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NEW YORK / WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – Joe Biden will elect veteran diplomat Antony Blinken as U.S. secretary of state, a person close to the president-elect’s team said on Sunday, adding that an announcement is likely to be made Tuesday. .
Blinken is a longtime Biden confidant who served as No. 2 in the State Department and as deputy national security adviser in President Barack Obama’s administration, in which Biden served as vice president.
Blinken’s appointment made another longtime Biden aide, Jake Sullivan, the top candidate for his U.S. national security adviser, the person said. Bloomberg News previously reported on the expected nomination.
Biden’s transition team declined to comment, and Blinken did not respond to a request for comment.
Blinken, 58, has long promoted the view that the United States should take an active leadership role in the world, interacting with allies or see that role played by countries like China with opposing interests.
“For a burden that sometimes seems … the alternative in terms of our interests and the lives of Americans is much worse,” he said in an interview with Reuters in October.
People familiar with his management style describe Blinken as a “diplomat’s diplomat,” deliberative and relatively soft-spoken, but well versed in the practicalities of foreign policy.
After Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to President Donald Trump, Blinken became one of the founders of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consultancy that advises corporations on geopolitical risks.
Having briefly practiced law, he entered politics in the late 1980s helping raise money for Democrat Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign.
He joined Democratic President Bill Clinton’s White House as a speechwriter and became one of his national security advisers.
Under Obama, Blinken worked to limit most US combat deployments to a small number of troops. But he told Reuters last year that Trump had “destroyed American credibility” with his withdrawal of US troops from Syria in 2019 that left the US’s Kurdish allies in the lurch in their fight against the Islamic State.
In the election campaign, Blinken was one of Biden’s closest advisers, even on issues that went beyond foreign policy.
That confidence is the product of Blinken’s years working alongside Biden as an advisor to his failed 2008 presidential campaign, as a national security adviser early in his vice presidency, and as the Democratic staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was appointed. President.
(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick in New York and Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington, Delaware; written by David Brunnstrom; edited by Diane Craft and Peter Cooney)
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