Last we spoke with Joey Hood, he was between assignments with the State Department, waiting for word on where he and his family would go next. It seemed everything from his language study to early career experiences were setting him up for the ultimate big league position. In this Roads Taken Revisited, find out how taking everything as it comes can sometimes lead you to where you’re meant to be.
Last we spoke with Joey Hood, he was between assignments with the State Department, waiting for word on where he and his family would go next. It seemed everything from his language study to early career experiences were setting him up for the ultimate big league position. In this Roads Taken Revisited, Joey talks about being nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia, the confirmation process, and what he sees as the potential in growing our bilateral relationship.
In this episode, find out from Joey how taking everything as it comes can sometimes lead you to where you’re meant to be…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Joey Hood was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Tunisia by the U.S. Senate in December 2022. He served in leadership positions in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, including as Acting Assistant Secretary. He has served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Iraq and in Kuwait, as well as Consul General and Principal Officer in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Prior to these assignments, Mr. Hood was Acting Director of the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs.
For Joey’s first appearance on Roads Taken, listen to The Generalist Diplomat.
Joey Hood: The idea is that we're going to try to intervene in a way that is uniquely American. So what we should be doing here is supporting the private sector in getting market access to the United States with their great products at lower prices for American consumers. So far that's been working.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Last we spoke with Joey Hood, he was between assignments with the State Department, waiting for word on where he and his family would go next. It seemed everything from his language study to early career experiences were setting him up for the ultimate big league position. Find out how taking everything as it comes can sometimes lead you to where you’re meant to be…on today's Roads Taken Revisited, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Ambassador Joey Hood, and we are going to reconnect on this very special Roads Taken Revisited and hear where he's landed when he was a bit in limbo the last we spoke to him. So Ambassador Hood, thank you so much for being with us.
JH: Ms. Rowley, it is definitely my pleasure to be with you once again, and yeah, to be in a different part of life now, which is something that happens frequently in the Foreign Service, where we go from job to job, country to country, you know, sometimes you wonder if you're going to emerge from it all still sane. But so far so good, they tell me.
LJR: Yeah, yeah. Well, last time we got through all of those really big questions about who you were when we were in college together and who you thought you'd become, and your story was one of, well, just take all the roads you can possibly take, thinking you might be headed in one direction, you're gonna end up in probably someplace different.
At that time, you were awaiting your next assignment and I'm not sure if you knew—so that was October 2020—I'm not sure if…you knew, but you couldn't tell me. That's right. And you knew that it wasn't going to be tomorrow because these things take time. So can you walk us through the process of your hearing that you were up for an ambassador role and what that entailed?
I think I knew once hearings started, I knew, but it then seemed to be forever. So it must have felt like double forever for you.
JH: Oh, definitely. The way it works mechanically is that the State Department will receive from the White House, fairly early in an administration, you know, here are the list of ambassadorships that we, the White House, intend to fill. For the other ones, you let us know, State Department, who you want for these jobs. And there's a committee that's headed by the deputy secretary that includes all the undersecretaries and they receive the expressions of interest. Basically you know, you apply for assignments in the foreign service, just like applying for a job in the private sector. You got your little resume, you got your little bio, you know, your mission statement, or whatever. And all that goes into a process. You get interviewed and you know, eventually the list goes up to the committee and they decide somebody's got to get each one of these jobs. And then comes the phone call.
And for me, the phone call came in July of 2000…oh gosh, I think it was 2021 then. So no, when we spoke, I actually didn't know. I have to correct myself. But it's still hard to believe that it was three years ago that I talked to you. It feels like so much sooner. So July of 2021, then I did know, but you can't tell anyone, of course, because all that does is it sends the name to the White House, saying, well, we think this is the most qualified person. And then the White House sends it through vetting. And if you've been working for the U. S. government in positions of trust for 20, 25 years, you go, really? Vetting? We're going to do this? But, you know, they have to put everybody through the same system and they want to know things that may be a little different than for your typical national security job, you know, working elsewhere in embassies or in Washington. Like, did you have any domestic labor? Did you pay them? Did you pay their social security? You know, is there anything basically that could embarrass the administration? Not that that would be a security issue, but it might be an embarrassment issue, for example. And so once you get through all of that. Assuming that you pass, then there's an announcement, and so that came in May of 2022. And that's the public part. That's when the White House has officially nominated you, and then the Senate can decide to take you up or not, or when. And that whole part, I think, is more well known to the public, where they'll eventually schedule a hearing. Senators will get a chance to ask you questions, and usually you're on a panel of, you know, two or three or five or six other nominated ambassadors. And so you may get more questions than the others, or you may get fewer. I think I ended up with one, but that's just the hearing. Because senators have a right to send in questions for the record. And so that can take as much time as it takes for the senators to be satisfied with your answers and or for, you know, the majority and a working part of the minority to say, it's gone long enough. We're just gonna send these to the floor for a vote. And so that came for me I think it was December 22nd or 23rd.
