The morning President Obama was intending to announce a plan to open relations with Cuba, I was bursting to tell someone, so I decided to disclose the news to Declan, who was then five years old. To give him context, I summarized more than fifty years of US–Cuba relations, describing how the US government had put in place something called an “embargo” to cut off the flow of goods between our two countries. In just a few hours, I told Declan, “President Obama is going to try something new.” He nodded along as I spoke, seeming to absorb my simplified history lesson.
Later that day at the US Mission, I gathered my team to watch Obama’s televised announcement. Just as the President started speaking, the nurse from Declan’s school called to tell me that he had been playacting as an animal during recess when his friend Sawyer had accidentally kicked him in the face, giving him a bloody lip.
Declan grabbed the phone from the nurse.
“Mommy,” he said, his voice conveying urgency. “We need an embargo for Sawyer.”
I told myself that the exposures the kids were getting to the world beyond America’s shores would compensate in a small way for the shortage of time they had with me. But I knew nothing could substitute for parental attention. I also worried that my kids would grow accustomed to a penthouse apartment and special treatment. I remembered the gratitude I felt as a child when Mum scored a seat in the upper decks of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium for a Pirates game. Yet when I took Declan to Washington Nationals’ spring training each year, he got to go onto the field and meet the players. When Mum and Eddie had taken me to Disneyworld, we had queued for hours to ride Space Mountain, making the thrill all the more immense. Yet when I brought Rían back to the scene of my childhood delight, I looked at the other parents guiltily as my security escort moved us to the front of the long lines. At such moments, I made sure to tell the kids, “This. Is. Not. Normal”—a good reminder to myself as well.
“LEAN ON” ENCOMPASSED more than this invaluable support from family, friends, and coworkers. It also spoke to the importance of women having each other’s backs. I saw this dynamic play out in powerful ways at the male-dominated United Nations. While men had held the majority of positions during my time working at the NSC, only when I got to the UN did I regularly find myself the only woman in the room.
When Obama had nominated me for the job, I went to see Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s UN ambassador during his first term (before she became America’s first female Secretary of State in his second). Albright told me that in 1993 she had assembled the seven female ambassadors at the UN (out of 183 countries at the time) in what she called the G7—the “Girl Seven.” The way she described her gatherings with the women who represented Canada, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Lichtenstein reminded me of the Wednesday Group. Albright’s G7 developed into both an informal sisterhood and a cross-regional lobby that managed to secure the appointment of two female judges to the bench of the UN war crimes tribunal.
Fortunately, I had far more female company at the UN than Albright. When I arrived in New York, I was the thirty-seventh woman permanent representative out of 193 countries.* Inspired by her initiative, I convened the G37 as often as I could. I invited my female colleagues to dinners at the apartment, including an evening featuring the authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who discussed their book The Confidence Code, which argues that “success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence.”41 I also invited all of the G37 to the Public Theater’s Eclipsed, a play about sexual violence in Liberia that was written, directed, and performed solely by women.
Whenever we got together, we would inevitably commiserate about how tired we were of being asked how it felt to be “one of only X women” in whatever venue we were in.42 We would also lament how some in the broader international affairs community still dismissed the push for enhanced female participation as a form of special pleading.
We knew that advocating for inclusivity was more than just a gender or moral issue. In fact, progress toward gender equality has broad, intrinsic benefits for whole societies. One of the best predictors of a state’s peacefulness is the way women are treated within that state. In addition, progress at closing the gender gap in employment significantly increases GDP, reduces income inequality, and leads to higher incomes for men. Learning from one another that we shared a frustration with the narrow way in which gender issues were sometimes treated emboldened us to be more outspoken.
Still, I was acutely aware that my circumstances as a woman at the UN were not comparable to those of my female colleagues. Because the United States was the most powerful country in the world, the fact that I was American was far more salient to UN officials and foreign diplomats than the fact that I was a woman. I suffered few of the slights endured by female diplomats from other countries.
I also knew I had it easy compared to Albright and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who President Reagan had made America’s first female UN ambassador. During my time interning for Mort, I had watched Kirkpatrick confidently interrogating guests at the Carnegie Endowment. We had vast policy differences, but I read up on her UN experience and discovered that, as tough as she looked, even she had grown weary of the constant sexism in New York and Washington.
Once, President Reagan’s chief of staff, Mike Deaver, approached her with a sensitive request: Could she urge Reagan to pursue an opening with the Soviet Union?
“Everyone notices you have influence with the President,” Deaver explained to her.
When Kirkpatrick shrugged, he went on. “No, no, everyone notices. He always listens when you speak. He looks at you and his eyes light up. Maybe it’s because you’re a woman.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s interested in foreign policy,” Kirkpatrick shot back.43
WHEN IT WAS TIME for the UN to elect a new secretary-general in 2016, I thought that a woman might be selected for the first time. When I mentioned this to a European ambassador, he told me that he was open to it—“as long as she is competent.”
