The Diplomacy Center Foundation recently welcomed Ambassador William Courtney (ret.) and Laryssa Courtney to its list of major donors supporting the capital campaign for the National Museum of American Diplomacy (NMAD). Ambassador Courtney also becomes the 71st member of the Founding Ambassadors Society, which recognizes presidentially appointed members of the US diplomatic community supporting NMAD.
William Courtney is currently an adjust senior fellow at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum, whose members are private-sector business leaders from Russia and the West. He chairs the board of trustees of Eurasia Foundation, which carries out USG-funded programs abroad to improve governance, strengthen civil society, and counter disinformation. He also co-chairs the international advisory council of the America 250 Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the US Semiquincentennial Commission.
In 2014, Ambassador Courtney retired from Computer Science Corporation as senior principal for federal policy strategy. From 1972 to 1999, he was a Foreign Service officer in the US Department of State. He served as ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the US-Soviet Bilateral Consultative Commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT). The United States and the Soviet Union signed the TTBT in July 1974, but it was not entered into force until 1990. The TTBT established a threshold that prohibits nuclear tests with a yield exceeding 150 kilotons.
Ambassador Courtney also was special assistant to the President for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia; deputy US negotiator for the US-Soviet Defense and Space Talks; deputy executive secretary of the National Security Council staff; and special assistant to the under secretary of state for political affairs. He served abroad in Brasilia, Brazil; Moscow, Russia; Geneva, Switzerland; Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Tbilisi, Georgia.
Ambassador Courtney is a member and former board director of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He was a member of the board of directors of the former World Affairs Council of Washington DC. He belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was an international affairs fellow from 1977 to 1978. He graduated from West Virginia University with a BA and Brown University with a PhD in economics. He is married to Laryssa Courtney and has two adult children, Will and Alison.
On their reason for supporting NMAD, Ambassador William Courtney and Laryssa Courtney say it is because “young people will learn more about diplomacy as the first line of America’s defense abroad and as a vital enabler of prosperity through trade and investment.”