What It Really Means to Be a U.S. Foreign Service Officer — One Diplomat's Story

Twenty Years, Twenty Countries, and the People I Carried Home With Me

People always ask me what it was like.

They picture the embassies, the formal dinners, the motorcades. And yes — there were motorcades. I once coordinated press logistics for VP Biden's visit to Baghdad and made sure the Secretary of Defense got where he needed to go without a single camera catching something it shouldn't. I negotiated in rooms at the United Nations where the words we chose, the precise language of a resolution, would either stop money from flowing to terrorist networks or wouldn't. I sat across from a Four-Star General every morning for two years and told him what was happening in 104 countries across Europe and Africa that he needed to understand before 0800.

‍But that's not what I remember when I think about twenty years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer.

‍What I remember is people.

‍It Started Before the Foreign Service

‍Before I was a diplomat, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mohammedia, Morocco. I was twenty-six years old and I had a classroom full of students and exactly enough Arabic and French to be understood if I spoke slowly and meant what I said. That year rewired something in me. Not just the obvious things — the call to prayer at dawn, the mint tea poured from a height, the way a medina smells like bread and spice and old stone — but the quieter revelation that the world was full of people who were curious about the same things I was curious about, who wanted to understand and be understood, who had something to teach me if I could stop performing and start listening.

‍I carried that into the Foreign Service in 2004, and I never put it down.

‍The First Table

‍My first posting was Oman, and I arrived with a portfolio that would have seemed impossible on paper: lead the labor chapter negotiations for the U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement. I was a first-tour officer. I had never negotiated anything at that level in my life.

‍What I learned in those rooms in Muscat was something no training prepares you for: that negotiation is fundamentally a human act. That the official across the table from you is not an obstacle — he is a person with a constituency, a reputation, a family, and a set of pressures you will never fully see. The agreement we eventually reached — Oman's first-ever labor law reforms, historic changes that met international standards for the first time — happened not because we outmaneuvered anyone. It happened because we built enough trust, over enough dinners and conversations and patient, stubborn months, that the other side could say yes without losing face.

‍I later organized a summit of nine Arab labor ministers and labor leaders in the same spirit — a room full of people from countries that didn't always agree, finding the narrow space where they could. I think about that room a lot. I think about what it takes to get nine ministers, in a region that fraught, to sit down and talk about workers' rights. It takes relationships. It takes patience. It takes caring about the outcome more than you care about the credit.

‍The Places That Marked Me

‍Bosnia was a different kind of education. Sarajevo in 2007 was a city still carrying its history in its bones — bullet holes in buildings, a generation that remembered the siege, and an American community scattered across the country that needed someone at the Embassy who actually showed up. I led the first Embassy town hall in a decade. I registered eight hundred Americans to vote. I established the Embassy's first immigrant visa unit from scratch. None of that was glamorous. All of it mattered.

‍Baghdad was harder. I served there three times across my career — the last time as Counselor for Political Affairs, leading a fifty-two-person interagency team during one of the most complicated periods in U.S.-Iraq relations. I negotiated policy on Syria, Turkey, and Iran. I worked alongside generals and managed $150 million in foreign assistance programs. I directed crisis response. I was one of the few people in Baghdad who had to be able to walk into any room — military, political, diplomatic, civilian — and speak all the languages at once, not the literal languages but the languages of priority, of risk, of what we were actually trying to accomplish here.

‍I loved it. I loved the impossible complexity of it. I loved that it mattered.

‍Geneva was where I found a different kind of depth. As Deputy Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament, I spent two years negotiating arms control agreements at the multilateral level — working against Russia, Syria, Venezuela, malign actors who wanted the international framework to bend in their direction, who were patient and strategic and absolutely committed to their own version of the world. So were we. I was proud of that work. I was also proud of something quieter: ensuring that Women, Peace, and Security priorities were embedded in key disarmament resolutions during the UN General Assembly. Diplomacy is not only about weapons and deterrence. It is also about who gets a seat at the table and whether the table itself is set justly.

‍And then there was the United Nations in New York, where for three years I drafted and negotiated Security Council sanctions resolutions targeting terrorist financing, oil smuggling, the networks that fund violence in Libya and Yemen and Iraq. I sat in chambers where the stakes were not abstract. Where a poorly worded clause could become a loophole. Where the vote could go either way and we'd spent six months making sure it didn't.

I was thirty-something years old, doing work that touched the edge of history, representing the United States of America. The weight of that never got ordinary.

‍What It Means to Serve

‍Here is what I want people to understand about the Foreign Service, about that particular kind of public service: it is a calling, not a career.

‍You give up predictability. You move every two or three years. You pack your life into diplomatic pouches and shipping containers and learn to call a string of temporary apartments home. Your family makes sacrifices. You make sacrifices. You spend years in places that are genuinely dangerous, genuinely difficult, genuinely far from everything comfortable.

‍ And in return — in return you get to be part of something that is so much larger than you.

‍I have sat across tables from people I disagreed with on nearly everything and found, in the end, one thing we agreed on. I have been in rooms where American influence, wielded carefully and with genuine respect for the other side, produced outcomes that made people safer. I have met people in Muscat and Sarajevo and Baghdad and Geneva and New York who changed how I understand the world, who gave me pieces of their humanity and trusted me to handle them carefully.

‍That is an extraordinary privilege. I knew it then. I feel it even more now.

‍ Why It Led Me Here

‍When I left the Foreign Service in 2025 after twenty years, people asked what I was going to do next.

‍The honest answer was: exactly this, only differently.

‍Everything I built in those two decades — the ability to read a room, to understand what a place actually needs, to know the difference between a surface-level experience and one that goes deep, to create the conditions where people from different worlds can find unexpected common ground — it turned out to be exactly what it takes to design a journey worth someone's time.

‍Sojourn & Soirée isn't a travel company in the traditional sense. It's an extension of the same instinct that drove me into the Foreign Service in the first place: the belief that when you bring the right people to the right place at the right moment, something real happens. Something you carry home with you.

‍I spent twenty years carrying the world home with me. Now I get to take you there.

‍Want to travel with someone who has spent a career learning how the world actually works? Learn more about who we are — and inquire about joining an upcoming Edition.

‍—Cynthia

Cynthia L. Plath is the founder of Sojourn & Soirée and a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with twenty years of experience in Iraq, Geneva, the United Nations, Germany, Bosnia, Oman, and Washington, D.C.