Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke (April 24, 1941 – December 13, 2010) was one of the most consequential American diplomats of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He served as US Ambassador to Germany, US Ambassador to the United Nations, and as the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnian War.

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Holbrooke as US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), a newly created position tasked with coordinating American strategy in the Af-Pak theater. Vali Nasr served as his senior adviser in this role from 2009 to 2011. Nasr later described Holbrooke as a champion of diplomatic engagement over military escalation in Afghanistan, and wrote critically in The Dispensable Nation (2013) about what he portrayed as the Obama White House's sidelining of Holbrooke's diplomatic strategy.

Holbrooke died on December 13, 2010, of a torn aorta, while in office. He is a key node in the US-Iran diplomacy network through his influence on a generation of American diplomats and his direct management of Vali Nasr, one of the most prominent pro-engagement Iran analysts in US policy circles.