U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is expected to pick Antony Blinken, one of his closest policy aides and confidants, to be secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. A former State Department No. 2 and longtime advisor to the former Delaware senator, Blinken has decades of foreign-policy experience dating back to the Clinton administration and signals the return of the foreign-policy establishment to power after the disruption of the Trump era.
Blinken has advised Biden for nearly two decades, first as staff director at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was chairman, and later as national security advisor to the vice president. He served as deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017, when he played a pivotal role in the Obama administration’s Syria policy and the U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of Crimea.
