Supporting Common Cause in Lithuania

In January 2024, Kara McDonald F98 was sworn in as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Lithuania. McDonald has built a career in the foreign service, beginning as an election monitor in Bosnia and Herzegovina during her time as a student at The Fletcher School. She proceeded to work for USAID and the U.S. Department of State, honing her expertise in Central and Eastern Europe.

Fletcher spoke with the ambassador about her work in Lithuania, working in common cause, and the various ways in which Fletcher students and graduates can influence international affairs.

The Fletcher School: Let’s start at the beginning. Why were you interested in pursuing a graduate degree in international affairs? What led you to Fletcher?

Ambassador Kara C. McDonald: I am originally from the Midwest, and I believe I was the first in my immediate family to hold a passport. When I was quite young, I was very interested in international travel. I did a service project where I helped build a community center in the Dominican Republic. In my college years, I spent summers in Geneva, working at the International Labor Organization and switching on and off microphones in an interpretation booth for delegates in the chamber. It happened that in one of my trips to Geneva, a Fletcher student named Maura Lynch F95 was staying at the same hostel. She turned on the fire in me to go to Fletcher. It was really that person-to-person reference that got me looking at the school.

What were you involved in as a student, and how did that ignite your curiosity in new ways?

While I was at Fletcher, I was very interested in going into international relief and humanitarian assistance work, so I signed up for courses in conflict resolution, human rights, and international law. I was a teaching assistant for the late Jeswald Salacuse, and during of my Fletcher summers, I worked at the Reebok Organization to support their International Human Rights Award. My time at Fletcher coincided with the Dayton Accords that brought peace to the former Yugoslav states. It was the time of Srebrenica and the siege on Sarajevo. Many of my courses at Fletcher focused on ethnic conflict and nation building in the post-Cold War era. A State Department official reached out to The Fletcher School to find individuals who could serve as election observers, and through that connection, I became active in election supervision with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In fact, I spent a lot of my second year supervising election registration in Bosnia and Herzegovina while finishing my degree.

What did that work look like? How did that illuminate the next steps in your career?

The electoral process post-Dayton in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a practical application of many of the conflict resolution classes I had taken. I spent several months in a suburb of Sarajevo observing people register to vote. I worked with a local team of about 10 poll workers from the community who supervised the process of building the voter lists. My role was to help resolve conflicts in that process, and to elevate any thorny issues for higher-level review. The goal was to provide international oversight and legitimacy over the process to improve trust among the ethnic groups and parties. The war generated a lot of internal migration and turmoil from the interethnic conflict, so my role was to be a neutral party and lend some credibility. If there were questions of contestation or allegations of problems, international observers were there to help arbitrate or elevate the issues to higher-level review.

I worked on three or four election observation missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1997 into 1998. There’s a whole generation of people who also participated in this kind of work. We're scattered all over the world now, but interethnic conflict and post-Cold War conflict were the questions of my generation.

How did this lead to your work now, and why is this work important to you?

I'm a career foreign service officer. Not too long after I worked with the OSCE, I spent a couple of years at USAID before joining the State Department. I've been in the U.S. government for over 25 years. It’s such a fascinating career; you can work on so many different issues in so many different parts of the world. I always try to encourage students to look at the foreign service because it offers so much breadth and horizon for international work.

I joined the foreign service and was fairly quickly put into Central and Eastern Europe as a regional area of focus. I served in Bucharest, Moldova, and eastern France. Serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Lithuania is extraordinarily rewarding work. It is a part of the world that is a very close ally, but it sits in a very tough neighborhood. It sits on the eastern flank of NATO and is sandwiched between Kaliningrad, Russia on the west and Belarus on the east. Of course, with Russia's attack on Ukraine, with various dynamics in the region, it's very busy, dynamic, but fulfilling work. We are working with Lithuania to defend and protect our freedom and our free world.

How did your Fletcher education prepare you to make challenging decisions in this role?

Fletcher was not just focused on how to write the policy brief. It was more focused on how to create a strategy to address big problems. At the embassy, we have a country team, which is like a boardroom composed of heads of agency and heads of section. Much of the work that we do is about how we create strategies, tying all of these strands together. We're all working in common cause towards specific effects and results that we want to achieve.

A big part of what I took from Fletcher was the network of students. It has such a rich student body. I can remember sitting in conflict resolution courses with a student who was from the government of the People's Republic of China and somebody from Tibet, who is now a member of the Tibetan parliament in exile. Who gets to do that in a graduate school level class and have open, honest conversation? That was very enlightening for me. Building interpersonal relationships is really the foundation of foreign affairs. So much of what we do here at the embassy is based on people-to-people contact and building relationships of trust so we have ways that we can shape the environment around us for positive and peaceful effect. That was very much a dynamic that I learned from Fletcher.

Do you have any advice for current Fletcher students?

Seize the opportunities that come up. The world is truly your oyster. There are so many different ways to work in international affairs. I think it is no longer just a government-to-government world. As I like to say, you can sell apples from many different types of carts, whether it's a foreign affairs agency, the private sector, the NGO sector, or the technology sector. There are so many ways in which to be involved in how our world is connected - it’s a tremendously rewarding line of work. The problems we face can't be solved by one person, one people, one community, or one country necessarily. It requires a lot of people working in common cause to influence, shape, and build trust with others.

Read more about Fletcher’s international negotiation and conflict resolution field of study.