Club founders seniors Gregory Dunn and Nassim Fedel enjoy being active on world issues, and encourage other students to do the same by joining their new Foreign Affairs Club.

– Kevin Lee

The new Foreign Affairs Club aims to bring international issues to Palo Alto High School, offering students a place outside of class to express their opinions on world events.

Seniors Gregory Dunn and Nassim Fedel, who founded the club, hope that their club will provide a place for students to meet and discuss current issues. Students can look forward to debates, seminars and perhaps guest speakers.

“Our plan is that during the year, the club will be able to host public events at Haymarket theater in which we bring in people who are experts in some international relations field — usually a Stanford political science professor — can come and talk to students,” Fedel said.

Dunn and Fedel thought of starting the Foreign Affairs Club when the two wrote an a guest column for The Paly Voice last year about the situation in Afghanistan.

“In the middle of 2011, I wrote an article for Voice on foreign policy on Osama Bin Laden’s death,” Dunn said. “We thought it turned out pretty well and we thought, ‘Hey, we should probably do more of this.’ The solution was foreign policy/foreign affairs club”.

Dunn and Fedel look foward to the club as a place to properly address policy issues as well as international problems. The club will emphasize student discourse and encourage members to speak their mind and opinions.

“The other impetus for the formation of the club was policy debate,” Dunn said. “Both the other president of the club, Fedel, and myself are members of the Palo Alto policy debate team, and as a part of this we discuss a lot about foreign affairs, but we seem kind of out of place doing this at school most of the time. So we need a place where we can discussions that are interesting and worth having on campus and an extension of these things we learn in debate.”

Besides discussing current events, the club hopes to publish articles expressing their opinions on publishing articles that discuss their opinions.

“We already have a functioning website, which will contain all of the papers that we write up,” Dunn said.  “We are certainly interested in expanding to Stanford, and there’s a lot of people who know about foreign affairs there and we are hoping to get the papers we write published in some of the forums that Stanford offers.”

The Foreign Affairs Club will hold their first meeting at lunch, Sept. 29, in room 305. Their website is located at http://palyforeignaffairs.org/.