Twenty days after the US presidential election, Donald Trump announced on the evening of 23rd that he would start the transition process. So General Services Administrator Joe Murphy finally gave Biden the green light to access all the federal resources needed to make the transition.
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In a tweet, Mr Trump praised the director of the General Services for his dedication and loyalty to his country. She and her staff have been subjected to a lot of harassment in the past, which Mr Trump said he did not want to see happen. The legal action will continue and I am confident that I will win. But in the best interests of the country, he advised Murphy and his team to do whatever it takes to begin the initial phase of the transition.
It is worth noting in Murphy’s letter to Biden today that the GSA does not certify election winners, and that the GSA’s role is limited only to ensuring that the resources needed for the presidential transition are available (including $6.3 million in transition funds). And the actual winner of the US presidential election is determined by the electoral process set out in the US Constitution.
As part of a campaign of pressure before Trump agrees to a transition, Biden today announced a list of six cabinet and top officials he will nominate when he takes office:
Secretary of State: Antony Blinken, former national Security adviser to the Vice President, former Deputy Secretary of State
National Security adviser: Jake Sullivan, former director of the Secretary of State’s Office of Policy Planning
Secretary of Homeland Security: Alejandro Mayorkas, former deputy Secretary of State for Homeland Security
Director of National Intelligence: Avril Haines, former deputy White House national Security adviser
Permanent Representative to the UN: Linda Greenfield, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs
Presidential special envoy for Climate Change: John Kerry, former Secretary of State
In addition, the media have reported that former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will be nominated to be Treasury secretary. It is unclear whether permanent representatives to the UN and climate envoys will reach cabinet level. One of the great features of this list is that it’s full of acquaintances! Those who were active in the Obama administration four years ago are now moving back and forth, promoting young and middle-aged people.
Mr. Biden was certainly pleased with his choices, which he said also reflected adapting to a changing world, from Ms. Yellen likely to be the first female Treasury secretary to Ms. Mayokas the first Latina to head homeland security.
Run into Blinken
Both Blinken and Yellen had a good reputation in Washington, and it so happened that Blinken’s office had been in the same building as Wang’s for the past four years (the closest office building to the U.S. Congress), so Wang’s impression of blinken was that he was polite and approachable.
After leaving the Obama administration, Mr. Blinken joined Mr. Biden’s Penn Biden Center as its executive director and began advising Mr. Biden’s campaign.
The first time He met Blinken in an office building was after work in 2017, when Wang met Blinken on the elevator to the underground garage and blurted out: Secretary Blinken, how are you? Blinken, who had always kept a low profile, was perhaps surprised that he was known outside the White House and State Department. Blinken was holding Biden’s new book, “Promise Me, Dad,” which he recommended as a well-written book. