WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden packed his State Department team on Saturday with a group of former career diplomats and veterans of the Obama administration, signaling his desire to return to a more traditionally foreign after four years of uncertainty and unpredictability. policies under President Donald Trump.
Biden will nominate Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State and Victoria Nuland as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs – the second and third highest rank respectively. They were among the officials chosen to serve under the new Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
The team “embodies my core belief that America is strongest when it works with our allies,” Biden said in a statement. He said he was confident that “they will use their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America’s global and moral leadership. America is back. “
Among the others are:
Brian McKeon, former assistant to Biden’s Senate, becomes deputy secretary of state for management.
—Former senior diplomats Bonnie Jenkins and Uzra Zeya, who are respectively under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights.
—Derek Chollet, trusted hand in democratic foreign policy, to become a counselor to the State Department.
—Former UN official Salman Ahmed, as Director of Policy Planning.
—Suzy George, who was senior assistant to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, will become Blinken’s Chief of Staff.
—Ned Price, a former National Security Council employee of the Obama administration and a CIA official who stepped down in protest in the early days of the Trump administration, will serve as the department’s public face and the role of spokesman on take themselves.
—Jalina Porter, Communications Director for Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., Who is leaving Congress to work in the White House, becomes Price’s deputy.
Price and Porter plan to return to the practice of holding daily State Department press conferences, officials said. Those briefings had been eliminated under the Trump administration.
Jeffrey Prescott, a former national security aide when Biden was vice president, is Biden’s choice to become deputy ambassador to the United Nations, serving under UN envoy candidate Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
Five out of 11 are either people of color or LGBTQ. While most are not household names, all are advocates of multilateralism, and many are well known in Washington and foreign foreign policy circles. Their selections reflect Biden’s intention to move away from Trump’s transactional and often one-sided “America First” approach to international relations.
Sherman led the Obama administration’s negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, from which Trump withdrew, and was in talks with North Korea about ballistic missiles during President Bill Clinton’s second term. Nuland was Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs during the crisis in Ukraine.
Sherman, McKeon, Nuland, Jenkins and Zeya need Senate confirmation on their posts, while the others don’t.