Biden Women | Samantha Powers and Wendy Sherman Return Soft Power to US Foreign Policy

Two Harvard women diplomats with deep foreign policy credentials will assume major roles in the new Biden Administration. Both former Obama administration officials are believers in “soft power” and US diplomacy on the world stage.

Samantha Power, the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School and the William D. Zabel '61 Professor of the Practice in Human Rights at Harvard Law School, has been nominated to be the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Wendy R. Sherman, professor of the practice of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the School’s Center for Public Leadership, has been nominated to serve as deputy secretary of state.

Writes the Harvard Kennedy School:

Power served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017 and before that as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights. A former journalist, Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and has written a memoir, The Education of an Idealist. Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a professor at the Kennedy School.

Sherman served as under secretary of state for political affairs from 2011 to 2015. She was the lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal and also led talks with North Korea on its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs. She began her career as a social worker and activist on child welfare and low-income housing issues and was director of EMILY’s List before joining the State Department during the Clinton administration. She is the author of Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power and Persistence.

On the subject of US relations with Iran, Sherman said last week “We’re going to work hard at this, because we have lost credibility, we are seen as weaker” after Trump.

On a sad note for the well-known Wendy Sherman, her husband Robert Alan ‘Bobby’ Sherman’s graveside service was today, Monday Jan. 25, 2021.