Craig Dunkerley

About

Former ambassador Craig Dunkerley is a retired career member (FE-MC) of the Senior Foreign Service and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the NESA Center since 2003. He was an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

As the Secretary of State’s Special Envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) from 1997 through 2001, he led both the successful US negotiating effort to adapt the CFE Treaty, signed at the Istanbul OSCE Summit in 1999, and a subsequent diplomatic campaign to facilitate the staged withdrawal of Russian military forces from Georgia and Moldova. He was confirmed by the US Senate with the rank of ambassador in this capacity.

He has served as Associate Dean at the Foreign Service Institute, responsible for the Senior Seminar. In the mid-1990s, as director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs (EUR/RPM), he managed one of the Department of State’s largest offices, with day-to-day responsibility for political/military issues related to NATO’s first round of post–Cold War enlargement and those associated with NATO’s post–Dayton Agreement engagement in Bosnia.

In the late 1980s, he served in Brussels as political counselor to the US Mission to NATO, handling discussion with the Allies of political/military issues arising out of German reunification, dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and Desert Shield/Storm. He previously served as a member of the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff (including duty as speechwriter for then Secretary of State George P. Shultz). As a member of the Department’s Office of Soviet Affairs in Washington, he was a senior staff member on several US-Soviet arms control negotiations in Geneva, Stockholm, and Moscow during this period.

A graduate of Amherst College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Dunkerley entered the Foreign Service in 1971. During his career, he has received the Department of State’s awards for Vietnam Service, Superior Honor, Meritorious Honor, and Senior Performance on a number of occasions, as well as the department’s Distinguished Honor Award and the Presidential Meritorious Service Award.