 1995 while Dr. Manuel was teaching politics there, traced a 24-year Foreign Service career from the Peace Corps in Paraguay to Kabul, Buenos Aires, San Salvador and Bogotá.
Dr. Thomas Faith and a colleague from the Office of the Historian introduced the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and Erika Mueller Chen of the Sports Diplomacy Division showed soft power at its most visible, from Sports Envoy programs to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The visit was arranged by Mia Gilstrap, Andre Garvin and Futsum Tekle of the Bureau of Global Public Affairs, and the group discovered, to the delight of at least one New Englander, that there is a Dunkin’ inside the State Department.
Day 11 · Monday, July 27
The Ambassador of Portugal
Francisco Duarte Lopes, Ambassador of Portugal to the United States, opened the final week with a session on a relationship that reaches back to 1791, when Portugal became one of the first countries to recognize the young United States. He covered NATO, the Azores, the Portuguese-American communities that bind the two countries and Portugal’s place in Europe today, and then gave the students the better part of the hour for their questions.
For Dr. Manuel, whose grandparents came to the United States from Portugal and whose scholarship has followed its revolution and its democracy, it was a morning of particular meaning. Two days later the Ambassador received the students at his Residence.
Day 12 · Tuesday, July 28
How Policy Is Made, and Singapore Between Washington and Beijing
Quinn Bornstein, a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Georgetown, opened the morning with a session on how policy actually gets made in Washington: the interagency process, the committee staff who write the language, the timing, and the long distance between a good idea and a signed document. A political science graduate of Brown, she worked on agriculture policy as a legislative staffer for Senator Bernie Sanders and did research at the Brookings Institution before beginning her doctoral studies, and her dissertation takes her to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to study rural public opinion and trust in government. With the final memos and talking points due that night, the students’ questions went to who actually receives a recommendation of this kind and what happens to it after it arrives.
Weiyang Lim, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Singapore, spent the afternoon with the students in White-Gravenor on U.S.–Singapore relations, ASEAN, and how a country of six million people manages its position between Washington and Beijing. Singapore is roughly one-fifth the size of Rhode Island and one of the most consequential trading and security partners the United States has in Asia, and that gap between size and influence became the substance of the session.
The students pressed him on the South China Sea, on supply chains, and on what a small state does when the two largest powers pull in opposite directions, and he answered each question directly. The visit was arranged by Faustina Lim, First Secretary for Information, and Siobhan Tan joined the delegation.
Day 13 · Wednesday, July 29
The Residence of the Ambassador of Portugal
Two days after his visit to campus, Ambassador Francisco Duarte Lopes received the students at his Residence. Over Portuguese refreshments, he led the tour himself, taking the cohort through the house in five groups of twenty, and invited the students to try the piano along the way.
At the Residence of the Ambassador of Portugal, July 29, 2026
Day 14 · Thursday, July 30
The Students at the Podium
Every group presented its policy memo in White-Gravenor 208, each team introduced by its own mentor, with five minutes to present and three to take questions before an audience of their peers rather than a faculty panel. One team wrote from the CIA’s Korea Mission Center on renewed engagement with North Korea over nuclear arms reduction; others took up Iranian sanctions evasion through Chinese refineries and the Strait of Hormuz, the Iran nuclear file, post-Assad Syria, Ukrainian strike capabilities and U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Three weeks of workshops had given every memo the same spine: BLUF, the bottom line up front; DIME, the diplomatic, informational, military and economic instruments a recommendation has to move if it is to be more than a wish; and three questions about the committee’s standing, the addressee and what precisely is being recommended. The Cuba group set out the risks and rewards of three options on the slide before choosing the middle course as the least risk to the country.
Cura personalis is not a slogan in a program like this; it is the work of knowing ninety-four students well enough to be useful to each of them.
Day 15 · Friday, July 31
Adieu à tous
The Summer 2026 session closed after fifteen days and ninety contact hours. Over three weeks the students heard eleven guest speakers, among them the ambassadors of Ireland and Portugal and the Deputy Chief of Mission of Singapore, ran crisis simulations on cyber warfare, homeland defense and nuclear negotiations, and were received at the State Department and at the residences of the ambassadors of Brazil and Portugal.
Dr. Manuel first set foot on the Georgetown campus as a graduate student in August 1986, forty years earlier, and has found that the roads of his career have led back there. Nothing gave him greater joy in those three weeks than sharing his love of Georgetown with the students, who now belong to its Jesuit community too and will carry it with them wherever their paths lead.
He thanked Assistant Academic Director Ken Bailey, the mentors, and the diplomats, officials and scholars who gave their time. The students rose in a standing ovation at the farewell, and the cohort gathered one last time on the steps of Healy Hall for the traditional group photograph.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
After the Program
A Student’s Reflection
One student co-wrote her group’s policy memo on U.S. options toward Iran, a sensitive and timely question, and wrote afterward that weighing different opinions and approaches with her peers was a highlight of the program. She credited her mentor, Kim Le, a rising sophomore in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, who guided the group through every workshop and draft.