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What advice would you give your younger self?
It's a question guaranteed to give most people pause. Not so Victoria Nuland.
“Don't think about the job after the one you're in,” she replies, quickly. “Take the most exciting, challenging and impactful job that is in front of you, with interesting, smart people who want to do good. Do it as well as you can and love the moment that you're in. Seize that adventure, and other things will happen as a result.” Such eloquence and conviction, while quite striking, are rooted in a 32-year career during which she rose into the upper echelons of American diplomacy.
Her time on the diplomatic circuit saw her take in roles ranging from serving as principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, US ambassador to NATO, and State Department spokesperson. She then concluded her public service during the Obama administration by serving as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs and as a Career Ambassador - the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service.
Not bad for someone who originally entered diplomacy because she thought it would be “something of a lark”.
Growing up in Connecticut, Nuland harboured no grand ambition to become a diplomat and, like many, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with herself after graduation. That said, she was clear that a career in the private sector wasn't for her.
“My father was a surgeon and really injected the idea of public service into us,” she recalls. “After leaving school, I worked for a member of the House of Representatives for a year, and then I got accepted into the diplomatic service at 23. I saw myself travelling the world for four or five years and then I'd go back to Graduate School and decide what I wanted to do. But I ended up staying for 32 years because it was a great adventure. I always ended up landing in places that were interesting and having bosses who were trying to achieve change.”
Her time in service coincided with some of the most dramatic events in history, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Russia, which at the time “wanted to democratise”, as she says. “There was also the bringing of central and eastern Europe into NATO and the EU, so there was a lot of hope and promise for the liberal world order. Along with our European allies, the United States was very much at the centre of trying to cement positive changes. So I had a real sense of hope and optimism about the possibilities for affirmative change, not only for individual citizens but also for nations.”
Unfortunately, the horror of 9/11 shattered this momentum, with the attacks swiftly followed by the Iraq war and the conflict with Al-Qaeda. “This was a new and difficult-to-understand enemy,” she admits. “We were not well-organised, whether it was the diplomats' ability to work well with the military in that kind of context or whether it was the structures of the alliances. So we had to rebuild coalitions, first for Afghanistan - which we did through the NATO platform - but also for Iraq in a different way, and where we were less successful. It was very difficult, and there were many mistakes made.”
These challenges, she believes, had a damaging effect on the morale and motivation of younger diplomats, who had not been in post for the more positive developments of earlier years. Instead, they were confronted with a myriad of complex challenges - military and civilian - with no easy solution in sight.
“They were far less optimistic and enthusiastic about collective power in pursuit of affirmative change,” explains Nuland. “By the time I became a leader in my own right, first as NATO ambassador, then as spokesperson for the department, and then finally running the European bureau, it really was a case of retraining and reinspiring that can-do spirit in the next generation. We needed to remind them how to listen well to allies, pull together all the tools of governance - economic, political, security, military - that are necessary for positive change. Today, I would say we are in a period of withdrawal and retrenchment - which is quite worrying.”
Nuland is now juggling a portfolio career, one that mixes serving as chief executive of the Center for a New American Security with various roles in the private sector, including as a senior advisor to The Boston Consulting Group. Interestingly, she sees the traits that make for an effective diplomat as very much transferable to roles outside the diplomatic service.
“You need to have some strategic goals that set out what it is you are trying to achieve and on what timeline,” she points out. “You also have to understand why you have this objective and where it creates value. Diplomats also need to create a team with different strengths that really work well together. In a diplomatic sense it is not just your national team, it should be a global team whenever this is possible. You also need to be able to leverage other institutions like the United Nations or the World Bank - it just depends on what the situation is.”
The most important skill, however, is to be able to listen, really listen, to what the other side needs and is offering. “You need to see where you can create common interest and common action,” she explains. “You also need to be flexible and adjust when circumstances change or you didn't anticipate a problem over the horizon, or if things simply don't work.”
Similarly, Nuland says that achieving a strong public impact relies on a number of different factors - especially in a role as complex as assistant secretary of state. “It is a matter of working on multiple levels,” she reflects. “So having a strong home team with lots of different skills, a strong on-the-ground team you are in constant contact with, and then being very clear about what the goals are and what the public messages are.”
To illustrate her point, she cites the example of the Russian invasion of Crimea and then the invasion of Eastern Ukraine. “We worked intensively with President Obama, and he worked intensively with the G7 and EU and Asian democratic nations,” she recalls.
“We agreed that Russia had to pay a price. There was a decision made that entering the military fray would only make the situation worse, so we had to come up with other tools that would create an impact on people's thinking. This resulted in the development of the sanctions regime where they were ratcheted up in a multilateral way in a manner that hurt Russia more than it hurt us, because we had analysed their economic vulnerability. So we needed very good technical experts, both on the vulnerabilities of the Russian economy as well as those of our allies who were asking to participate. We needed very good diplomatic synergy - from the levels below me, at our embassies, as well as up through to our leaders. So it was a matter of careful technical work, team-building, and extreme coordination with our allies.”
Nuland may have left the diplomatic service, but it's clear that diplomacy hasn't left her. Hers remains an active voice in the arena, one that speaks passionately about America's values and role in the world. “A lot of it also has to do with setting an example of tolerance, democracy, balance of power, support for judicial independence, and so on,” she says. “All those things that have over the 70 years since the end of World War Two made the US and its democratic allies beacons for change. But these things now have to be defended at home as well.”
No doubt she will continue to broadcast this message, not only at her next meeting - she was speaking en route to a meeting with a senator on Capitol Hill - but also in different forums, and to different audiences, for many more years to come.
