Friday, March 29

Wendy Sherman, the toughest negotiator in the White House, stands up to Russia


The proof that the White House believes it can prevent a new war in Ukraine at the expense of the Kremlin is that it has sent Europe to negotiate Wendy Sherman. Seasoned in a thousand battles, this tough 72-year-old diplomat, little given to subtleties and unnecessary smiles, is a born graduate. Ask any American diplomat about Sherman and he will tell you ‘ipso facto’ that he was hugely negotiating with North Korea during the Clinton years and with Iran during the Obama years.

Sherman (Baltimore, 1949) is today undersecretary of state, number two in the mythical American diplomacy, and has on his shoulders the weight of negotiating neither more nor less than with the

Vladimir Putin’s regime, whom his boss, President Joe Biden, called a “murderer” just a year ago. Things between Moscow and Washington are downright bad, and Sherman is trying to prevent a new Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine like the one in 2014.

His week is being hectic. Meetings with his Russian counterpart Sunday and Monday, and meetings with the Atlantic Alliance this Wednesday and with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe this Thursday. And in the meantime, constant conversations with the press in which he does not walk with half measures. “Let’s see,” he said of Putin in a conference call on Monday, “you don’t send 100,000 soldiers to the border of another country to exercise.”

Sherman argues that authenticity, persistence and commitment make the negotiator powerful in all situations

Sherman she is not a career diplomat. She started out as a social worker and joined the Democratic Party. After passing through the Capitol, as an employee of a congresswoman from Maryland, she landed in the State Department at the hands of the Clintons, and since then she has remained in the Government when the Democrats have governed, alternating their responsibilities with think tanks, consultancies and teaching at Harvard University.

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The high point of his career so far had been leading the U.S. team in the Iran denuclearization negotiations, which were translated into an agreement in 2015 after an intense dialogue also held in Geneva, a city that he already knows well.

She herself recounted in 2018 that during the twenty-fifth day of negotiations, when the consensus between the parties seemed closed, the Iranians hesitated, replanting one of their commitments. Sherman wept in rage. That implication stunned the iranians, which they immediately accepted and moved on to the next matter. “When you bring values ​​such as authenticity, persistence and commitment to the negotiating table, both at work and in personal life, you are enormously powerful,” he says.

For Donald Trump and the Republicans, as well as for Israel, that agreement was a surrender of the west faced with threats from the Ayatollah regime, and the former president in fact withdrew the US from the treaty unilaterally. At this moment, Biden is studying his return, which depends on negotiations in Vienna.

Sherman, meanwhile, is busy with his contacts with Russia. He went to the first bilateral round with his homework done and a series of offers that impressed his counterpart. His Russian counterpart, Sergei RiabkovShe said after their face-to-face that although there was much to be done, “the other party listened carefully and was receptive.” Apparently, Sherman put on the table a generous proposal to limit the location of medium-range missiles, something that at first seemed to please Moscow.


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