I had already made the road trip to New Hampshire. I was already at my destination and then I got that news in the middle of the night or really first thing in the morning because I wasn't, you know, I wasn't expecting it so I wasn't sitting next to my phone. So I saw it first thing in the morning, I think Christmas Eve Eve. And the next message from the people who do presidential nominations in the Department of State was Congrats. Wonderful. You now need to get sworn in. And I said, right, I know. Like, but I'm in New Hampshire. I'm on vacation with my family. Like surely this will have to wait. And they said, surely no, it has to be done because otherwise we can't get the rest of the administrative ball rolling. We need to be able to schedule your pack out. We need to be able to, you know, give you orders so that we can schedule your pack out and we can buy your airplane tickets and all these other things that don't happen overnight. And so I said, okay, fine. How do I do that? They said, well, do you know a federal judge? I said, no, no. Fresh out of those; anything else? Well, do you know a notary public? I said, well, you could have led with that.
LJR: I know. Oh my goodness. That's a big jump, right?
You know, so I thought, well, I do, but I can't imagine walking into a bank and saying, Hey, can you just have this notary public's, you know swear me in as ambassador to Tunisia. I'm sure they would have freaked out and said, I'm sure I gotta check with someone. I can't do this. Why don't you come back when we're back from vacation?
LJR: On Christmas Eve.
JH: Yeah, right. So I contacted an old friend that I'd grown up with and I said, you are a notary public, right? And she said, yeah, I am. I said are you free the day after Christmas to meet in Keene at the gazebo so we could do some administrative paper signing? And she's like, yeah, sure. And I said, okay, you're going to get an email from the Department of State telling you what to do. I didn't, like, I didn't want to scare her off either. I figured once she'd committed, then she was in it.
LJR: She couldn’t back out, right.
JH: So, but she took it all in stride. She's like, yeah, sure, no problem. I'll sign these things and you're, and you can swear to them in my presence. So that's what we did. We met at the gazebo in downtown Keene and it was wickedly frigid that day. So that was memorable. But at least I got to have members of my family there that might not have been able to travel to Washington for the big official swearing in, which is not real. That's just the, that's just the Beyonce part. The real swearing in is what happens right after you're confirmed with a notary public somewhere, you know, Calvin Coolidge style.
LJR: Just to get you out the door. JH: Yep.
LJR: So, and then that all happens quickly as well, right? I remember you're telling me if this happens, you know, it's going to happen quickly. So when were you off.
JH: So you want to be as prepared as you can be, but it's not like you can box up all your belongings and say, well, since I may be confirmed in the next six to 12 months, I'll just pack out, you know, cause you really don't know if it'll work. And some people don't make it through the system at all. So you really do have to wait until you've got the confirmation and the swearing in. In my case, I wasn't going to cut short my family vacation because that was also a chance to see members of my family that I wasn't going to see again necessarily for a long time. So I finished that. We went back down to the Washington, D.C. area, and that's when we really got started, and so we had a grand total of, I think, two and a half to three weeks to get our entire house packed out, our cars sold, a new car purchased, and all the paperwork done for all those things. With generally with people who don't do this as a career and so they don't get the urgency. And so you spend a lot of your diplomatic skill convincing people to get you a title quickly, convincing you to, you know, convincing them to you know, do all these other things much, much faster than what they might normally want to do or be able to do. But eventually it all works and you just tumble out the door and you make your way to your new post.
LJR: To a new post that hasn't had an ambassador for a while.
JH: Uh-Huh.
