Advancing International Relations

While many people in many different jobs handle challenging logistics, complex schedules, and international travel arrangements, the stakes are somewhat higher when your role is Advance Coordinator at the White House and you're supporting the work of the President of the United States. “I work in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and when I go into work my day revolves around what the President's schedule is going to look like over the next few days, weeks, and months,” says Kai McGuire ‘14.

“Advance is a weird word when you think about it, because it can be a noun or a verb or an adjective depending on the context in which you use it. In this case we use it in a verb form — advancing a ‘principal,’ advancing a person — so in my case, I’m advancing the president,” Kai explains.

“Every time the President leaves the 18 acres of the White House, there’s a group of people who go out ahead of him, anywhere from seven to 10 days, that are from the Secret Service, White House Communications, White House Military Office, Press Advance, Staff Advance, and the Medical Office,” former Presidential Advance Director Kelly Gannon Russell explained in a 2022 interview. ”They would all go out and handle all the logistics for all the President’s movements, but also all the staff that travel with him and security, and the media. They’re the people who have to make the trip possible for the principal.”

“We have to understand where the principal is going to be walking, where are they going to enter a building? If they're making a speech, what sort of stage are they going to be standing on? What is the backdrop going to be? What kind of people are they going to be interacting with? Is it open press? Is it closed press?... Is it going to be political? Is it going to be in the principal's official capacity? There are a lot of different questions that have to be answered,” Kai says. In addition to planning the specifics of each trip or activity ahead of time, the advance team also accompanies the principal on their visits. Coordinating current and future logistics, moving team members around the country — and often the world — requires a lot of planning. “A lot of my day revolves around looking at the schedule and understanding what our needs are based on the specifics and the peculiarities of the trip itself. That involves the logistics of getting travel, getting our advance team to these locations, and making sure that they have the tools that they need to do the job,” Kai says. Beyond that, Kai considers “what is the cadence of what we're going to be doing? How many people do we need to be sending out?” He describes the work as being like an air traffic controller. “We have many different trips going on, we have different advance teams, and we need to circulate and allocate our resources to all of these different trips. And a lot of times they're very complicated because they involve different stops along the way.”

In addition to the planning, there is also the execution of the trips, and the other main part of Kai’s work involves accompanying the President when he travels. It was in that capacity that Kai recently had the opportunity to return to Japan, the place he grew up, as a member of the team attending the G7 Summit in Hiroshima. “That was a really meaningful experience for me because it was a homecoming in many ways,” he says. “I was really proud to be back at home and able to represent the administration and the important work that we were doing there. It felt really meaningful and just a great opportunity to connect my different worlds — different parts of my upbringing.”

Kai spent many of his formative years in Tokyo, attending ASIJ from 2005 until he graduated with the Class of ‘14. His family have strong connections to the school with his younger brothers Ian ’17, Hugh ’20, and Lee ’22 all fellow Mustangs. Kai’s father Matt McGuire (AP ’05–22) also served on the school’s Board of Directors for three years. “My mother is Japanese and my father is American, and growing up in Tokyo and going to ASIJ, I think was always very aware of the fact that the United States and Japan share this very special relationship, this very special alliance, which in many ways, you could say I am sort of a direct product of.” Kai particularly remembers the impact that his education and the trips he took at ASIJ had on his understanding of that context. He particularly remembers trips to Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP) and Izu in middle school as well as taking Japan Seminar (JSEM) with Kathy Krauth (AP ’00–12) in high school. “That was a really important class for me, a really formative experience,” he says. The class provided him the opportunity to really understand and peel back the layers of the country he grew up in. “I think it was that experience of understanding the United States and Japan's history, and the history of the relationship, and getting a better, deeper understanding of the work that it takes to create a relationship like that that really, really inspired me.” Kathy remembers Kai as a stellar social studies student, who excelled in JSEM. “He was curious, intelligent and was able to make meaningful connections across time and space,” she told us. “He was, and I am sure remains, a kind and funny person.”

Opportunities to travel and explore his own cultural background “teach you how much you actually don't know about the world. And it always made me very curious,” he says. “I think what's sort of really sparked my interest in trying to understand more about the parts of the world that I had never been to or that I hadn't encountered yet in my life.” That influenced Kai’s choice to study international relations, firstly at Tufts where he majored in International Relations, Russian and European Studies, and currently at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service where he is a McHenry Fellow pursuing a master’s in Asian Studies. It was also “what inspired me to study abroad when I was in college twice, first in the Republic of Georgia and then in Russia,” he says. “I think that the service trips, the field trips [at ASIJ] were all really formative experiences because they really get you out of the bubble of Tokyo and get you out into Japan, meeting people who you wouldn't normally interact with,” he reflects. “And I always remember coming away from those trips and feeling like, oh, there's so much of the world I just don't know.”

Kai was able to leverage his international background and language skills early in his career working for the Embassy of Japan in the United States for two years as a Congressional Coordinator. He later joined McLarty Associates, an international strategic advisory firm that specializes in commercial diplomacy. There, Kai managed a global client portfolio focused on the firm’s work in Northeast Asia and Japan. He then moved to the White House, beginning his time in the administration as an advance associate in 2022. “I always felt a very strong call to public service — I think since I was young, I knew I wanted to be in public service and that everything I studied and did in my work was going to be toward that.”

Kai credits much of his perspective and success to his experience at ASIJ. “Being the beneficiary of such a robust educational program, being around such great faculty, being in such a really loving community, and having great friends, I felt really fortunate to grow up in that environment.” He goes on to reference the phrase “to whom much is given, much is required” in the context of his desire to give back.  “I feel very fortunate to have had an education at a school that really impresses upon students the value of being a global citizen,” he says. “I really just felt a call to live up to that principle and to try to make use of my education — the education that I feel so fortunate to have received — and I felt really compelled to pay that forward in some small way.”

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