I relayed this comment to Jordan’s UN ambassador Dina Kawar, who had become a close friend. She rolled her eyes. How, she asked, could anybody seriously think that an unqualified woman might just slip through the cracks to become UN secretary-general? As Dina joked to me, “Are they afraid that some woman will say, ‘Oh, I was going to do my hair today, but thought I would become Secretary-General instead!’ ” Such qualifiers would never have been considered necessary for male candidates in the race.44
Of the five countries that held permanent seats on the UN Security Council, only the United States had ever appointed a woman as permanent representative, and often I was the only woman in the Council as a whole.* When school groups were escorted into the viewing gallery to listen to our debates, I wondered what the young girls thought when they saw one woman seated among fourteen men. Surely, their ambition—or at least their sense of possibility—would be influenced by such a striking disparity. The boys’ sense of what was “natural” would undoubtedly also be shaped by snapshots like this.
In 2014, thanks to rotations among the ten nonpermanent members of the Council, I had the chance to serve with five other women, the ambassadors representing Argentina, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nigeria, and Jordan. We were the largest female contingent on the Security Council in the seven-decade history of the UN.
Although we still accounted for less than half the ambassadors on the Council, and although our number would dwindle back to one female representative in 2016, the excitement around the UN was palpable. Young women would pull me aside in the restroom to say how proud they were to see the six of us duking it out in the traditionally male chamber. Our deliberations changed in subtle ways; I noticed that the female ambassadors tended to refer back to their colleagues’ comments more frequently than the men did.
Having six women on the Council didn’t deter male ambassadors from occasionally taking outlandish positions, such as questioning well-documented cases of sex
ual violence. Once, when we were discussing what to do about allegations that Sudanese Army soldiers in Darfur had perpetrated mass rape, one of my African colleagues dismissed the detailed reports.*
“Why would the soldiers have done this when they have their wives to come home to? Where is the proof?” he asked, insisting, “If these rapes really happened, the women would have spoken openly about it—even if the security forces were present.”
I interjected. “Oh, are you speaking from your vast personal experience of having been raped and then being asked what happened while security forces affiliated with your rapists leer over you?”
On another occasion, Vitaly memorably criticized the UN’s Yemen envoy for spending too much of his precious time talking to women. “Your job is to make peace, and that is hard enough,” Vitaly said. “Why are you wasting your time having meetings with women who aren’t even involved in the conflict?” On such occasions the women ambassadors—and a few of the enlightened men—would fling our hands up to demand the floor in order to respond.
More impactfully, we pressed for action by the UN secretary-general to punish those who had perpetrated sexual violence, including, horrifyingly, UN peacekeepers themselves. Over Egypt’s objections, we secured the passage of a Council resolution that required the UN to expel whole peacekeeping units whose soldiers were accused of sexually abusing civilians. As a result, in 2017, Secretary-General Guterres sent home the entire deployment of more than 600 Congolese peacekeepers that had been stationed in Central African Republic, following numerous accusations that a number of them were perpetrating abuses.
While I could do little to affect whom foreign heads of state selected to represent their countries at the UN, I tried to make the US Mission to the UN friendlier to women and mothers—even by making small changes like installing the US Mission’s first lactation room. I also pressed to include women experts in Security Council debates—and not just on those topics explicitly branded as “women’s issues.” When the US ambassadorships under me opened up, I actively recruited women to apply and recommended several of them to the White House. In the end, President Obama named women to three of the four posts.
When I traveled abroad, I added a stop on each trip to interact with teenage girls. I especially loved playing sports with them—the epitome of the “lean on” ethos, in which team members set one another up for success. In Mexico, I played soccer with a group of underprivileged girls. In war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka, I played the local sport of Elle (a bat-and-ball game) in the rain with Muslim girls who had only recently returned to school after years of conflict. And in the Middle East, I played basketball with Israeli and Palestinian girls who hoped to become engineers, architects, and even politicians. In each instance, the shy teenagers who had barely spoken before we began playing began to open up once I was in my gym clothes, no longer looking like a senior US official.
When I met with young women in the United States, I erred on the side of oversharing, describing my self-doubt in the Bat Cave and the tradeoffs between my dream job and the family I longed to see more of. I did not gloss over the challenges they would face if they pursued ambitious careers in public service or foreign policy, but I encouraged them to take the leap.
I also offered a dose of perspective, highlighting the stories of women and girls who were breaking through barriers I found almost unimaginable. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, girls had been denied almost all access to education. Yet by the time I arrived at the UN, three million Afghan girls had risked violence and enrolled in schools. Finally allowed to run for seats in Afghanistan’s Parliament, women had won 28 percent of the positions—a higher proportion than in the United States Congress.
I often spoke publicly about the Afghan Women’s National Cycling Team, which was banned under the Taliban but had been re-established in 2011. Since then, the team had grown to around forty women. Afghan men frequently yelled at women cyclists to get off the road, and motorcyclists had even been known to grab at the women as they pedaled past (causing several to crash). Yet the women kept on riding.
