The Conciliator

The 79-year-old Democratic lawmaker sought to force a vote to confirm 10 new ambassadors. The nominees weren’t the big campaign donors who typically get glitzy posts in Paris and Rome. They were career diplomats, tapped to represent Washington in places such as Benin, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, and Kyrgyzstan, whose nominations are frequently held up for political horse-trading. And sure enough, despite having had successful confirmation hearings, their nominations had stalled amid partisan fighting.

Fed up with the lack of progress, Shaheen—the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee—made her move. She played the China card. Shaheen gave a speech highlighting the dearth of confirmed U.S. ambassadors while Beijing makes diplomatic inroads around the globe.

As she spoke, she gestured to two world maps juxtaposing where the United States and China have ambassadors. While the map of China’s top envoys appeared to be almost filled out, the U.S. map showcased gaping white spaces across most of Africa, with many other unfilled positions in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Empty posts in Russia and Brazil loomed particularly large.

Shaheen finished her remarks and requested the confirmation of the nominees. None of the other 99 senators objected—an almost unheard-of result in today’s polarized Senate.

“I think this is very uniquely Jeanne Shaheen,” said Naz Durakoglu, the Democratic staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime staffer for Shaheen, recalling how other Senate staff for both Democrats and Republicans laughed when they realized what the senator was doing and that she was going to get away with it. “Because she was the one doing it, no one objected.”

Shaheen, who is retiring at the end of the year, has spent nearly two decades on Capitol Hill working in a bipartisan manner to strike modest compromises. That hasn’t always made her popular with the Democratic base, which has been hunting for its own flamethrowers to meet the challenge of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

Flamethrower she is not. Rather, Shaheen operates as a conciliator, doing the often-unglamorous work of trying to build consensus. No matter how outraged she may be over Trump’s latest norm-defying move, she always speaks in measured, even tones.

“You can’t just say ‘I’m going to give up.’ You’ve got to keep at it. I believe in persistence,” the senator said during a June interview in her office in the Senate’s Hart Office Building.

In her two final years in office, Shaheen has had to watch some of her signature foreign-policy achievements—such as securing initiatives to advance women’s rights, which she spent years painstakingly building bipartisan support for—come undone. Will her legacy be defined by Trumpism, or does her story still have a twist in the tale?

---

Prominently featured in Shaheen’s office is a large wood-and-glass display case full of the challenge coins that the senator has received throughout her long public service career, including from the New Hampshire Air National Guard, the U.S. Navy, and various U.S. embassies around the globe. On the walls is a series of framed woodblock prints by New Hampshire artist Matt Brown, who loaned them to the office.

New Hampshire is not just the state that Shaheen represents—it’s a place whose politics deeply shaped her.

She was the state’s governor for six years, from 1997 to 2003. Because of the moderate nature of New Hampshire’s electorate, which lately trends Democratic but still elects Republicans for statewide office, Shaheen believes that she has bipartisan policymaking in her DNA.

“The whole time I was governor, I had a Republican legislature,” she said. “My career in politics has been about trying to work in a bipartisan manner.”

New Hampshire is unique in having an elected Executive Council, also known as a governor’s council. “It’s a carryover from colonial days, and it approves all nominees and all contracts. And the governor and council meet in public session twice a month,” Shaheen said, adding that throughout her tenure as governor, Republicans held nearly all the seats on the council. “So, in order to get anything done, we had to figure out how to work together.”

The senator’s legislating philosophy is similar to her governing philosophy and can generally be summed up by the old aphorism: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good.”

That ethos has guided many of Shaheen’s conversations with fellow Democrats during the second Trump administration. It has also enabled multiple small but meaningful policy wins, such as in summer 2025, when she voted to confirm Mike Waltz as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in exchange for the White House releasing $75 million in withheld foreign aid to humanitarian programs in Haiti and Nigeria.

Shaheen also teamed up with Republican Sen. Jim Risch on legislation targeting Russia’s shadow fleet—the aging, reflagged oil tankers that Moscow uses to evade energy sanctions.

Those penalties eventually made it into the massive new Russia sanctions law that Trump signed in September. Shaheen wasn’t the initial sponsor of the broader law—that was the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham—but she played a no less pivotal role in prodding Democrats, who were leery over giving Trump additional powers to impose sweeping tariffs, into holding their noses and backing the legislation to support Ukraine.

“In my mind, it’s a trade-off, and I think the most critical issue right now is putting pressure on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and trying to do everything we can to end the war in Ukraine,” Shaheen said. “Is it a perfect bill? No. Legislation is never perfect. But would it help us to really put pressure on Putin? The answer is yes.”

