Katharine Beamer’s Q&A

Katharine M. R. Beamer On Advancing Human Rights, Renewing The Global Magnitsky Act, And Bolstering Public Support For American Diplomacy

By Jonathan Movroydis

Katharine M. R. Beamer, representing the US Department of State, is a National Security Affairs Fellow for the academic year 2021–22 at the Hoover Institution. Beamer’s service as an American diplomat has taken her across Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe and the corridors of the US Capitol.

In this interview, Beamer talks about her two-decade career as a foreign service officer, which was inspired during her years as an undergraduate at Stanford University. She discusses her authorship of the human rights report in Guatemala following that country’s peace accords, which ended a four-decade-long civil war. She details her fellowship in US Congress, where she worked on the Global Magnitsky Act, which places sanctions against corrupt foreign government officials and human rights abusers, prohibiting them from travel to the United States and access to its financial markets.

Beamer also explains that during her fellowship, she plans to explore ways in which the United States’ foreign policy community can best articulate to citizens the role of diplomacy in bolstering national security, advancing America’s economic interests, and promoting democratic values.

Why did you join the United States Foreign Service?

When I was an undergraduate at Stanford studying international relations, I was walking through the main quad one day and talking with an upperclassman about a course we had both taken. I said, “I’m tired of critiquing others’ mistakes—I want to be in the field of shaping and executing foreign policy. How do I do that?”

She replied, “You should take the Foreign Service Exam.” I had never heard about the Foreign Service (and most of the texts we read were about higher-level leaders like presidents, ambassadors, etc., without mention of the career Foreign Service.)  And so I did, as a junior at Stanford. Afterwards, I took an internship at the US embassy in Brussels that really confirmed that this was a career that I wanted to pursue. When I was a senior at Stanford, I passed the Foreign Service oral examination and shortly thereafter received an offer from the State Department. My career started after graduation.

Did you study under any Hoover fellows while you were attending Stanford?

At the time, I did not have a great awareness about Hoover, which is why I so enjoy participating in the mentorship component of our fellowship program—Stanford students need to know about the wealth of knowledge and practical experience at Hoover. However, I did have current Senior Fellow, Emeritus, Stephen Krasner as my first international relations professor. He would go on to become the State Department’s director of policy planning, when I was a junior officer.

Condoleezza Rice was still at Stanford during my sophomore year. She had not yet taken the position as national security advisor in the Bush administration. I tried to take a seminar that she was teaching that year, but the room on the first day was overflowing and seniors were given priority for seating. I was crushed.

Now that I am in this fellowship program, I have had the opportunity to interact with Condi in intimate settings here at Hoover. That has  been an immense joy and honor.

I understand that one of your first days at the State Department was around the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Is that correct?

Yes. My first day was September 10, 2001. On my second day, I was at the National Foreign Affairs training center in Arlington. It is appropriately named in honor of the late secretary of state and Hoover distinguished fellow George P. Shultz. Shortly after 9am, we felt the plane hit the Pentagon nearby and we were evacuated from our facility.

It was quite an introduction to the world of US foreign policy, and a radical moment in terms of the way that diplomacy shifted. In many ways, it is so great to be back at Hoover this year because I get to discuss ideas with people whose essays and books I have been reading over the past 20 years about how the world has changed since I started my career.

Will you tell us about some of the diplomatic assignments that have defined your career thus far?

I have always loved Latin America, and I came into the State Department already speaking fluent Spanish. I knew that this region would be a focus of my career. My first assignment was as the human rights officer in Guatemala. I arrived there six years after that country had concluded its peace accords between parties that had fought in a four-decade-long civil war.

It was a fascinating experience, which involved on the one hand grappling with the legacy of US intervention in Central America and on the other advocating for the protection of human rights.

I authored the human rights report, which is one of the mandated documents that every embassy all over the world sends each year to Congress. Much of my job involved examining the social consequences of the civil war, helping communities find closure, and attending trials of military officers who were implicated in massacres. A large part of my work there, too, was helping the NGO community and justice advocates combat corruption in their nascent democratic institutions. I am proud to say that much of this work helped form the basis for the UN commission against corruption in Guatemala, which served as a model for fighting corruption elsewhere in Latin America.

During my second tour, I changed gears entirely and went to the US embassy in Warsaw, Poland, soon after Poland joined the European Union (EU) in May 2004. It was a time of tremendous optimism and great faith in democracy. It has been heartbreaking to see how the Polish government lately has been really butting up against the EU’s institutional norms. A lot of the work that the United States and its allies have carried out there is at risk of being undone.

After Poland, I went back to Washington and worked in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs  as the desk officer for Paraguay and Uruguay. These two South American countries are quite different. Uruguay is known as the Switzerland of South America. Its population is educated, its politics are relatively stable, and at the time that I was covering the country it was governed by a pragmatic center-left practicing cardiologist. On the other hand, Paraguay faced a more unpredictable path forward in terms of the resilience of its democratic institutions.

