Interviews > Victoria Nuland

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Who was your best diplomatic coach? Why and what did you learn to do or not to do?

I think the most well-rounded mentor that I had was Strobe Talbott. He was asked by then-President Bill Clinton to work on the countries of the former Soviet Union when Clinton came to office in 1993 after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Strobe brought me back from Moscow to be his junior flunky and taught me a number of lessons that I've come back to again and again. 

First of all, from his journalistic background, he had a really profound ability to create empathy with his interlocutors and to really hear what the other person was saying in terms of their needs, their concerns, their interests, and their hopes and then to use that to try to create a common purpose. 

The second thing that Strobe was really fantastic at was that he believed in the interagency. He very quickly came to understand it. So, when we would travel, whether it was to Russia or Ukraine or the Caucasus, or Kazakhstan, we always flew together with our representatives from DOD, JCS, CIA and NSC, Treasury and some of those people went on to be incredible leaders in their own right. At one point, we had Larry Summers, David Lipton, Eric Edelmen, John McLaughlin and others all working together, and this really created a sense of common purpose. We could also pull all of the U.S. government’s policy tools together, and we could work with one another to prepare our principals to make decisions, whether they were cabinet members or the President, based on a common vision and a strategic plan. 

The third thing is that Strobe was a superb communicator, and still is, of course. His communication skills stood out at the negotiating table, when he spoke publicly about what we were trying to do, when he worked with the press, and, most importantly, in the way he could write a one and a half page memo to President Clinton that could distill days of meetings into a vivid picture of the challenges and opportunities, with a policy plan for what to do next. He really solidified my understanding that what we do is all about communication, and honing those written and oral skills are essential. 

Did your mentors do anything that actually coached you that was more specific to how you were able to internalize and take on these lessons—other than observation and participation.

On the coaching side, our Ambassador to Moscow in 1991-92, Bob Strauss, forced me not just to report on the situation in front of me, but to really analyze what the other guy or the other country needed and wanted and to think hard about how we could find common purpose. What can we do here? What's the deal to be had? We’re not just there to report; we’re there to move relations forward. 

With Strobe, I think it was the sense that we are in partnership. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can't bring everybody else along, whether it's interlocutors on the other side of the diplomatic table or whether it's the cabinet, the President, the Congress, U.S. public opinion or your allies and partners, it's not going to go anywhere. So you have to play that four dimensional chess of diplomacy and you have to be working all those angles at the same time. I learned it’s important to work all of that at once, and not let any of the balls fall.

What experience helped you develop your vivid writing style?

On my second tour, I was staff assistant in EAP and had to triage 1000 cables a day from the region for my Assistant Secretary and 5 DAS's. I learned then that if your message doesn't jump off the page, busy people are not going to read it. Also, you shouldn't be shy about having your own personal voice. That's what makes you more distinctive in the business and more valuable.

What regrets do you have about your career? What would you redo?

You know, I had an incredible run and I had sort of a Forrest Gump experience where I landed in places where history was turning all around us and I got a chance to be part of it. So I don't think about it in terms of regrets. Did I make mistakes? Of course. The most obvious one is that I shouldn't have been cursing on an open phone line. (Note: In February 2014, audio of a private conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked to the press. End Note) We hadn't had a phone call dumped on the street by Moscow in about 25 years. So I wasn't thinking about that. Obviously, I think there were times when I drove harder than colleagues or the process was ready for and had to backtrack and build a broader coalition, but what I don't regret is that I always had a strong point of view, even though it sometimes may have created enemies. Sometimes it created a sense of stress, but I am proud of the fact that I was a diplomat who wanted to make positive change rather than just observe the problem.

Would you talk a little about the interagency approach from Strobe? Did you have any particular keys to making each interagency meeting as successful as possible? Is there something you did or didn't do before or after interagency meetings?

First of all, if you were calling or running the meeting, you want to have a very clear sense of the outcome, of why you’re having a meeting in the first place. Don’t have meetings for meetings sake. Have a clear agenda, have a clear set of outcomes you’re looking for. Second, whether you're going into your own meeting or whether you're staffing people above you, ideally, you want to touch every single agency and participant in the room ahead of a meeting. That allows you to assess how much unity you have, and to work through any disagreements so that you maximize the chance of having success at the table. Or, you at least know what obstacles you're going to run into so you're ready for them. Don’t go into meetings cold.

In the meeting, it is critical to use the last five minutes to summarize what's been agreed on, not agreed on, and the work streams and assignments that everybody has signed up to going forward. Otherwise, there's no point in having had the meeting.

When I was in EUR, our best ambassadors, if I had forgotten to call them before they were going to be video-ed in for a DC meeting—whether the meeting was at my level or above us—would call me and say, “What's the plan here? Here's what I can contribute. Here's what I can't leave the meeting without getting clarified." They knew we were more likely to make effective policy in the meeting if we coordinated ahead of time.