LJR: Is that true? Right? So, that must be, on the receiving end, they must be a little out of sorts as well. Right?
JH: Yeah. Well, it certainly makes them so much more excited to have an American ambassador because they know that it often takes a while to get one. Here wasn't too bad. It was I think about nine months. But we've had some ambassadorial positions go vacant for three, four, five, six years. You know, our system is what it is. It's what the founders created, checks and balances. And so the executive and the legislative don't always see, eye to eye.
LJR: What?
JH: And so sometimes these positions don't get filled as quickly as I think we'd all like. So in our case here, it wasn't too bad. We had a fantastic colleague of mine with whom I attended graduate school, who was filling in as the chargé d'affaires. That's the person who is normally the deputy to the ambassador, but steps in to be in charge of affairs when there's no ambassador there. And she was doing a fantastic job, so I just picked up the baton from her, and off we went.
LJR: Wow. And so, Joey, I get to say that.
JH: Yes, you do. Your grandmothered in.
LJR: Oh, good. Actually, I don't want that title for a very long time. So, but previously we talked about the fact that you had had experience Traveling and living in West Africa. You had embedded mostly in the Middle East in your diplomatic career. And does this now in Tunisia feel like a marriage of those two sides or is it more akin to one or the other, how has this felt as a, not culmination, but a next step of all the other things that you've done?
JH: Yeah, it really does feel like a marriage of all the things that came before. I didn't really plan it that way. As you know, from my personal philosophy, why plan things, you know, just be ready, just try what you can and you know, make do. But this maybe it's the members of the deputies committee that looked at it and said, well, you know, this is the right person for this job. I don't know. But it is a bit of a culmination of previous experiences. And the Tunisians will be the first ones to remind you of that. Famously, the territory that's now Tunisia was the Roman province of Africa. That's literally what its name was. And so, they are not just on the African continent, but they feel that they are very much deeply rooted in the continent itself. And that's part of their political philosophy as well, which is why they are so committed to supporting peacekeeping operations around the continent. They're active supporting the UN peacekeeping operation in Mali, as well as in Central African Republic, largely using aircraft that they either received as cooperation or that they bought for themselves from the United States. And so that's I think a very good example of the type of cooperation that we have together. Tunisians of a certain age generally do speak French more than they speak English. And Tunisians below a certain age certainly speak more English than they do French. So I do my best with Arabic in public, and in private meetings, I'll generally put it to a vote. What do you want, French or English? And I'm glad that I can do the French thanks to my Dartmouth bachelor's degree in French literature, and of course, what I've learned along the way from my Dickey Center-supported and Tucker Foundation-supported time in Senegal and in Burkina Faso and just, you know, loving the language. That has led to my ability to have meetings in French now.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And so there's the, the day job part of you, but then there's still, you know, you're there with family, you're there as a person who's living life as an expat. What has that been like for you? Has everybody kind of settled? It's been a bit of time now, but not so long.
JH: It does take a while to settle. It's generally between six and 12 months at any post for anyone. And that just entails. Literally getting your stuff, figuring your way around town. How the house works. Every house is a little bit different and this one's no exception. I think probably one of the most important updates from the last time we spoke is that now we are very lucky to have our daughter who is a Dartmouth 26, visiting us right now, along with two other students, a 26 and a 25. And they're touring around the country now doing all the tourist things. And I have to, I tell Tunisians that I really am grateful to them for having a country that is so welcoming and hospitable and interesting that people like my daughter and her friends want to come here. They feel excited to come here. And it's easy. I'm not so surprised by them. I am very surprised my father came to visit. He's almost 80 and has only been out of the United States a couple of times—once to go to Vietnam, and the other time to accompany my aunt to Germany earlier this year, which I suspected at the time was a test run for Tunisia, and I was right.
LJR: Very nice. That's exciting. I'm sure he is super pleased, not only to see your world, but to see you in this post. It must be really gratifying for him.
JH: Well, I hope so, but it was really gratifying for us to see him make that long trip and, you know, immerse himself in a culture that's very, very different from rural New Hampshire and love it.
LJR: Yeah.
JH: But again, I'm grateful to the Tunisians for actually creating an environment for that to happen.
