Anka Lee is a Los Angeles-based Partner at Scalare Advisors, a strategic consulting firm, working closely with West Coast clients to navigate geopolitical challenges, mitigate risks, and find opportunities abroad. He is a national security expert with over two decades of experience leading large teams in the U.S. government, California state government, and in the private sector. 

In Sacramento, he served as California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon’s international policy director, where he empowered state elected officials to address shared policy challenges with foreign counterparts — from climate to cross-border water pollution to data privacy. Earlier in his career, Anka was a news producer at KTVU-TV Fox 2 in San Francisco, covering national, state, and local campaigns. He also led a four-year campaign that convinced voters to approve a $40 million bond to renovate public schools in Richmond, California.

In Washington, his senior leadership roles included Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia at the Pentagon, where he advanced bilateral defense relations with major allies and partners in the region and pursued collective action to meet growing security challenges in the Indo-Pacific. Prior to that, as USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator for multilateral affairs, he rallied like-minded countries to surge financial support for pressing global issues — from addressing Ukraine’s security needs to alleviating hunger to coordinating responses to China’s corrosive development practices globally. 

He has written for and appeared on The Atlantic, BBC, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, Just Security, Foreign Policy, NBC, Newsweek, POLITICO, Time, and San Francisco Chronicle. Anka received his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and M.A. in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center and an External Senior Advisor at the Special Competitive Studies Project.