I then was assigned to serve in Slovakia, where, again, I had a human rights portfolio. I did a lot of work on the Roma community and Hungarian-Slovak relations amidst the rise of Hungarian nationalism. During my assignment, the US worked with partners in the EU and in-country to help restore the integrity of Slovakia’s judicial system. Although Slovakia was considered a democracy, its institutions were populated with bureaucrats who did not fully understand that they were supposed to be accountable to their citizens.

After that, I worked on Capitol Hill for a year for Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland as part of the State Department fellowship program. In this assignment, I worked on the Russia-specific Magnitsky Act (2012). Originally the Magnitsky Act applied only to Russia and enabled the State and Treasury Departments to apply visa and economic sanctions against that country’s human rights violators and corrupt officials. Congress expanded Magnitsky in 2016 to apply globally and now allows us to sanction people and enterprises engaging in corruption or human rights abuses throughout the world.

Following another brief assignment in Washington working on Caribbean issues, I went to Bolivia during the last few years of the presidency of Evo Morales. While I was there, I oversaw the national referendum about whether Morales should be allowed to amend the constitution so that he could run for another term of office. The Bolivian people turned the reform down; however, Morales was later able to obtain a ruling from loyalists in the constitutional tribunal that abolished term limits and allowed him to run again in 2019. Allegations of fraud against Morales in that election resulted in nationwide demonstrations and his resignation and year-long exile from Bolivia.

Prior to arriving at Hoover, I was stationed in the Dominican Republic (DR), which had experienced unprecedented rates of economic growth after joining the US-Central America-DR Free Trade Agreement in 2007. They had a great period of political stability but were also struggling with the corruption resulting from the excessive power and influence of the executive over other branches of government.

In 2020, right after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Dominican Republic had an internationally observed, free and fair election in which the opposition candidate won for the first time in nearly two decades, and the new government is making serious efforts to combat public corruption. This was a great signal about the resiliency of the Dominican Republic’s democratic institutions.

Going back to your experience in Poland, will you talk about what efforts were made to strengthen democratic institutions and why, in your view, that country is becoming less of a free society?

I was not involved in developing the reforms that the EU officials recommended the Polish government adopt in order to join the EU—remember, that was my second assignment and I was a very junior officer. These included independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, and other various democratic principles.

What I experienced in Poland was a tension between pro-EU actors and the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice Party, which is now the ruling party. The Law and Justice Party appeals to Poles who hold strongly to Catholic values. When I was there, Pope John Paul II, a native of Poland, had passed away and there was a one-million-person vigil that took place in his memory. As then, Catholicism is still an extraordinarily strong feature of Poland’s identity.

In my opinion, what we are seeing now in Poland, Hungary, and other Central European countries is a sort of hesitancy to complete the European project and all that it entails, including the admission of refugees torn apart by political and economic instability in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Poland has thrived economically since joining the European Union and has received a significant amount of money in EU structural funds. Thus, in this post-Brexit moment, I do not think there is a lot of support among the Polish people for leaving the EU. My hope is that the economic benefits of this arrangement will have a moderating effect and help Poles strike a balance with their domestic institutions and the EU norms.

You recently authored an article in The Hill about the Global Magnitsky Act, which you mentioned working on in Senator Cardin’s office. Could you talk about the origins of the policy, its impact, and why you think it should be renewed?

Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer based in Moscow. He uncovered a scheme by which Russian tax officials were going to steal $230 million from the Russian people and blame it on one of his own clients, an American named Bill Browder. Browder authored a fascinating book that outlines this saga called Red Notice.

Instead of thanking Magnitsky for being a brave whistleblower and uncovering corruption, Russian authorities instead threw him in prison, where he died of pancreatitis after being beaten repeatedly by prison guards and denied medical treatment. Browder has since made it his personal mission to find justice for Magnitsky.

Browder was flabbergasted at the lack of consequences for corruption in Russia. He met with American and European politicians to push this idea of naming and shaming those that were implicated in the fraudulent scheme. Browder wanted justice to be exacted on the people who concocted the fraud at the tax office, those who were working as guards and doctors in the prison where Magnitsky was detained, and anybody else who was involved either in the corruption, the cover-up, or the actual mistreatment of Magnitsky. Browder had a copious amount of evidence against people in a dossier that he had compiled.

Browder had worked to advance legislation on both sides of the aisle. Senator Cardin, who chairs the Helsinki Commission, which looks closely at issues of human rights in Central and Eastern Europe, was one of the first sponsors of the bill, along with Senator John McCain, in 2012.

As I mentioned earlier, the bill essentially calls on the State and Treasury Departments to identify corrupt actors and human rights violators, deny their visas so they can’t travel to the United States, and freeze their assets so they can’t use the US financial system to launder their illicit gains.

For example, let's say a tax official in the Russian ministry on a salary of 10,000 rubles per month acquired a $3 million villa in Croatia. Such vast wealth was not likely obtained by any means other than corruption. We don’t want those people to be able to use the US financial system to launder their money. And so, the Magnitsky Act is a powerful tool that can help prevent this kind of activity. It is not the only tool, and there is a lot more that needs to be done in this area, but it does enable diplomats in the field who have evidence of individuals being involved in specific crimes to do something about it. Yet, there is a high evidentiary bar that you must reach to get someone sanctioned.

