The U.S. Senate has confirmed Jennifer Wicks McNamara as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, making her the first woman ever chosen to lead the American embassy in Hanoi.
McNamara was approved on May 18 as part of a group of nearly 50 nominations that the Senate cleared together in a single vote, a procedure that allows the chamber to confirm large batches of appointees at once. The package, which also included U.S. attorneys, several other ambassadors and senior administration officials, passed 46-43. Eleven senators did not vote.The post had been vacant since Marc Knapper, the most recent U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, concluded his term on Jan. 18.Rather than a career diplomat, McNamara is a civil servant with nearly 31 years in the U.S. government, according to a State Department Certificate of Demonstrated Competence submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She began her career with the U.S. Army in South Korea, followed by postings in Hawaii and Virginia, and joined the State Department in 2003.
Jennifer Wicks McNamara speaks at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Dec. 11, 2025. Photo by Reuters
Since November 2012 she has served as director of the Office of Presidential Appointments at the White House, a role she has held across four presidential administrations. In that position she has guided roughly 1,000 candidates for senior, Senate-confirmed State Department posts, in effect shepherding other nominees through the same process she has now completed herself.At her confirmation hearing on Dec. 11, McNamara told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio regard Vietnam as one of Washington's most important partners in the region. "A strong, independent, and resilient Vietnam is in the United States' interest," she said.Her confirmation comes as Hanoi and Washington mark 30 years since they established diplomatic relations, a span in which the former wartime adversaries have built increasingly close ties, elevating their relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, Vietnam's top diplomatic tier, in 2023.McNamara described a relationship spanning defense and security, trade and investment, and people-to-people ties. Defense cooperation, she said, builds on "extensive efforts to address the legacies of the Vietnam War." With congressional support, she told the committee, the U.S. has worked with Vietnam to clear 700,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance, assist 1 million people with disabilities, and remediate dioxin contamination at Da Nang and Bien Hoa air bases. Vietnam, she added, has for decades helped repatriate the remains of more than 1,000 U.S. service members.She also pointed to expanding cooperation on regional stability and on countering transnational crime, including online scam operations that she said defraud Americans of billions of dollars a year.On trade, McNamara said commerce between the two countries had grown enormously in recent years and that the potential for shared economic growth was significant.People-to-people ties are deepening as well, she said, noting that Vietnamese Americans are now the fourth-largest Asian American population in the U.S. and that educational, cultural and tourism exchanges are on the rise."Through open dialogue we will continue to advance regional security, shared prosperity, and our bilateral partnership," McNamara told the committee.
