State’s Ian Kelly moving from Foggy Bottom to Vienna
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly has been nominated by President Obama to be the U.S. representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the White House announced Monday. Kelly is well known as the daily briefer at the State Department, placed in the difficult position of often having very little new information ...
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly has been nominated by President Obama to be the U.S. representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the White House announced Monday.
Kelly is well known as the daily briefer at the State Department, placed in the difficult position of often having very little new information to offer in the face of barrages of questions from frustrated members of the State Department press corps. As OSCE representative, he would be based in Vienna.
For the first five months of the Obama administration, he was deputy assistant secretary in the bureau for European and Eurasian Affairs. He served as director of the Office of Russian Affairs from 2007-2009 and was counselor for public affairs at the U.S. Mission to NATO before that. He has also been posted overseas in Rome, Ankara, Vienna, Belgrade, Moscow, Leningrad, and Milan, according to the White House announcement.
Other diplomatic nominations announced today include Allan J. Katz for Ambassador to Portugual, Bisa Williams to be Ambassador to the Republic of Niger, and Raul H. Yzaguirre to be Ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
Williams is currently the lead State Department official dealing with Cuba policy. No word yet on her potential replacement or what her move will mean for the Obama administration’s ongoing dialogue with the Cuban government.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
More from Foreign Policy

Saudi-Iranian Détente Is a Wake-Up Call for America
The peace plan is a big deal—and it’s no accident that China brokered it.

The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes Sense
If Israel and its supporters want the country to continue receiving U.S. largesse, they will need to come up with a new narrative.

Putin Is Trapped in the Sunk-Cost Fallacy of War
Moscow is grasping for meaning in a meaningless invasion.

How China’s Saudi-Iran Deal Can Serve U.S. Interests
And why there’s less to Beijing’s diplomatic breakthrough than meets the eye.