As I argued in my piece for The Hill, the passage of the Russia-specific Magnitsky Act in 2012 was a truly bipartisan effort. The staff of senators McCain and Cardin worked hard together on this with many other members of the Senate and the House.

The act initially passed as part of a package to repeal what was called the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (1974), which denied permanent normal trade relations to what was then the Soviet Union because of Moscow’s restrictions on Jewish emigration. When Russia was finally cleared to join the World Trade Organization in 2012, Jackson-Vanik needed to be repealed for the United States to grant permanent normal trade relations to Russia. This sent the message that, yes, we want Russia to join the WTO and for US citizens and companies to have the ability to access the Russian market, but at the same time, we need to address the rampant corruption and human rights abuses that still take place there. The bill was amended in 2016 and expanded its scope to corrupt actors and human rights abusers worldwide. Since then, we’ve used these sanctions across the globe to provide tangible consequences to more than two hundred actors who typically commit these crimes with impunity. It’s incredibly important, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I hope we are able to continue improving our ability to keep our financial system from being unwittingly complicit in these crimes.

Are there any challenges to the Global Magnitsky Act getting renewed?

Right now, my impression is not that there is any specific opposition to the renewal of the Global Magnitsky Act, but I am concerned, given all the activities on Capitol Hill, that it won’t be a priority. I’m hopeful it will be added to a future omnibus funding bill.

What will be your research focus at the Hoover Institution?

One project that I am particularly passionate about is encouraging Stanford students to consider a career in the US Foreign Service. I think since California is remote from Washington, DC, students do not necessarily think about government service when they are evaluating their career options. There is also a certain pressure to join the tech sector or pursue jobs in management consulting and investment banking. I am trying to open people's eyes to the existence of the State Department and what a fulfilling career diplomacy can be.

I am also interested in looking at anticorruption mechanisms and democracy, as well as how to better articulate America’s long-term strategic goals in a way that the average citizen finds relevant. In the latter area, I am reminded by the work of career diplomat and current CIA director William Burns, who has always been a wise defender of American diplomacy. I am constantly recommending his memoir to students (or anyone else) who ask me about my career.

It is important to have the support of the public if we are to achieve our foreign policy goals. The State Department does not have a domestic constituency the way that the military does with its bases throughout the United States. We need to do a better job of explaining to the American people the long-term benefits of diplomacy. I have been talking to many groups here at Stanford and thinking about articles that I can write, which would describe the types of work that we do overseas and our advocacy for legislation passed in different countries that help US strategic and economic interests, as well as promote human rights and American values.

Is there anyone at the Hoover Institution who has made you think differently about your profession and study?

Everybody at Hoover pushes me to think differently, which I love. I have been exposed to tremendous intellect. I am really excited about the new initiative on fact-based policy. There is a real space for Hoover to help elevate the level of dialogue, particularly among more conservative voters and outlets.

Amy Zegart, the director of the National Security Affairs Fellowship (NSAF) program, has been indispensable in helping us understand how the government can catch up to the private sector’s capabilities for technological innovation. I’ve also really enjoyed learning more about the military and leadership from my NSAF colleagues and from Secretary [James] Mattis and General [H. R.] McMaster. 

Twenty-three years ago, I took John B. Taylor’s Economics 1 course. He is a very thoughtful person. That a scholar of this caliber still teaches introductory economics is such a gift to Stanford students.

I also have just enjoyed reading a lot of different Hoover fellows’ work. Larry Diamond is someone who has influenced my thinking about democracy, human rights, and other issues that are close to my heart. I am also trying to push myself to read outside of my comfort zone to better understand different policy perspectives.

Where do you look for inspiration?

Professionally, of course I look up to some of the biggest diplomatic giants of the past half century: from George P. Shultz and Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice and William Burns. I’ve also been tremendously inspired by many of the foreign contacts I’ve worked with over the years in pursuit of our shared values. I don’t take our freedoms and our institutions for granted; with all our flaws and mistakes, I am still profoundly grateful to be American and represent our country. 

I am very inspired by the students that I meet with as part of the NSAF mentee program. The energy, enthusiasm, and commitment of Stanford students is contagious. This is a hopeful sign, because my generation is a bit downcast about the future of the United States. We came of age at the apex of American power, but now the international picture is a lot murkier. US leadership is certainly facing more challenges than when I was previously at Stanford, in the late 1990s. I’m a mom, an aunt, and a mentor, and feel a great sense of responsibility to create opportunity and promise for the next generation—that also inspires me.  I’m an eternal optimist and intend to use this time at Hoover to learn from the past and plan for a brighter future.

What does leadership mean to you?

A leader is someone who has a vision that is based on their values and who articulates that clearly and inspires others to take part in fulfilling it. With regard to America’s leadership in the world, I think our public officials should help citizens fully understand America’s strategic goals, achieve their support for principled policies, and strengthen their commitment to democratic values that bind us together as a nation.