What did you find that you didn't know about the Press when you became spox?

You have to put yourself in their shoes. They’re on deadline every single day. They’re responsible for telling a story every single day. So, if they're traveling with you, or if they're showing up in your briefing room, you can either help them and guide them to the nuggets of the story and get them halfway there and towards the story that the department is trying to tell. Or you can be passive and they'll make something up because they have a deadline. So you need to keep them close. 

The second thing is that most of them are looking for a unique angle or a unique perspective to get their story published and distinguish it from the competition. So you have to have a personal relationship with each of them to understand what aspects of the story interest them and how you can bring them in. But, most fundamentally, and I think this was a lesson that our dear departed Richard Holbrooke conveyed to a whole generation of us early on: He used to say, “If you want the press with you when the plane lands, you better put them in the seats when it takes off,” meaning bring them along all the way through your diplomatic initiatives so they understand what you're trying to do and, even if it doesn't move completely smoothly, they've been part of the journey so they can explain it.

What was the toughest issue you dealt with from the podium?

There were journalists who specialized in “gotcha,” and you could never be sure how that was going to come at you. There were certain issues that had really strong catechisms, and you always had to use the exact same words. And if you deviated, then it indicated some radical change in policy, even if you didn't mean that, so you had to be very careful about those.

The policy and security enterprise is vast, so on any given day you could get caught flat-footed by a journalist who knew about something that you hadn't been briefed on, and you had to manage that with grace and get back to them when you could without looking like you were somehow derelict of duty for not knowing about some major issue.

What was it like on 9/11 at NATO? What was the key to catalyzing NATO to invoke Article Five? 

Like for every American, it was horrifying. We were so far away, and we weren't sure exactly what was happening. Then, we got some threat information that NATO headquarters might be a target too. That information ultimately didn't pan out but at the time we had to plan for it, and evacuate most of the staff while keeping just a few in each mission to do the work.

And it was absolutely unprecedented. In fact, it was not our idea initially to invoke Article 5. It was the Canadians, David Wright was their Ambassador who came to us on the evening of September 11th and said, “Hey, you've been attacked. If it's a foreign attack, (and remember, that on the day we didn't know who had attacked us) then we should invoke Article 5.” And then, the next day, when we decided to bring the NATO Ambassadors (the NAC) together and see if we had the votes for Article 5.

It was one of the scariest moments in terms of the risk that Nick Burns, our ambassador at the time, and I were creating for the United States, as well as an opportunity because we knew if we were able to get an invocation of Article 5, it would be a great boost to Americans - a vote of support from all our European Allies. But we also knew that if we tried and failed we would destroy NATO on the day after the worst attack on U.S. domestic soil since Pearl Harbor. So it was pretty high risk. We had a lot of countries who immediately said “yes” that morning, but we also had countries with coalition governments who had to go back and get every political party on board. We also had a couple of countries that had to go to their parliaments. I remember one country in particular, a small one in the middle of Western Europe, which was the last country to say yes, and the Secretary General, Lord Robertson, called that prime minister, but he wasn't sure, and the NATO Ambassador of that country, was literally sobbing on the secretary-general’s couch because his nation was the last holdout. 

Ultimately we got unanimous support, but the treaty language isn't very clear. You invoke Article 5, and then the NATO treaty says every country should contribute to the collective defense in its own way. And so we were asking countries to sign up to help support us without knowing who had hit us or what we were going to ask them to do for support. So it wasn't the easiest dance that we had there that day, and then ultimately, as you know, we asked countries to come help in Afghanistan based on Article 5. In the first few months after 9/11, though, Washington wasn’t sure if the United States actually wanted any NATO help so that was a whole separate drama.

How do you hire good people? How do you build a good team? When was that hard or easy? When did you get it the most right and why?

I always looked for folks who were activists, who were creative, who wanted to be agents of change and create a more secure, stable, and prosperous world for us. Not just sit there and analyze a problem. I would much rather have to ratchet back somebody's idea than have the problem of not having an idea. The second thing was you had to really ensure that the team knew that you wanted ideas, and that there wouldn't be a penalty for even crazy ideas. So part of it was conveying to everybody at every level to think of themselves as policymakers and then see what we could come up with together. Then, it is important to have a tight, coordinated team on each of the major streams of work that you were focused on so that everybody from the desk officer level on up felt part of the project and part of the mission that we were embarked on together. 

The final part is to allow for dissent, which can be a hard one for some leaders. But it is crucial to make sure that the door is open, that if you are making a mistake or if we are moving too fast or if we haven't analyzed risk appropriately, that even the most junior person on the team can say ‘hey, I'm worried about that, or hey, I think if we do A then this horrible thing B might happen so we need to at least plan for it.’

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