I would ask my audiences—whether my fellow UN Security Council ambassadors or a group of students—to think about the impression these women left:
Imagine just for a minute what it must feel like to be a little girl from a rural town in Afghanistan—and to suddenly see those forty women, in a single file, flying down the road. To see something for the first time that you couldn’t have believed possible. Think about where your mind would go—about the shockwave that image would send through your system. Think what it would allow you to believe possible. You would never be able to think the same way again.
Agency. Self-determination. Dignity. Solidarity. We could not discount the potential impact of even one such altered perspective on a young girl, her family, and, eventually, on an entire community.
— 36 —
Toussaint
Ever since my time in Bosnia, I had believed that I could best learn about a situation by being where events were unfolding. As the Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” I tried to bring this “get close” spirit to diplomacy.
As a writer and an activist, seeking out people’s firsthand experiences was of course common practice. But as a government official, it proved much more difficult. The briefing papers and diplomatic cables I consumed rarely offered raw, unfiltered points of view.
As I brainstormed with my team about how to concentrate our energies in the final stretch of the Obama administration, my top Africa adviser, Colin Thomas-Jensen, floated the idea of traveling to the forgotten parts of Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to meet with people on the front lines of the fight between the governments in the region and the terrorist group, Boko Haram.* Boko Haram wanted to create a purely Islamic state in the area where these three countries and Niger converged, and its fighters targeted those who did not support the group’s demand for the strict imposition of Sharia law.
Boko Haram gained global notoriety in April of 2014 after it kidnapped 276 girls from a school in Chibok, Nigeria. The girls had been preparing for the all-important exams that would determine whether they would gain admission to a vocational school or university. The night of the raid, the Boko Haram militia barged into the dormitories and forced the terrified girls, both Christians and Muslims, onto trucks and motorcycles, leaving their school in flames. When one of the trucks broke down, 57 girls managed to escape. But the rest were brought to rural hideouts, where their captors forced them to adopt a radical form of Islam and marry Boko Haram soldiers.
In the #BringBackOurGirls campaign that followed, public figures and grassroots groups used social media to pressure governments to devote more resources to locating the abducted students, who seemed to have vanished. The girls’ mothers and fathers, I had read, were “going mad” at the lack of progress being made to find their children.
The Chibok kidnapping occurred the same year that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) rose to prominence while swallowing up huge swaths of territory in the Middle East. Yet in 2014, Boko Haram actually held the dubious distinction of being the world’s deadliest terrorist group. The following year, in 2015, it killed more people than al-Qaeda’s core franchise had in its entire history. And by 2016, Boko Haram had pledged allegiance to ISIS, amassed thousands of fighters, and displaced 2.5 million people from their homes. Horrifyingly, the Chibok girls constituted only a small fraction of the staggering 10,000 children estimated to have been seized by the group since 2013. In some cases, girls and boys they kidnapped were drugged and forced to become suicide bombers.*
Although the Pentagon had sent three hundred advisers to support counter–Boko Haram efforts, the regional militaries that US personnel advised had not proven effective. The governments were making familiar mistakes, prioritizing the killing of terrorists but giving scant consideration to the ways their own human rights abuses and economic neglect w
ere aiding Boko Haram’s recruitment.
As we discussed a possible trip to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria, Colin cautioned that security concerns would make a visit even more complicated than our trip to West Africa during the Ebola outbreak and our four trips to the violent Central African Republic. But making the effort to go would also break new ground. I would be the first cabinet official to visit Cameroon since 1991. I had traveled to Chad earlier in the administration, becoming the most senior US official ever to visit, and would now be returning there for the second time.
Like a good number of American “partners” in fighting terrorism, Cameroon and Chad were run by repressive presidents who had been in power for decades—thirty-four years for Cameroon’s Paul Biya and twenty-five years for Chad’s Idriss Déby—rendering them accountable to almost no one. Their undisciplined armed forces were committing human rights violations against a backdrop of broader state abuses against the general population. While I thought the mounting threat posed by Boko Haram made it necessary (if unappealing) to work with these governments, I also believed we needed to train carefully vetted units and use our military and financial support as leverage to try to secure reform.45 The governments needed to begin punishing soldiers who committed torture and extrajudicial killings, and to allocate economic support to impoverished civilians in areas where Boko Haram had gained ground.
The fact that aid workers had begun warning of imminent mass starvation in some of the conflict-affected areas of Nigeria provided an even more immediate reason for making the trip. Boko Haram’s attacks had so severely disrupted local trade, agriculture, and transportation that more than 50,000 people in the northeastern part of the country were believed to be experiencing famine-like conditions. Hundreds of thousands more could soon starve if they did not get relief. If we went, Colin said, we would be able to use the visit to shake loose $40 million of additional US humanitarian assistance.*
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