Biden reportedly picks longtime aide Antony Blinken as secretary of state

(Image credit: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

published 23 November 2020

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to nominate Antony Blinken as his secretary of state, people with knowledge of the matter told The New York Times on Sunday.

Blinken, 58, is one of Biden's closest foreign policy advisers, serving as his top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and national security adviser when Biden was vice president. He joined the State Department during the Clinton administration, and was a deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration.

His priorities will include getting the United States back into global agreements and institutions, like the Iran nuclear deal, World Health Organization, and Paris climate accord, the Times says. While speaking at a Hudson Institute forum in July, Blinken said "the problems we face as a country and as a planet, whether it's climate change, whether it's a pandemic, whether it's the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can't handle them alone."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.