This week, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden nominated the veteran State Department diplomat William Burns to be director of the CIA. The announcement marked the last nomination to fill out Biden’s foreign policy and national security team, but it was perhaps the most emblematic of where Biden is headed when it comes to how he intends to conduct foreign policy.
Burns, with whom both of us have worked for decades, is the first career foreign service officer to be nominated to run the CIA in the agency’s 73-year history. Previous directors have come from the military, Congress, the ranks of the CIA, and the political class. Diplomats have been excluded, perhaps not surprisingly given the agency’s focus on clandestine operations—the antithesis of aboveground diplomacy—as well as its tightly bound clubby and insular culture, a version of which foreign service officers share.
