A Diplomat’s Tool Chest: ‘Pajamas, a Blanket, and Snacks’

On the eve of February 24, 2022, Victoria Nuland was holed up in her State Department office, prepared for the worst. For months, US intelligence had been monitoring the buildup of more than 100,000 Russian troops along the border with Ukraine. Invasion appeared imminent.

As the undersecretary of state for political affairs and the highest-ranking member of the US Foreign Service, Nuland oversaw day-to-day matters worldwide for the State Department. For nearly a decade, she had been focused on Ukraine, first by supporting the country’s pro-democracy protests in 2013, then by condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and now in calling attention to the looming military conflict.

“We started warning the world, including the Ukrainians, NATO, and everybody else, what was coming and preparing in case Putin invaded,” Nuland recalls. “Many people believed it wouldn’t happen, that it was just a bluff. But as I’ve done many times in my career, I got ready to camp out in the office. I had two changes of clothes. I had pajamas, a blanket, and snacks. And, unfortunately, the night that Putin sent his forces into Ukraine, all of those things were needed.”

What’s needed to succeed as a diplomat is a topic that Nuland will now be addressing at SIPA, bringing with her three-and-a-half decades of experience with the State Department, including as its spokesperson, its ambassador to NATO, and its acting deputy secretary of state — considered the nation’s No. 2 diplomatic post. She retired in March, after accepting the position of Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor in the Practice of International Diplomacy.

Considered a chief architect of US policy on Ukraine, Nuland helped Kyiv repel what was widely expected to be a quick Russian victory by, in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “marshaling a global coalition to ensure [Putin’s] strategic failure.” Kyiv has since retaken more than half of the territory that was initially seized by Russia, and Blinken has said diplomats and students of foreign policy will for years be studying Nuland’s “leadership on Ukraine.”

At SIPA, Nuland herself will be leading such study sessions as director of the half-century-old International Fellows Program, which combines in-class lectures with field trips to meet with policymakers and diplomats. With Washington focused on a pivotal US election and its potential fallout, Nuland intends for students to follow what’s said about foreign policy on the campaign trail and to analyze each presidential candidate’s positions.

“What I want to bring to students is a sense that this is a craft—the craft of diplomacy, the craft of strategy and foreign policy that is really about human beings, human behavior, nations and their sense of themselves, their sense of legacy, their sense of their place in the world.”

“I also want to encourage students, whether they are American or international students, to understand this hinge moment that we are in,” she continues. “The open, free, democratic system that has been preponderant since the end of World War II is at a moment of deep challenge. We have to refresh it, redouble the investment, and bring more countries benefits from it, or the autocrats are going to run the table.”

Joining SIPA also gives Nuland the chance to reunite with her old boss and “longtime mentor,” former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who chairs the faculty advisory board for the Institute for Global Politics (IGP), of which Nuland will be an affiliated faculty member.

“It’s an opportunity not only to teach some of the best students but to rub brains with some of the best thinkers around the country and create opportunities for more creative thought than you often have time for with the daily grind, the inbox of government,” says Nuland, who is no stranger to academia as the daughter of the late Yale University professor, surgeon, and author Sherwin B. Nuland.

While Nuland had a global portfolio at the State Department and served around the world— including in Moscow, Brussels, China, and Mongolia — her expertise is on Russia, which was the original source of her interest in international affairs. As a teenager she fell in love with Russian literature after seeing the play Three Sisters, which led her down a rabbit hole of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Then while studying history at Brown University, Nuland took the Foreign Service exam on a whim.

“It was something that everybody in the history and international relations major just did for fun on a Saturday morning,” Nuland says. “I thought I would do five years in the Foreign Service and then go back to school and decide what I wanted to do with my life. But it just kept being an adventure.”

Nuland went on to serve under six presidents, from Republican Ronald Reagan to Democrat Joe Biden, a bipartisan record that underscores her ideals of negotiation and compromise. Now through the IGP’s bipartisan dialogues series, Nuland wants to help students engage with leaders of both major parties, as she sees such conversations as essential “to knit the fabric of the country back together.”

“Fundamentally, the people that I worked for in both parties wanted to make the world better, America a better global leader,” Nuland says. “I also think that America’s strength, when we’re at our best, is that Democrats and Republicans can work together.”

To the outsider, Nuland’s career might appear to be an argument that one doesn’t need to go to graduate school to serve in government, play a key role in international diplomacy, and influence history itself. But with hindsight, Nuland recognizes where she could have been more informed. Hinting at what she is likely to emphasize to students, Nuland says she found that her history courses proved most relevant to her diplomatic work in helping her understand a nation’s psychology.

“As Keren Yarhi-Milo emphasizes, if you’re going to be an active diplomat, it really is about the psychology of individual leaders, individual negotiators, and the group psychology and sense of memory of nations,” Nuland says. “You have to know their national history, but you also have to know what motivates them, what calls them to a higher place, and about their worries, fears, and sense of risk.”

That’s a key to diplomacy. And it’s also a key to untangling some of the biggest issues of today. Amid the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts, the US’s ongoing tensions with China, and the existential crisis of climate change, SIPA graduates might feel as if they’re walking into a hopeless mess. Nuland wants to embolden students to tackle even the most seemingly intractable problems.

“I think you can encourage students that they can make a difference if they roll up their sleeves and work on one or some of these things, that it’s not so overwhelming, that they can be change agents,” Nuland says. “That’s what I hope to inspire.”