LJR: Yeah. Well, that sounds great. And it's lovely that you have such hospitable hosts and I'm sure it's all the better that we have someone, a U.S. presence there and to, to keep those relationships going. What is that one thing that you're excited to do and contribute in this role? Like, what, what will, looking back, you say, Oh, I actually made an impact there. I'm proud of that.
JH: Yeah. You know, it's sometimes hard to predict what that's going to be because in my experience, it almost always ends up being something you didn't expect whatsoever. And so here I'm, I'm hesitant to predict what it might be, but so far, I think what has surprised me and where I felt really gratified to be working here is in our support to economic growth projects and our support to security assistance. Because Tunisia went through a very, very difficult time as it famously had its revolution in 2010, 2011. And then kind of lost their way, I think, a couple of years into it, and there really came a moment when there was going to be a big decision as to whether they were going to continue down a democratic path or it was going to become something a bit scarier. And that's when they had labor unions and business unions get together with civil society organizations and political leaders. And they had this national dialogue and they agreed on a way forward, which produced a constitution and a political consensus that held out for another eight or so years. But what it didn't do was—in the view of many Tunisians—is it didn't produce much change on the economic side. And so within the space of about 10 years, they lost about a third of their GDP, and that's crushing for any country, but especially a lower middle income country like this one, that on top of COVID on top of the war in Libya, which had been their largest trading partner on top of the effects of Putin's invasion of Ukraine really just made it really, really hard for them to cope. So we have economic growth projects that are designed to be smart interventions. I mean, it sounds silly to say that; who would design a dumb intervention deliberately. But the idea is. That we're going to try to intervene in a way that is uniquely American. So we're the world's biggest economy. We're a capitalist success. So what we should be doing here is supporting the private sector in getting market access to the United States with their great products. At lower prices for American consumers, and so far that's been working in the areas that we—I think this is the smart part—decided to invest small amounts of money in training, equipment, and linking up with American buyers. So that would include American, sorry, Tunisian handicrafts for the American market. When I first heard about Tunisian handicrafts, I thought, okay, you know, here we are, USAID is teaching basket weaving, and I'm supposed to, you know, think that's a great thing. That's not it at all. They produce a ton of olive oil here, which is great. Olive oil requires olive trees. Olive trees can also produce olive wood. Olive wood is very prized for things like what we use in our kitchens. You know those cutting boards everybody has? That, like, black and tan, looks like a checkerboard? Almost all of them are made in Tunisia. They may not be marked that way because for a long time, what ended up happening was the raw material would be exported somewhere else and they would be put together in that other country. Now, with our help, Tunisians are actually making things like these cutting boards and salad bowls and serving spoons and whatnot, and they're making a killing. And American consumers are getting a great deal because they get lower prices than if it goes through an intermediary or intermediaries. in other countries. So we're doing things like that on like olive wood and on olive oil itself. We're now the number one importer of olive oil from Tunisia in the entire world. And Tunisia itself is the third biggest producer in the world. So this is like a really big deal. It means a lot of jobs. It means a lot more exposure of Tunisia to Americans when they pick up that bottle and they say made it and where made it. What is this place? This Tunisia? This is delicious. So that's all good for our bilateral relationship. Because the more people are working, the more people are finding a reason to invest in American partnerships, the fewer people are going to be going off to doing you know, joining extremist groups like they did before back in the middle of the past decade. A lot of people know the fact that Tunisians per capita were the biggest exporters of extremists to fight for ISIS other than Iraqis and Syrians. That's really problematic. It's problematic, not just for what they're going to do there, but what they could do when they come back here. So we in the Tunisian government really decided to work together on these two areas: the economic growth and security assistance. And on security assistance, I mentioned, you know, the long running Air Force cooperation on C 130s and rotary wing aircraft, but it goes well beyond that to training and equipment and tactics and so forth to really just help them do their job better. It's not us coming in and doing it for them. It's, you'll hear the Department of Defense always talking about working by, with, and through our partners. And that's just what we've done here. We were lucky that we already had a foundation from which to work because Tunisia's first president after Independence decided the United States would be the number one security partner of the country. It doesn't mean they don't have others, but we're the biggest ones. And so from that foundation, we worked together and found a way to beat back the terrorist groups, the extremist ideology, and hopefully find ways to put people to work. And I'm not talking about like one or two businesses here. We're working with upwards of 40, 000 small and medium enterprises.
