Paula Dobriansky

Paula Jon Dobriansky
3rd Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs
In office May 1, 2001 – January 20, 2009
President	George W. Bush
Preceded by	Frank E. Loy
Succeeded by	Maria Otero
Special Envoy to Northern Ireland
In office February 15, 2007 – January 20, 2009
President	George W. Bush
Preceded by	Mitchell Reiss
Succeeded by	Declan Kelly
Personal details
Born	September 14, 1955 Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.
Nationality	American
Political party	Republican
Alma mater	Georgetown University Harvard University

Paula Jon Dobriansky (born September 14, 1955) is an American foreign policy expert who has served in key roles as a diplomat and policy maker in the administrations of five U.S. presidents, both Democrat and Republican. She is a specialist in the areas of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as well as political-military affairs. She served as Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs from 2001-2009, making her the longest-serving undersecretary in the State Department’s history. Currently, Dr. Dobriansky is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. [1]

Background

Dobriansky graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in political-military affairs. She is a Fulbright-Hays scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her late father, Lev Dobriansky, was a Ukrainian-American economist and prominent anti-communist activist who initiated the Captive Nations Week during the Eisenhower Administration.[2]

Current role

Since 4 March 2009, Dr. Dobriansky serves as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Dobriansky is also a co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's commission on stabilizing fragile states. She also serves as an Advisory Board member for the Partnership for a Secure America.

As of January 2010, Ambassador Dobriansky served as the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Career Highlights

During her most recent term at the State Department, for which she was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dr. Dobriansky presided over an expanded portfolio of responsibilities as Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs where she led efforts across a range of activities from democracy and human rights and labor to refugee and human trafficking issues to oceans and science, health, climate change.

In 2007 in Bali, she was an architect of the ‘Bali Roadmap’ that established a pragmatic, consensus-driven approach to moving forward towards a new climate treaty. [3] During this period, she vigorously encouraged public-private partnerships including, notably, the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Alliance and a voluntary government-industry initiative deriving from the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT). Also during this period she served as the Administration’s Special Coordinator for Tibet and Presidential Envoy to the Northern Ireland Peace Process for which she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Medal, the State Department’s highest honor [4].

In previous administrations, Dr. Dobriansky served as Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council, Deputy Head of the U.S. Delegation to the 1990 Copenhagen Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and Associate Director for Policy and Programs at the United States Information Agency. Former President Bill Clinton appointed her to serve on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. She also served as a Senior Vice-President and Washington Office Director for the Council on Foreign Relations, where she was the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies.

Over the course of her career, Dr. Dobriansky has received high-level recognitions and orders of merit from the governments of Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine and Romania. She is the recipient of four honorary doctoral degrees.

Dobriansky serves on the Board of Directors for the Washington D.C.-based human rights organization, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

On Climate Change, Dobriansky Urges Creative Thinking Beyond Copenhagen

In an article published in the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Survival journal, Dr. Dobriansky joined forces with a leading scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to urge creative thinking about the “Many Paths Forward” beyond the recently-concluded Copenhagen Conference of Parties on climate change. She and Vaughn Turekian point out that "give the important role that deforestration plays in producing the greenhouse effect, government and NGO-led programs that reduce forest loss are key to a global climate change strategy." [5] In December 2007 9000 delegates from 187 countries arrived in Bali, Indonesia for the UN Climate Change Conference. Diplomats and scientists were convening to try to strike a new global climate treaty. As Dr Rajendra Pachauri arrived the IPCC had issued a string of ever more urgent reports. He was hoping that governments, especially the US were finally listening. Ironically the Bush administration had welcomes Patchauri to the IPCC, expecting that this engineer and economist, on the board of several large Indian energy companies would be cautiously sympathetic to the US position on climate change. Instead Patchauri has repeatedly sounded the alarm, and has put responsibility squarely on the businesses and governments in the industrialized west. Dobriansky didn't see it that way, saying they would make no cuts unless all other nations, including the poorest agreed. For the first time the developing countries stepped forward surprised Dobriansky and they did in fact agree. The developing countries in other words called the US bluff, and even China was in the lead saying we should do that. Dobriansky said "I have to say that, uh, ya know the formulation that has been put forward we cannot accept." She was booed on the floor. Suddenly Dobriansky recognized that the story that was going to come out of Bali was that the United States had destroyed a major climate agreement. So she sat there, flipped the microphone back on, shut the meeting down by saying she would not stand in the way of the consensus.