Wendy Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, Plans to Retire

After Russia massed 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border in preparation for an invasion, the Biden administration sent one of its top diplomats to talk to its Russian counterpart in an attempt to dissuade Moscow from a full-scale war.

Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, met with Sergei A. Ryabkov at the US mission in Geneva in January 2022. Mr. Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, left at lunch and returned demanding that the United States respond in writing. draft agreement on security issues that the country has presented earlier.

The document is a non-starter for President Biden, and Ms. Sherman soon realized that Mr. Ryabkov’s request was a cover for the inevitable war.

“We knew we were going to be in the race,” he said in an interview Thursday night.

In an email to State Department employees on Friday morning, Ms. Sherman announced his retirement, 30 years after he walked into the agency’s headquarters for his first diplomatic assignment and as the United States was engaged in the most important military campaign in Europe since World War II. War II. He plans to leave his job on June 30.

Mrs. Sherman, 73, has been a fixture in foreign policy circles in Washington and world capitals as a go-to diplomat for difficult negotiations with US rivals and enemies: Iran, North Korea, Russia and, mostly recently, China.

Along the way, Ms. Sherman became a role model for women in foreign political institutions. She was the first woman to serve as deputy secretary of state and, in the Obama administration, as political affairs secretary, the third-ranking position in the State Department. He has worked in three Democratic administrations and under five secretaries of state. In his work as deputy secretary alone, he has visited 39 countries.

“For many of us, especially as senior women in national security – there have been few more effective or consequential leaders in foreign policy in recent memory, and then add fewer women,” said Suzy George, chief of staff at the State Department and associate from Ms. Sherman since 1995.

Warren M. Christopher, the first secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, tapped Ms. Sherman, who worked for a media consulting company at the time, for his first job at the State Department, as assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs. Later, in Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, Ms. Sherman worked on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and North Korea talks. He accompanied Ms. Albright went to Pyongyang in the first visit to North Korea by a US secretary of state.

His most difficult diplomatic assignment may have been leading US negotiators in talks with Iran over the nuclear deal during the Obama administration. In 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the final agreement, which limited Iran’s nuclear program but came under fire from Republican politicians for what they said was a failure to address certain military activities. President Donald J. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, which Iran had already done.

In the post of Ms. Sherman now, he has been the point person in the State Department on China policy. He must balance competing priorities: working with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to maintain communication channels while also opposing China’s policies around the globe. He flew to Tianjin in 2021 to meet with Wang Yi, then foreign minister, and men in white hazmat suits escorted Ms. Sherman and her friends to their hotel.

When the Pentagon detected Chinese spy balloons flying over the United States this year, Ms. Sherman called Chinese diplomats to deliver a démarche.

“She is the iron lady of US diplomacy,” said Cho Hyun-dong, South Korea’s ambassador to Washington, adding that Ms. Sherman played a “very constructive” role in helping to improve relations between his country and Japan.

Jonathan Finer, the deputy national security adviser, said Ms. Sherman was the Biden administration’s standard diplomat for delivering “difficult conversations in difficult places.”

Mr. Finer and Ms. Sherman visited Kyiv in January, but this is not the first time in Ukraine: In a side-by-side photo in Washington, they planted flowers in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in 2014, where security forces under the pro-Russian President opened fire dozens of peaceful protesters died.

In August, Ms. Sherman visited the Solomon Islands with Caroline Kennedy, the ambassador to Australia. One of the goals is to signal US commitment to the region where China is engaged. But Ms. Sherman was also on a personal mission: the occasion was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the signature battle of World War II in which his father, a Marine, was wounded. He carried a green military hat on his trip and carried it to the podium as he spoke.

“It was a very, very intense time,” Ms. Sherman said. “I landed on an airstrip from which the Marines fought in World War II, and I landed on a plane marked United States.”