On April 11, a classroom in Pendleton East was transformed into the Situation Room for the U.S. National Security Council. The Norwegian Cabinet, NATO’s North Atlantic Council, and the U.N. Security Council each had its own meeting room as well. Twenty students representing the four groups for the day darted up and down the hallway, joining meetings, interrupting conversations, and sharing information.
They were participating in the Diplomat’s Toolbox Crisis Simulation, an event organized by Stacie Goddard, Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science, in collaboration with the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. (The institute is part of the Wagner Centers for Wellesley in the World, which also includes the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership, and Democracy, and the Wellesley Centers for Women .) Inspired by the well-known undergraduate course Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59 taught at Georgetown University, “American National Security Tool Box,” the event honored the former U.S. secretary of state’s legacy while giving Wellesley students the opportunity to practice diplomatic skills.
First, Goddard assigned roles to all the participants (who had indicated their top choices), which ranged from prime minister of Norway, to the U.S. national security advisor, to the secretary general of the North Atlantic Council of NATO. Ambassador Wendy Sherman, an actual former U.S. deputy secretary of state—and a friend and colleague of Albright’s as well as a past visitor to the Albright Institute’s Wintersession events—served as president of the United States.
For the simulation, the students were tasked with navigating responses to a fictionalized issue: A dual fiber-optic cable that connects the Svalbard archipelago to Norway has been severed. SvalSat station, a critical ground station for polar-orbiting satellites that NASA, NOAA, and NATO use for reconnaissance and climate data, is on Spitsbergen, an island in the archipelago. A Russian state-owned mining and research ship, the Karpinsky, is floating above the cable, which was severed when the captain dropped anchor after a catastrophic engine failure—at least, that is Russia’s story.
The students were given different pieces of information about the event, views on what was happening and why, and perspectives on what a resolution should look like. They worked together, negotiated, and spun narratives to benefit their own groups’ interests—all in an effort to pass a resolution everyone could agree on.
Inside the Norwegian Cabinet room—usually known as Pendleton East 325—Sidney Briggs ’26, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, updated Norway’s delegation—Prime Minister Juliette Bacuvier ’26, Foreign Minister Alma Erro ’27, and Defense Minister Svetlana Greene ’26—on the U.N. Security Council’s efforts to get two or three countries to be part of a fact-finding mission around the severed cable.
“China abstained, but Russia vetoed,” Briggs told the Norwegians. “Then Russia brought forward a condemnation of your country and an argument that they needed to have safe passage back to Russia, even though their boat cannot move right now … So I vetoed that. I told them that they need to stop using their smoke-and-mirrors effect.”
When planning steps for their next resolution, Briggs asked the Norwegians what they needed. “We just need to get access to those cables,” said Bacuvier. “We just want their boat to move, just a little bit. You know, a kilometer is fine,” said Erro.
Veda Madhusudan ’27, the Russian permanent representative to the U.N. Security Council, was the only person defending Russia when most other countries thought this “accident” was an intentional act of aggression. “I knew I wanted to be in the center of it all,” Madhusudan said about choosing to represent Russia. “I wanted to be in a position of power where I could actually make decisions.”
Ahead of the simulation, each student met with Goddard to discuss their priorities for the country they were representing. Madhusudan’s focus was to deny any ill intent, stick to the official story, maintain the situation was a humanitarian issue rather than a military one, and accuse Norway of violating a treaty article. When she got into character, she said, she was “in it to win it”: “I didn’t care about where Veda, as an individual, stood on this issue. I was like, where would Russia stand on this issue?”
She frequently sparred with Briggs. “I know Veda, she’s great, so I felt comfortable just kind of going for it,” Briggs said. “I think having the personal connections make it a lot easier to be a little bit more belligerent than I normally would be, because I know that they know I'm not [like that].”
At the end of the simulation, Sherman, who served under three U.S. presidents and five U.S. secretaries of state, and who was lead negotiator during the Iran nuclear talks under President Barack Obama, spoke to the students about their experience. “So imagine doing what you did today every single day, from early in the morning to very late at night,” she said. “It is really extraordinary and complex and difficult, and you all did really, remarkably well.”
Sherman noted that the ability of social media and technology to create deepfakes, distort narratives, and divert attention makes it “even more important that you remember what you're there to do, and don’t get distracted by all the stuff that's out there.”
Maria Garcia ’26, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said she was intrigued by the role of misinformation and disinformation in the day’s event. “It was hard to know who knew what and to really coordinate around that,” she said. “Also, the way I said something could be interpreted by one group of people as one thing and another as a totally different thing.”
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Wendy Sherman, playing the role of U.S. president, works with her team in the Situation Room. Photo by Joel Haskell -
Members of the U.S. National Security Council strategize in a Pendleton East hallway. Photo by Shannon O’Brien
Madhusudan noted the same phenomenon in her role representing Russia. “The spinning of narratives is something that really stuck out to me,” she said. She sees that as an important skill in diplomacy, “because you don’t want to show all your cards at once. You want to pick and choose who you’re telling what.” In the debrief with Sherman after the simulation, Madhusudan said, “at one point, I went through different people from each committee and each group, and I was telling them completely different things,” all to maintain her narrative of innocence.
As the students talked with Sherman about the decisions they considered and the various possible outcomes, she said it brought to mind a familiar adage that she paraphrased: “You can begin the war, but how it ends is not up to you. You can begin to solve a problem, but unless you're very discreet and you know what you’re trying to solve for and what that strategy is, you can end up in a place you did not anticipate.”
“It was fun to see their excitement and urgency as new developments came up—even sprinting down the hallway to pass info,” said Erin Corcoran ’13, assistant vice president for alumnae relations and global engagement. She held several roles in the Office of the Secretary of Defense before coming to work at Wellesley, most recently as the special assistant to the under secretary of defense for policy. “I participated in an earlier version of a crisis simulation in one of my classes with Professor Goddard when I was a student,” she said, “and I remember later sitting in my first interagency meetings in D.C. and thinking, ‘Oh, that class showed how it actually works!’”