Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske on Diplomacy, Judgment, and the Reality of Foreign Service Work

Diplomacy is often imagined as prestige, protocol, and high-level strategy. In practice, Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske describes it as something more demanding and more human: reading people accurately, understanding your own government’s limits, and finding real common ground without losing sight of the mission.
In this conversation, Kubiske reflects on the unexpected path that brought her into the Foreign Service, why economics became central to her work, and how judgment actually gets built over time—less through theory than through mistakes, curiosity, and experience. She also offers a candid look at the hard trade-offs of diplomatic service, including working with flawed actors, navigating policy reversals across administrations, and representing U.S. values in moments when American conduct itself was under strain.
We also discuss what she learned in Honduras and Brazil, what made the work worth it across decades of service, and how students can test whether the Foreign Service is a real fit before romanticizing it. Her advice is clear: go overseas, try the work, and learn diplomacy as practitioners do—through institutions, people, and lived experience.

-Lisa J. Kubiske is a career Foreign Service officer and former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

Career as a single problem
Ben Wolf (BW): If you had to describe your career as a single problem you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske (LK): To make the world a more prosperous and peaceful place—that’s the problem to solve.
What drew me to the career was, actually, a degree of happenstance. I had a lot of international background traveling with my family growing up. And I spoke Spanish because I’d done a year abroad—I studied in Mexico, and then a year abroad in Peru.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I did know that when I had gone back to Peru for a year after my year abroad, people couldn’t pigeonhole me. Was I government? Was I a spy? Was I an academic? I wasn’t any of those things.
So my year in Peru had already made me more aware of what my own political and moral values were, because I had been there when they had been nationalizing all these industries. I didn’t like that. They didn’t nationalize the press.
And I figured I should belong to some kind of institution—have some kind of connection where people would understand. So I looked for jobs, and I definitely had a positive-negative reaction to working in the U.S. government, but not to representing the United States.
So I took the Foreign Service exam because it was free, and it was there, and I was in a master’s program in international affairs at Georgetown. And I thought, well, I’ll just try it.
I actually thought I wanted to do policy, and when they send you overseas, they tell you: you’re not making policy; you’re implementing policy. That’s not quite 100% true, because the way you send suggestions back through the State Department, you can be quite influential at times. But I thought originally I wanted to do policy.
Then I got overseas, and I thought: well, I’ll try it for a tour. I’ll try it for another tour. I kept doing well, so I stayed in, and I did eventually become an ambassador.

What diplomacy is in practice
BW: When you first entered the work, what did you think diplomacy was? And what did you learn it actually is once you were inside the State Department?

LK: I thought it was trying to bring everybody onto the same page through dialogue. That’s what I thought, and that is what it is. But you have a lot of tools at your disposal.
Particularly during most of my career, the U.S. was an admired place. That definitely helped. The fact that we were also interested in development, and that we represented—or tried to represent—moral values and human rights values: those were positives. And the fact that our economy, for a lot of the period, was doing well—it also was interesting to people.
People could partner with us, or sometimes emigrate to the U.S.—all of that. So there were definitely tools. It wasn’t just dialogue, but it was definitely trying to find common ground and showing how what we were interested in for ourselves and for the world had a lot in common with what they might like to do as well—or why they would like to have a relationship with us.

Why economics became central
BW: A lot of your work sits at the intersection of economic policy and on-the-ground diplomacy. When did you realize economics would become central to your toolkit?

LK: That’s another thing I kind of fell into.
The first job I got out of graduate school was not the Foreign Service. I had taken the Foreign Service exam, but they didn’t contact me for a long time. So I ended up with a job in the Economic Research Service at the Agriculture Department—USDA.
They taught me a lot of practical agricultural economics—sort of practical, focused economics. My interest had been more in development, but that’s okay. I had taken some economics courses before, but it became real when I was doing it with the Agriculture Department.
Then when I did get into the State Department, they said, “Oh, well, obviously you have all this economic experience—we’re putting you in the economic specialty.” And I thought, “Well, I’m actually interested in democracy,” but that’s okay—development, that’s okay. I can do this.
And the good thing about the State Department is that when you do economics, there are so many different types of economics—everything from trade and investment to sanctions, development, and work with international organizations—that every tour can be a little bit different. So I found a home there, basically.

Judgment: what it is and how you learn it
BW: People talk about “good judgment” as essential in foreign policy. What does good judgment look like in a role like being an ambassador—and how do you train it rather than just hoping you have it?

LK: I’d never thought about that question.
I guess it gets trained by the mistakes that you make. But good judgment is: you can read the other—whoever you’re working with, either a country or an individual—so that you truly understand where they’re coming from, and where you can find common ground.
And you understand your own government and your own country. So you understand what we’re trying to put out there. And you also understand the limits of what you can do.
Through that sort of informational filter, you can decide how to move forward. There’s room in that for creativity—that’s definitely what you want—and curiosity is also part of what gets you some of the information you need to make a good decision. But you’re also guided by your own moral values.
American moral values—it doesn’t really matter what religion you come from—pretty much Americans all kind of have a similar interest in freedom, however you want to define that, and prosperity, and some basic security for your family, some ability to aspire for better for the future, for your kids. That’s common to everybody. So you build on that.

