Former State Department Official Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir Nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia

President Joe Biden has nominated Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir to be U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, the White House announced Oct. 20. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, she was most recently executive secretary of the Department of State. 

She formerly served as Ambassador to Malaysia. Her other roles include executive assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. 

She has also served as U.S. Consul General in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and as director of the Office of Maritime Southeast Asian Affairs, which includes responsibility for U.S. relations with Indonesia. Before that, she was a Pearson Fellow in the House International Relations Committee’s Asia and Pacific Subcommittee, and the House Financial Services Committee’s International Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee. 

Early in her career, she was deputy coordinator of the Taiwan Coordination Staff in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. She also held overseas assignments in China, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. She earned a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.S. from the National War College. She is fluent in Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia.

The daughter of an Indian father and an American mother, Lakhdhir grew up in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, Noor, immigrated to the U.S. from Mumbai, to attend the University of California, Berkeley in the 1940s. While in New York City for his MBA at New York University, he met Lakhdhir’s mother, Ann, while living at the International House in Manhattan.

Lakhdhir’s “international career began as a child, as a result of her parents’ rich international background and family trips abroad,” she said in an interview published on the National Museum of American Diplomacy website. These experiences encouraged her to begin her career overseas as a teacher in China for two years after graduating from Harvard College in 1986.

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Lakhdhir also credited her upbringing for being a key factor “in developing her perceptions of herself as a multi-ethnic woman.” Her father, “a first-generation immigrant from South Asia,” was not too hopeful of “global political regimes,” and initially encouraged Lakhdhir and her brother to pursue career paths in science or engineering, she said in the interview. She also recalled him being “sometimes hesitant to share his Indian culture with his children thinking it might create obstacles for them.” Her dad “made a decision early that his children were going to be American,” she added. 

She largely credited her connection to her Indian heritage to her mother, who exposed her children to South Asian culture. She was also a role for Lakhdhir, along with many other women supervisors and mentors she encountered in her time at the Department. 

(Top photo, courtesy of the Department of State.)