Biden to appoint Antony Blinken as Secretary of State

Blinken, 58, is considered a moderate who is well regarded by foreign diplomats and can move on with Republicans to the Senate, where he will have to seek confirmation. At the same time, he served as a go-between for Biden and members of the Progressive community, engaging the latter on their demands on what a Biden foreign policy will look like.

Bloomberg first announced that Biden would call on Blinken as secretary of state.

Blinken’s biography reads as if he had been raised for a life in the diplomatic field. He attended high school in Paris, earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard, and went on to earn a law degree from Columbia. Blinken’s father, Donald, also a Harvard graduate, was an investment banker who served as US Ambassador to Hungary.

Young Blinken worked as a lawyer and (briefly) journalist. He served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and spent time on Capitol Hill, where he was Democratic personnel director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was president. During the Obama years, Blinken served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Secretary of State.

Those who know Blinken describe him with words like “polite”, “smooth” and “nice” and often add that he plays the guitar well. Blinken has been the main face of Biden’s foreign policy during the 2020 campaign, advocating for positions such as the need for the United States to rebuild unraveled alliances by Donald Trump’s America First approach. Blinken has also been a major advocate for the United States to join the Iran nuclear deal.

Blinken was drawn into Republican efforts to ask Biden about his son Hunter’s business activities in Ukraine. Blinken was questioned as part of a GOP investigation into the matter. The investigation was ultimately unable to establish that Hunter Biden’s actions affected his father’s work as vice president or US policy toward Ukraine.

Sullivan is perhaps best known for his role as assistant to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, working for her in the State Department and serving as a key figure in her 2016 presidential campaign. He is at the start in his forties, but he gained a reputation as a young genius in the field of foreign policy. He was instrumental in shaping the Iran nuclear deal and was Biden’s national security adviser for a time when Biden was vice president.

Since the loss of Clinton, Sullivan has spent time researching ways to make American foreign policy more responsive to the domestic needs of the United States. He has written or co-authored a number of essays that attempt to fill in the gaps that have often separated foreign and economic policy, and it was believed he could be placed in a country-focused role in a House. Blanche Biden.

The role of the White House’s national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.

Thomas-Greenfield spent 35 years in the Foreign Service, including as Ambassador to Liberia and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. She is one of Washington’s most prominent black female diplomats.

She has also spent time as a senior human resources official at the State Department and could provide Biden with valuable advice as he seeks to rebuild the morale of US diplomats who have often felt cut off under the Trump administration. .

While the role of ambassador to the United Nations will require confirmation from the Senate, it was not immediately clear whether Biden intended to place the post in his cabinet.

Before the November 3 election, Susan Rice, former national security adviser to Barack Obama, was considered one of the first to serve as secretary of state. But sources say Republicans’ likely control over the Senate raised concerns that she would not survive a confirmation battle. Rice had become a lightning rod to conservatives over her role following the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, as well as her ties to the “Unmask” Trump’s aides.