There should be “no more” excuses against the placement of women in leadership roles, prolific scholar, author and speaker Tamara Cofman Wittes told a Zoom audience at a John Hopkins event last year in which she reflected on her three-decade career in US foreign policy.
To ensure that women would not be ignored as they have been in the past, she helped found The Leadership Council for Women in National Security in 2019.
Even before US President Joe Biden took office, the council had transferred to his team the names of more than 850 women qualified to serve in US Senate-confirmed roles in the fields of national security and foreign policy.
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The argument has typically been that “there aren’t enough women in nuclear security” or in “counter-terrorism,” Wittes said the John Hopkins event adding, “we knew that it wasn’t true.”
Wittes herself is now one of those nominees. She is awaiting Congressional confirmation for her new role in the Biden administration working for Samantha Power as the assistant administrator for USAID in the Middle East.
As head of the USAID Middle East bureau, she will oversee development assistance in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. One of her focuses will be oversight of $250 million in Israeli-Palestinian peace building initiatives allocated under the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act. She will also be involved in Middle East policy issues relating to national security.
Power, head of the US Agency for International Development Administration and a US National Security Council member, lauded Wittes’s appointment.
Wittes is “leading voice on the region who has shaped policy from in and out of government,” Power said. “She is also a founder of @lc_wins [the leadership council] which does so much to advocate for women in foreign affairs.”
A native of Michigan who now lives in the Washington area, Wittes has a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a masters and doctorate from Georgetown University, where she has also taught and lectured.
“I grew up in a civically minded family – with a father in the Foreign Service and a mother who would take me along when she went door to door to get out the vote. I moved to Washington after college and decided to pursue a career in foreign policy. I got my PhD in international relations,” Wittes wrote for a small biography posted on the Leadership Council’s website.
One of the first recipients of the Rabin-Peres Peace Award, Wittes edited and helped author the book How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process. In addition, she authored the book Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy and is working on a book about US ties with autocratic countries, called Our SOBs. She also co-hosted a weekly podcast called Rational Security.
Wittes was last a senior research fellow at the Brookings and had in the past been the director of its Center for Middle East Policy. She has written numerous articles and lectures widely on foreign policy, including on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women empowerment and antisemitism.
Her USAID appointment is her second governmental foray. She also worked for US president Barack Obama’s administration as the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs from November 2009 to January 2012 and had a front-row seat to the Arab Spring.
“It was a period of challenge far beyond what we anticipated,” Wittes said at the John Hopkins event in describing the events of those years.
“I ran an assistance program in the bureau [US State Department] that worked across the region in the Arab world and in Israel... to support civil society and to support indigenous demands for political and economic and social change,” Wittes said.
“The work that we were trying to do to support the demands of those in the region .. was insufficient to prepare us when history landed on our doorstep as it did, in December 2010 with the outbreak of the uprising in Tunisia.
“Within six or eight weeks, we had uprisings in a half-a-dozen countries. We evacuated five embassies simultaneously,” she said. Her role, for the most part, was to advise decision makers in heated debates, Wittes told the John Hopkins audience.
One of the more significant achievements from those times, she recalled, was the way she and her team were able to rework her $60-$70 million program “to find money that no other program in the US government could find to support Tunisia in its democratic transition.”
Among the lessons she learned from her time in the State Department was the importance of women leadership.
“I had spent the first half of my career in international relations trying really hard not to be a woman in international relations, just trying to do international relations,” Wittes recalled.
“I came out of my experience in government with an understanding of how much diversity enriches the work that we do. How unavoidable it is to confront issues of exclusion and injustice in our work and how imperative it is for me, at this stage in my career, to be someone who helps push the envelope and makes it better for the people who are coming behind me,” she said.