U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is building out his administration with several key picks for national security and foreign policy roles. Biden nominated Antony Blinken as his secretary of state. Blinken, 58, served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration and has close ties with Biden. He would be a leading force in the incoming administration’s bid to reframe the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world after four years, in which U.S. President Donald Trump questioned longtime alliances. Blinken is a longtime confidant of Biden, having worked with him for almost 20 years as a member of his Senate staff. In Blinken, Biden is tapping someone with a commitment to international cooperation, refugee issues and humanitarian work that is rooted in his personal history — along with enough playfulness to pair up with Sesame Street’s Grover to make a video about welcoming refugees. A father of two toddlers who has his own band — called Ablinken — the longtime Biden aide was widely praised as an ideal choice both to repair damage to U.S. alliances and help fashion policies for a slew of challenges that are bigger than any one country can solve. Foggy Bottom observers hailed Blinken’s deep knowledge of all corners of Washington’s foreign policy institutions and his rapport with Biden. “Mr. President-elect, working for you, having you as a mentor and friend, has been the greatest privilege of my professional life,” Blinken said Tuesday at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, where Biden presented his national security team. Blinken continued, outlining the Biden team’s vision. “We can’t solve all the world’s problems alone,” Blinken said. “We need to be working with other countries. We need their cooperation.” Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, Blinken was in charge of the foreign policy agenda and coordinating responses to major global events. After bitter and divisive years in Washington and at the State Department under Trump’s administration, many current and former foreign service officers made a point of describing Blinken with a word rarely heard in the capital: “nice,” calling Blinken professional, smart, steady and thoughtful. Among those who worked with him in Baghdad and Washington, Blinken is praised for his management skills, inclusiveness and ability to listen. Blinken, who is Jewish, is considered a friend of Israel and worked with several Israeli firms while in the private sector. He has aligned himself with numerous former senior national security officials who have called for a major reinvestment in American diplomacy and renewed emphasis on global engagement. In interviews, the 58-year-old has spoken about the sense of responsibility he feels about policy in Syria, saying all those who worked on it have “to acknowledge that we failed, not for want of trying, but we failed” to prevent “horrific loss of life” and massive displacement. “It’s something that I will take with me for the rest of my days,” Blinken told CBS in May. He said “a bad situation” in Syria was “made even worse” by Trump administration policies, including a troop withdrawal and the abandonment of U.S. Kurdish allies, which he called a “huge mistake.” The way to deal with this, he said, was to work with allies, mobilizing others to respond and using the leverage of alliances to create change. Michael McKinley, a former career diplomat who resigned amid the Ukraine controversy when he was a senior adviser to current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said that Blinken’s long experience in the U.S. foreign policy trenches and the relationships he has developed internationally will help rebuild alliances that will be needed for that kind of work. “The incoming Biden administration has already signaled the importance of moving quickly to build back our relationships with our key global allies and partners, to strengthen our security alliances in Asia and Europe, and of addressing important outstanding trade issues that impact our national prosperity,” he said. “I think you are going to witness a very proactive and effective approach to rebuilding our relationships with the outside world.” On Iran, Blinken supports returning to the nuclear deal but only if Tehran returns to strict compliance. “[Joe Biden] would seek to build on the nuclear deal to make it longer and stronger if Iran returns to strict compliance,” he told the Aspen Institute last year. He said it was “virtually impossible” to imagine Biden ever normalizing relations with Syria. Blinken has embraced a humanist approach on the issue of refugees and is a fierce critic of Brexit. In a Sesame Street episode he taped in 2016, he tells Grover the puppet about the hardships for those displaced from their homes. Blinken’s early years steeped him in both an international outlook and Democratic politics. He grew up in New York City and Paris, where he and his mother moved with his stepfather, a survivor of Nazi camps during the Holocaust. He is fluent in French. His stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust and became an adviser to former U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Pisar shaped his stepson’s thinking, especially on the “right to protect” and humanitarian interventions, something that Blinken saw firsthand in the Bill Clinton White House and the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions. Blinken’s father, one of the founders of the New York investment bank E.M. Warburg Pincus & Company, served as then-President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1998. And Blinken worked with his father to raise funds for Michael Dukakis’ failed 1988 bid for the presidency. Blinken attended Harvard University before getting a law degree at Columbia University. After a little work in journalism, he set a course for foreign policy, eventually holding several senior positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations over three decades. Blinken served as a member of Clinton’s National Security Council staff from 1994 until 2001, and then moved on to be the Democratic staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he first forged his relationship with Biden, from 2002 to 2008. During President Barack Obama’s first term, Blinken served as Biden’s national security adviser and then moved on to become an assistant to the president and his principal deputy national security adviser. Blinken also chaired the administration’s main forum for deciding foreign policy, helping shape policies on the Iran nuclear program and Afghanistan. After he won a second term, Obama nominated Blinken to become the deputy secretary of state, the nation’s number two diplomat, a perch from which he helped determine the administration’s approach to Crimea’s merge into Russia, the global refugee crisis, the rise of ISIS and the war in Syria, as well as the administration’s attempt to recalibrate its relationship with Asia and China. Blinken’s apparent musical talents are getting plenty of fanfare among journalists. While media outlets typically intensely scrutinized any of Trump‘s cabinet picks ahead of their confirmation, Blinken’s rockin’ past appears to play the right tune in the press. “Hard to think of a more different personality from Pompeo than the ever-calm, courteous, europhile, guitar-strumming Blinken,” AFP News Agency correspondent Shaun Tandon reacted to the news. The Financial Times tweeted: “When Joe Biden enters office in January, his closest foreign policy adviser will be a guitar-playing Beatles fanatic who first started promoting American values as a high-school student in Paris during the cold war.” The Guardian reported: “He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and football, and harbored dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Before entering the White House, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles – love songs titled ‘Lip Service’ and ‘Patience’ – uploaded on Spotify.” (SD-Agencies) | 