WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — President Donald Trump has nominated Natalie A. Baker, the career diplomat who has run the US embassy in Islamabad for almost two years, to be the United States ambassador to Pakistan.
Her name was among 22 nominations the White House sent to the Senate on Monday. The list describes Baker, of Texas, as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of minister-counselor, nominated as “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan”.
Baker has led the embassy as chargé d’affaires since January 10, 2025, when Ambassador Donald Blome left Islamabad. Pakistan has had no Senate-confirmed US ambassador since then. Before she can take up the post, Baker must appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and be confirmed by a vote of the full Senate.
Baker arrived in Pakistan in August 2024 as deputy chief of mission, the embassy’s second-ranking post. It was a return to the city: early in her career she served as a consular officer in Islamabad. Immediately before Pakistan, she was deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Doha, Qatar.
Most of her career has been spent on the Middle East and North Africa. She has directed the State Department’s Office of North African Affairs, served as deputy chief and chargé d’affaires of the US mission to Libya, and was deputy director of the Iran Regional Presence Office at the US consulate in Dubai. From 2009 to 2011 she was political and economic counselor in Libya, staying until the revolution forced the embassy to evacuate in February 2011.
She has also been economic counselor in Kuwait, where she worked with the Department of Defense on the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, and cultural officer in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s in public policy from Harvard, and was a distinguished graduate of the National War College in 2017.
As chargé d’affaires, Baker has been Washington’s senior representative in Pakistan through a crowded period for the two countries. In January she attended the close of the Inspired Gambit counterterrorism exercise at the National Counter Terrorism Centre in Pabbi. In April, as Pakistan pressed for talks between the United States and Iran, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar told her that dialogue and diplomacy were the only way forward.
Last month she held talks on long-term energy supplies with Petroleum Minister Ali Pervaiz Malik, as American companies looked at selling liquefied natural gas to Pakistan, and praised Islamabad for avoiding a fuel shortage during the conflict in the Middle East.
The same batch nominates Jeffrey Colyer of Kansas as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, and career diplomats Cynthia Kierscht and Ian McCary as ambassadors to Senegal and Mali. It also names Michael LoSapio to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
