History Repeats Itself for Alum

In February, when pro-Russian separatists took power in the Crimean region of Ukraine and voted to join the Russian Federation, Dan Fata ’94 (CLAS) experienced a keen sense of déjà vu. After all, he had been the U.S. Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia under the same pretext of protecting ethnic Russians. Like Ukraine, another former Soviet bloc country, Georgia was caught in a tug-of-war between NATO, which wanted to maintain the post-Cold War status quo, and Russia, which wanted to regain the territories it lost after the USSR collapsed in 1989.

“Back in 2008, the question was what to do with Georgia and Ukraine — should America extend NATO membership?” Dan recalls. “I was the lone senior holdout (in the Pentagon) saying yes, while everyone else said no. I thought we needed to put those countries on the path toward NATO membership, even if full membership didn’t come for another 10 years. They have to know there’s a place for them in the greater transatlantic space.”

Dan’s path to the Pentagon began at UConn, where he was mentored by political science professors Fred Turner and Garry Clifford, who died earlier this year. After an academically rocky first two years, he buckled down and earned a 3.95 GPA his junior and senior years, joined the department’s honors program, and won a major departmental award his senior year. “Those two guys motivated me more than pretty much anyone else in my life,” says Dan. “They got me to look inside myself and see if I could deliver, and energized me to open my mind.”

After graduating from UConn, Dan earned an MA in international relations from Boston University and moved to Washington, D.C., where he established a reputation as an expert in European affairs. After working at some leading think tanks and then on Capitol Hill, in 2005, President George W. Bush brought him into the Pentagon as part of a new Defense Department team led by-then Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and eventually Robert Gates. “Our instructions were, fix what the first term broke,” says Dan. “Our relations with Europe over Iraq were just in the toilet, and we had the French and the Germans against us at the UN. So we had to focus on getting back to basics.”

Dan spent the next three years working to repair America’s relationship with its Western European allies. Although difficult, that work paid off when NATO countries agreed to continue supporting America’s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Dan’s only regret is that he couldn’t convince the Bush administration to provide more support to Eastern European countries. “If NATO had brought Ukraine into the fold at the time,” Dan says, “it might have prevented the current conflict.” Although he left the Pentagon in 2008 and recently joined Lockheed Martin as a vice president, Dan retains his emotional connection to the region.

“Our obligation is to ensure that the temptations that Moscow can offer Ukraine economically aren’t so attractive that they forget where they want to go,” he says. “Here’s a country, the majority of which wants to be a democracy, that has the same values we do. So it’s on us to do whatever we can to encourage that.”