Wendy Sherman serves as the deputy secretary of state. Her hands have been full since taking office in March, mainly dealing with China and recently with Afghanistan.
Sherman was born in 1949 in Baltimore and worked as a social worker and in nonprofits before shifting to strategic communication in the 1980s.
She first joined State in 1993 as assistant secretary for legislative affairs. In the past three decades, she served in different positions under three administrations, dealing with issues from North Korea to the Dayton Accords. For the Jewish community, she is mostly known for her role negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.
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“For me personally, one of the most difficult parts was the tension with this beloved country and its people,” Sherman said in 2016 about Israel, according to Defense News.
“So having the dissension and the difficulties that we had in this process – and with the American Jewish community of which I consider myself a part – was very, very painful,” she said then.
In March 2021, she addressed prospects of rejoining the JCPOA noting that it was impossible to return to the starting gate because the world had changed in the six years since the deal was signed.
Among the regional shifts she referenced were the Abraham Accords Donald Trump brokered between Israel and four Arab states.
These normalization deals with Israel were “a good thing,” and they have “changed the geopolitics of the region, and that means that one has to think of this in a different way because there are different elements on the table,” she said.