Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) insists the Senate can chart a bipartisan course on global challenges under President-elect Trump, despite the Republican leader demonstrating his disruptive influence on the party even before reentering the White House.  As the incoming ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, Shaheen will be a key player in charting that course, and she’ll break ground as the first woman to hold her party’s top position on the panel. Though Trump and his allies are critical of sending U.S. dollars abroad, Shaheen is adamant that she can count on some of her Republican colleagues to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and bolster deterrence to Chinese President Xi Jinping.  “I think in the Senate, there is strong bipartisan support for Ukraine, for trying to help Ukraine be in the strongest possible position for any negotiation on the war,” she said in a phone call with The Hill last week.  “There is a lot of bipartisan agreement on the need to address China's efforts to undermine the United States; Iran, North Korea, are all watching what's happening in Ukraine. They're taking lessons from how the United States responds.”  The 77-year-old looks back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the 1960s and ‘70s as being the heyday of influence — citing the impact of the five-year Fulbright hearings scrutinizing the Vietnam War.  “The Foreign Relations Committee was really important in directing foreign policy in the United States and its oversight responsibility for the Department of State, and I would hope that we can move it in that direction again,” she said.  Does she have a partner on the other side of the aisle? Shaheen has a visibly warm relationship with incoming Chair Jim Risch (R-Idaho), and she said they have discussed making the committee more flexible to respond to world events and prioritize getting ambassadors, in particular career foreign service officers, confirmed.  It’s a major area of partisan contention, after dozens of President Biden’s ambassador nominees were left unconfirmed in 2024 amid Democrats and Republicans on the committee finger-pointing over blame.  “Every single person in the Senate has held up a vote on something in order to get something else, that’s how it works around here, because that’s the power an individual senator has,” Risch told The Hill in September when asked about stalled nominations.  But Risch and Shaheen have publicly committed to moving quickly on Trump’s nominee for secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).  Still, plenty of Shaheen’s GOP colleagues are sure to toe the line of Trump’s position that the U.S. provides too much assistance abroad and should extract itself from global conflicts.  Last month, 37 Senate Republicans voted in favor of canceling $5 billion in loan forgiveness for Ukraine. Among them was Risch, who often likes to say he’s in “violent agreement” with Shaheen on priorities such as Ukraine.  And while Shaheen said it’s “still a priority for the Senate” to pass Biden’s November request for $24 billion in aid related to Ukraine, she acknowledged there is no clear path forward with the incoming Trump administration and Republicans' “trifecta” of power in D.C.  The President-elect has said Ukraine should “probably” expect cuts in U.S. assistance, and some of his advisers have proposed leveraging American aid to push Kyiv into negotiations with Russia.  Shaheen did not address questions on whether there is any strategy to push back against Trump, his allies in Congress or outside influences such as billionaire Elon Musk, whose Starlink satellite internet is a key communication tool for Ukraine’s army and for the U.S. and allies in remote and isolated locations.  On Musk, Shaheen said his influence, “so far, it's proven to be quite destructive,” speaking a day after he successfully lobbied Trump to come out against a short-term funding deal days before the government shutdown deadline.  Under Musk’s influence, Trump also came out against a yearlong extension for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an agency established with bipartisan support and tasked with countering foreign influence and propaganda. Musk has criticized the agency as engaging in censorship.  “He doesn't seem to understand the impact, or doesn't care about the challenge that we're facing in the United States, from disinformation and misinformation, where we are behind our adversaries, China, Russia, even Iran, in addressing that, and that's the role of the Global Engagement Center,” Shaheen said.  'She’s dogged' Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle and former staff label Shaheen as a serious legislator — a “work horse” compared to a “show horse” — but say she will push back and get “feisty” in the face of colleagues' stonewalling.  “She's dogged in working toward the goals that she set, or in trying to get something done, and, yes, there is a feisty aspect to her,” said Rich Sigel, who served as Shaheen’s chief of staff when she was governor of New Hampshire. “She always involves me in the phone calls she’s making with elected leaders, world leaders in Europe, and I really appreciate that,” said Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who served as ranking member on the Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe under Shaheen’s tenure as chair.  “Obviously these issues are not necessarily partisan, it’s about representing the interests of the United States, but she does a great job of making sure it’s a bipartisan effort when we’re talking to these world leaders.”  Algene Sajery, who served as democratic policy director of the Foreign Relations Committee between 2015 and 2018 and is a member of the board of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, said Shaheen is the “epitome” of what’s needed to counter partisanship.  “I think a lot of people on the committee and in the Senate really, on both sides, really care about human beings, about people. … But they let partisanship dictate policy, and I see it on both sides,” she said.  “I was just in awe of that woman,” Sajery said about Shaheen. “She’s able to listen to both sides and then really work through the problem. She’s exactly who we need in this time in the Senate to shepherd through good national security and foreign policy, laws and policy positions.” Breaking barriers A groundbreaker, Shaheen is the first woman to hold the ranking position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its 209-year-history. This follows her distinction as the first woman elected governor in New Hampshire, and first woman in the country to hold the distinction of being a governor and a U.S. senator.  Shaheen has not said if she’ll run for reelection in 2026; doing so would put her in the position of being the first female chair of the Foreign Relations Committee if Democrats flip the Senate.  She told Semafor she’s going to see how the next two years pan out.  “Is there an opportunity to move things forward in a positive way, to help address the concerns that I see that we have around the world in terms of humanitarian issues?” she told the outlet.  Shaheen is often the leading voice calling out the lack of focus on the rights of women and girls globally, unafraid of occasionally calling out her mostly male colleagues.  “You guys think that every time you see women in the title we’re talking about reproductive rights. … There’s a lot that women do besides having babies!” Shaheen scolded her Republican colleagues on the Senate floor in 2022, trying to advance the stalled confirmation of Biden’s nominee for ambassador at large for global women’s issues.  “That office is about, how do we provide economic empowerment for women and issues that affect women? ... There should be room for agreement around these issues,” she said in the call with The Hill.  “We know that when women are empowered, that they give back more to their families, their communities and their countries than men do in terms of monetary giveback, and that countries that have women who are empowered tend to be more stable.” Shaheen said vigilance is needed to push back on any efforts that threaten gains to women's participation and representation, including a Trump-era rule that blocks any U.S. funding globally for organizations that may provide information about abortion. Biden revoked the expanded "global gag rule," but Trump will likely push to reimpose it.  “I do think that is an area that we will continue to disagree on, because I think their policy is just wrong,” Shaheen said.  Another example of her work across the aisle came in 2017, when she worked with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) to sponsor the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) Act that would permanently revoke the global gag rule. Shaheen reintroduced the bill in 2023 with Murkowski, but it did not advance out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  But one of her signature bills is the 2017 Women, Peace and Security Act, which makes it a priority for the U.S. government to be a global leader in promoting women’s participation in foreign policy and national security efforts, such as conflict prevention, peace negotiations and democratic institutions.  She lists off her favorite statistic, from the United Nations, that women's participation in peace negotiations increases the probability, by 35 percent, of agreements lasting at least 15 years. Shaheen has been the only, or one of two, women on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since she joined in 2009. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) overlapped with Shaheen until she left in 2017. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) joined the committee in 2023.  Shaheen said her accession to the ranking position matters because “when it comes to something like foreign policy, there is an important lens of recognizing the role that women play globally.”