No superlative was spared when construction of the British Embassy to the United States was completed in 1930. It was a “home fit for a king,” as the Washington Post put it, designed to echo the intimidating elegance of an English country manor.
No superlative was spared when construction of the British Embassy to the United States was completed in 1930. It was a “home fit for a king,” as the Washington Post put it, designed to echo the intimidating elegance of an English country manor.
If the original embassy, which now serves as the ambassador’s residence, captures the sort of high-glamor diplomacy that Netflix would approve of, then the chancellery building next door—all concrete colonnades and flimsy windows—evokes a British state school from the 1960s.
As I wait in the lobby for my escort to meet with Ambassador Karen Pierce, two young British soldiers in uniform mill around the room. “I thought it would be more glamorous,” I hear one of them say to the other. Then I’m whisked through a corridor to the ambassador’s office, lined with portraits of her predecessors dating back to the late 18th century. All of them are men.
In the high stakes world of diplomacy, a Washington posting is the equivalent of competing in the Olympic Games: reserved for only the most limber of envoys. The British ambassador to the United States is the equivalent rank to a four-star general, the only one of its kind in the British foreign service. Since taking up the position in early 2020 during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pierce has served as a steady hand in Washington amid a churn of prime ministers, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the death of the U.K’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.
The ambassador’s airy study is dotted with artifacts gathered during Pierce’s 41 years with the foreign office. A vast collection of fridge magnets, more than 20 years in the making, stretches several feet up the wall. “The tackier the better,” she says.
A self-professed “total girl” with a passion for military hardware, Pierce has perched a model of a fighter jet and a limited edition British Barbie in a trench coat behind her desk.
Affable and fiercely intelligent, Pierce is at ease around journalists. (A briefing book diligently prepared by her staff goes untouched during our conversation.) We met in October, shortly after Hamas’s rampage in southern Israel, which shattered assumptions about the Middle East and plunged the region into war once again.
After a disorienting few years marked by the pandemic and the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it’s difficult to discern whether the world is indeed becoming a more volatile place, as it often seems—or whether the ubiquity of smartphones and social media has amplified the sense of urgency. If anyone would know the answer, it’s Pierce.
“I do think there’s something different about this first quarter of the 21st century because of the nature of the problems,” Pierce says. The “big global problems,” as she puts it—climate change, migration, and global public health—were always going to be there. But they have been exacerbated, she says, by wars and the pandemic, while the international community’s response is increasingly complicated by the rapid pace of technological change. Not to mention Russia’s and China’s hopes of flipping the global chessboard in its entirety. “When you put all that together, that’s a lot to wade through,” she concedes.
Still, moments of upheaval such as this one are what define a career in diplomacy. “They’re kind of what you join the foreign service to be involved in, which sounds a bit gruesome,” Pierce says. “I wanted to have a part, however small, in the management of international affairs.”
Pierce has had a hand in shaping the United Kingdom’s response to some of the biggest foreign-policy crises of recent decades, from negotiating peace terms in the Balkans, to the reconstruction of Afghanistan’s economy, to helping marshal a trans-Atlantic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Statecraft involves delicate finesse. It also requires stamina, which must be why Pierce often speaks about diplomacy in sporting terms; it is, she says, a “contact sport.”
Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vasily Nebenzya talks with British Ambassador to the U.N. Karen Pierce during a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting concerning the situation in Syria at the U.N. headquarters in New York on April 14, 2018. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Pierce arrived in New York City as the British ambassador to the United Nations in 2018, shortly after Russian security agents poisoned a former spy, Sergei Skripal, on British soil. It fell to Pierce to confront the Russians at the Security Council, where she developed a reputation for her gladiatorial sparring matches with her Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya.
In a particularly memorable exchange, Nebenzya likened the accusations leveled against Moscow to the trial scene in the book Alice in Wonderland, during which the Queen of Hearts demands that the sentence be handed down before the verdict. Pierce fired back with her own quote from the Lewis Carroll novel: “There is another very good quote from Alice in Wonderland, which is ‘sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,’ so I think that’s the quote that suits my Russian colleague best.”
“All the adrenaline comes, and I don’t like being beaten,” she says briskly of these high stakes interactions. “I don’t do sports, but this is the equivalent of running.”
Pierce has negotiated with Russian diplomats for decades, dating back to the waning days of the Cold War. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Western diplomats often remarked on the professionalism of the Russian diplomatic corps, describing its members as well-briefed and staunch defenders of their national interests who value a worthy opponent.
“They respect enemies—adversaries—who are tough and stand up to them,” Pierce says.
Despite their acerbic exchanges at the Security Council, Pierce and the Russian ambassador to the United Nations were able to maintain a working relationship on areas of mutual interest, such as the Iran nuclear deal, which former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018. That all changed following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
“Now the Russians have just decided to double down on being difficult and disruptive, and you can get less and less done,” Pierce says.
Pierce talks with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley at a U.N. Security Council emergency session in New York on May 30, 2018. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
Pierce was the first woman to take up the United Kingdom’s seat at the U.N. Security Council, and is likely the first person to do so wearing a feather boa. In hard-nosed diplomacy at the U.N., some countries have been known to use misogyny as a negotiating tactic to try to disorient women diplomats, including by talking over them, dismissing them, or ignoring them altogether.
“A favorite one is not to use women’s [diplomatic] titles,” Pierce says. “But because I like to win, it doesn’t have the effect on me that they want it to have. It has the opposite effect.”
Growing up in Preston, a small city in northwest England, Pierce credits a photograph in the Sunday Times magazine—which showed the U.S. consul to Nice, Eleanor Hicks, stepping aboard an aircraft carrier in southern France—as her inspiration to join the foreign office. It seems to have been as much the aircraft carrier as it was the glamor of the scene that caught the eye of a young Pierce. “I’ve always liked military hardware,” she says.
In her many decades with the foreign office, Pierce has seen the fallout of some of the most unspeakable atrocities, including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War and Myanmar’s violent purge of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims.
In spite of it all, she has long described herself as an optimist. “I think if you’re not an optimist, then what are you going to get up and do the next day? You have to believe a way through could be found,” she says. “For me, it’s tied up with problem-solving.”
Even in situations where predictions are dire, Pierce says, “we can do something about it, even if it’s only a small thing. And that might change the dynamic, and then that gives you something to build on.”
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