LJR: Whoa.
JH: I didn't realize there were that many in Tunisia, but there are and they are in the rural areas that, which warms my heart, as you know. They are in the cities. They are in manufacturing. They're many of these companies are women led, they're in different sectors. So it's not, you know, just putting all of our eggs in one basket. I think it's a really good approach for a very, very unpredictable and precarious time.
LJR: Yeah, for sure, this is a time with all those adjectives but you came into a place where there had been longstanding cooperation and relationship and that has to be a great foundation from which you're going to work now for how many years? What is this time horizon for you? Is that another question mark?
JH: Officially, you are serving at the pleasure of the President. And so the President could ask you to come home at any time. Frankly, the host government could do that, but that's very, very rare. Otherwise we tend to target, you know, somewhere like three years, four years. We also try to rotate people in the summer. So if you arrive, like I did in the middle of winter, you might end up doing three and a half years or two and a half years or four and a half. So it all depends on what, you know, what Washington wants to do and what you personally would like to do, but your personal preferences are generally not the priority.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And as you said last time, just about the time you think you have it kind of maybe figured out and have built, you know, special relationships, that's the time when you're going to go someplace else. So, I know you don't, I know you don't get too comfortable, but it sounds like this is a comfortable place for you right now and that I think you're poised to do good work with good people around you and I, I hear the plug for tourism. So I think we should all be putting Tunisia up on the tops of our list to come see this beautiful place with beautiful people and the hospitality that will bring us.
JH: Well, absolutely. I think it's something that American tourists are discovering more and more. We had, I think, 20,000 come this year. Of course, the Europeans, it's right next door for them. So they number in the millions Algerians and Libyans come here for tourism as well for different reasons. There's plenty of things and places to see and do around here. They've got the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, of course, but they also have mountains and deserts. You know, different experiences catered to different people. But a few things that you can find here you can't find elsewhere are like the original sets of the original Star Wars movies.
LJR: Do you live in Tatooine?
JH: Yeah. Tatooine is actually a town,
LJR: I love it.
JH: It is actually a town, and you can see the way that the men in particular are dressed, they look like Jedi's walking around because George Lucas didn't have a whole lot of money when he was doing that first movie in particular, and so he borrowed a lot from the local market, and it's just really fun to see that in person here. And to know that as a Dartmouth alumnus, you know, you're walking among history here because William Eaton, the first consul from the United States to Tunisia, he served from 1797 to 1803. He was a Dartmouth grad from I think 1790. You know him, but you don't know you know him because the Marine Corps hymn talks about from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
LJR: Shores of Tripoli. Yes.
JH: Well, how do you think they got to the shores of Tripoli? William Eaton led the Marines into Tripoli and specifically on a mission to reinstate the Ottoman ruler there way, way back, during times when we were fighting the pirates here on what was called the Barbery Coast. So I do hope that is the last time that a Marine Corps contingent is led by a diplomat into battle.
LJR: A Dartmouth diplomat.
JH: But that it's done by a Dartmouth alumnus did not surprise me one bit.
LJR: Well, that's wonderful. So the legacy, you have legacy going all, all over this story and
JH: Oh goodness.
LJR: Yes. So I look forward to my own journey there and hope I get there before you're off on your next adventure. But we totally wish you well, Joey, in this chapter and can't wait to keep hearing where life takes you and how this unfolds. So thanks so much.
JH: Thank you, Leslie. And thank you for doing this and helping us all keep track of each other and our evolution as we all wander around this girdled earth.
LJR: That was Joey Hood, who was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Tunisia by the U.S. Senate in December 2022. He served in leadership positions in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, including as Acting Assistant Secretary. He has served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Iraq and in Kuwait, as well as Consul General and Principal Officer in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Prior to these assignments, Mr. Hood was Acting Director of the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs.
I’d say that’s someone who gets around just about as much as we do. This podcast thing is global, you know. We have fans in Bangkok and Barcelona, New York and New Delhi. Because wherever you find your podcasts you can find us. Or access the full archive at RoadsTakenShow.com. That way you won’t miss a single episode with me, Leslie Jennings, on Roads Taken.