With Graham’s unexpected passing, Shaheen stepped forward to shoulder even more of the work of muscling the Russia sanctions legislation through the House and the Senate. As it happened, “the tremendous shock of Graham’s death really crystallized in people’s minds how important it was to get this done,” said Amy English, the deputy staff director for Democrats on Senate Foreign Relations. “This was literally Graham’s final wish.”

Even so, it took Shaheen and her strong working relationships with Republicans such as Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Katie Britt, to hammer out sufficient agreements on amendments with Republicans and Democrats to clear a procedural path to passage.

“It really does take someone that is absolutely dogged in seizing the moment to push something like this through,” English said, observing that Shaheen cleared much of her schedule last month when the House took up and subsequently passed the Russia sanctions bill.

---

Advancing global women’s rights has been a passion for Shaheen since her earliest years in the Senate, which she joined in 2009.

When I visited Shaheen’s office in June, I was eight months pregnant and more out of breath than I cared to admit from the short walk from the Uber to her office. Shaheen and her staff greeted me warmly, asking how I was managing in the intense summer heat. If they noticed that, beneath my long dress, one of my swollen ankles had burst the strap of my sandal, they were too gracious to comment.

I later learned from one of her aides that all the staff on the leadership teams in Shaheen’s personal office and on the Democratic side of the Foreign Relations Committee are working moms. “It just tells you about her values,” Durakoglu said.

In the Senate, Shaheen has pushed for the establishment of an ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and painstakingly secured passage during the first Trump administration of her Women, Peace, and Security Act (WPS), which requires the U.S. government to develop strategies for increasing the role of women in conflict prevention and peace processes around the world.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in April 2025 that he was ending the Defense Department’s implementation of the WPS law, Shaheen released a statement that accused the defense chief of having “absolutely no idea what he’s doing.”

More than a year later, she is still clearly upset with Hegseth’s decision. But she uses the language of a diplomat to express that dismay.

“It’s frustrating, and I think it’s bad policy,” Shaheen said, citing data she has showing that societies that empower women are more stable and tend to be more democratic. “I think Hegseth and the policies of this administration are…”—here she breaks for a prolonged pause to find the right word—“…not only shortsighted; they’re wrong.”

---

For someone just months from retirement, Shaheen doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

After Trump announced on Oct. 9 that he was unilaterally lifting U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel, Shaheen worked quickly with Democrats and Republicans to release a bipartisan statement condemning the move.

“We’re doing so much more than when she wasn’t retiring,” Durakoglu told me. “Part of the reason for that is because, deep down, she probably is worried about what this place is going to look like after her and some of her colleagues with similar mindsets leave. But she wouldn’t be trying this hard and putting herself out there in this way if she didn’t think there was a good chance that her way would succeed.”

The senator’s ability to work with Republicans in specific policy areas such as shoring up support for Ukraine notwithstanding, it’s clear that Shaheen is disappointed with how her GOP colleagues have accepted many of Trump’s foreign-policy moves that they would have surely opposed had they been undertaken by a Democratic president.

Republicans’ failure to conduct oversight of Trump’s nearly eight-month war with Iran, which he launched with little forewarning and no congressional authorization, weighs heavily on Shaheen’s mind. I asked if she thinks that the experience of the Iran war might finally prompt Republicans to reassert themselves to rein in a wayward commander in chief.

She rattled off a long list of what she sees as the war’s strategic failures, from Iran’s increased control of the Strait of Hormuz to having a more hard-line regime in Tehran than there was before the war. “I have not heard one Republican acknowledge that, even behind closed doors,” she said, before adding, “which is shocking.”

I also asked if she sensed in Republicans any greater willingness to defend their constitutional power of the purse.

“They’re really not very willing to engage even in the conversation. It’s more about, ‘Well, that’s Donald Trump. I can’t do anything about him.’ That’s sort of the attitude,” Shaheen said.

In September, the White House canceled almost $1 billion in congressionally directed spending toward programs that mostly benefit refugees and unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States.

“So many of the Republicans who were willing to take a stand against Trump are gone, either voluntarily or like [Sen. Bill] Cassidy, because Trump is opposed,” Shaheen said. Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in the Senate’s impeachment trial following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, lost in a party primary earlier this year to a hard-line MAGA challenger backed by the president.

“My argument is: ‘So you lose your election? What’s more important? Your principles, or staying in office?’ And that argument just doesn’t carry much weight with most people,” Shaheen said.

Polls have been painting an increasingly grim picture for Republicans’ prospects in next month’s midterm elections. If Democrats wind up winning the House and potentially even the Senate, Trump’s war against Iran will have played a significant role in costing Republicans much of their power on Capitol Hill.

Shaheen is hopeful that the November vote could represent a turning point. “It’ll be interesting to see in the upcoming elections if there are any of those states that have historically been Republican but don’t vote Republican this time,” she said. “I think that’s what it’s going to take in order to get people to think about doing more to work together.”