Honduras: principles vs. pragmatism
BW: When you were Ambassador to Honduras, what was the hardest recurring trade-off you faced between principles and pragmatism?

LK: A realization that you have to deal with people that may have checkered backgrounds.

BW: And once you confront that reality, how do you operate without letting it corrode the mission?

LK: Well, you don’t have much choice. You can’t avoid all the people in the world that you would disagree with—or where the U.S. would have a different view of the person—because you keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve.
So in the case of Honduras, for example, their justice system didn’t work. There was a lot of impunity, and a lot of that impunity existed because people with power allowed it to happen—made worse by the flow of drugs through the country.
But if you wanted to have stability in the country, which is something the U.S. also wanted, part of getting there was economic futures for poor people in the country.
And so you talk to the people who were in power, and you try to figure out economic development projects—or election projects, that was another one—that would lead to that goal you were interested in, which was more opportunity for people who were more or less outside the system.

Brazil: working with a global-aspiring power
BW: You also served in senior roles in Brazil. What did that experience teach you about working with a major regional power—something you couldn’t learn in Washington?

LK: Well, you always learn things when you’re overseas. Washington is very Washington-focused. I suppose if I had interviewed 20 people—or even the right three people—I would have gotten it, but countries have very different characteristics.
In Brazil, the people that I dealt with—whether government or not government—didn’t want to be told what to do. Compared to a country like Honduras, where they definitely did want to be told what to do. And I didn’t know that ahead of time. But I learned that.
But the other thing was: Brazil actually aspired to be a global power, not just a regional power. And so there were a whole set of issues—basically all the global issues that we used to deal with the Europeans on—whether it was nonproliferation in Iran, or climate change, or energy production, particularly biofuels in those days.
And so what I learned was: the way to deal with Brazil was to talk about those issues and see where in the world we could work together. And we did that very successfully, actually, in the energy area. And we were starting to do it in a number of other areas too—space and agriculture, and that kind of thing.
You learn a lot from every country you’re in, and every country brings something positive to the table. Brazil brings a lot of positives to the table. And as long as you’re working with them in a constructive way, as opposed to an “I’m going to criticize you” kind of way, you can get very far.
So those were all things I learned being in Brazil.

The hardest parts you don’t anticipate
BW: Looking back across your career in the Foreign Service, what’s been the most challenging part—something you wish you had known earlier, before entering the work?

LK: The world doesn’t stand still. Governments change, including ours.
So you think—you know that line about the arc of justice bending toward the positive. That may be true, but it’s back and forth, right?
And in this Trump era, the policies have changed so dramatically that I never expected there would be an effort to undo as much of what had been U.S. policy for my entire career, basically. And that’s a tough thing.
The other tough thing was: the guy who became president of Honduras, when I was there, ended up being extradited to the U.S. on drug charges. And that’s a tough thing to discover, when you realize this is more than the usual situation.
A third is in the human rights area. The U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib happened when I was in the Dominican Republic. I was the number two in the embassy—the deputy chief of mission—and I basically told my ambassador: it’s going to be a little hard for us to say that we’re promoting human rights when this is what we’re doing.
So those were all challenges.

What makes it worth it
BW: On the flip side, what’s been the most rewarding part of the career? Is there a moment that stands out?

LK: Well, for a long time, the one thing I did in my very first tour was coordinate all the search teams after a major earthquake in Mexico. It was 1985, so at the very beginning of my career. There had been this huge, huge, huge earthquake, and Washington sent down three different types of search teams, and I coordinated all of them as a first-tour officer. And we saved lives.
So that was definitely the single most rewarding thing. But there were many, many rewarding moments—dealing with people, seeing where you could bring the U.S. and people together, making their lives and ours better.
There was a port in one country that wanted to build a very secure port, and helping them do that was another big positive thing. So many areas.

Advice for students: test fit, don’t romanticize
BW: As we close, I want to turn this directly to students. For a smart college student who’s drawn to this life, what should they do in the next six months to test fit—before they start romanticizing a career in the Foreign Service?

LK: First of all, don’t romanticize it. It has its ups and downs.
Certainly the State Department has some internships, but other organizations have internships too—try to apply for some of those. Possibly an international organization, or regional ones.
In my area, which is mostly Latin America, with some China, the Inter-American Development Bank is probably worth pursuing to see what you can do with them. It could be a Washington-based job, but possibly they have other things. Maybe they have something remote where you could get a feel for it.
But definitely going overseas is a good thing to do. So even just studying overseas, and then making contact with different kinds of organizations—I think that would be a way to go.

What to read and where to learn more
BW: For a student who wants to learn the work the way practitioners understand it, what’s a book you recommend—and why?

LK: There’s an author named Nick Kralev. He’s written a couple of books, one of which I’m in, which I don’t have here. I think it’s called Diplomatic Tradecraft.
In that book, he has different chapters on lots of aspects of diplomacy, and they’re written mostly by former U.S. ambassadors, so you can get a really good sense of the advice that all of these former ambassadors give. I wrote the economic chapter.
He has other books that he did beforehand too—one of which I don’t remember the name—but it interviewed a number of ambassadors, and they just talked about their careers.
And the third thing: there’s an organization called ADST—the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. They collect oral histories from ambassadors, mostly ambassadors. You can go on their website, ADST.org, and click around until you find how to get access to their oral histories.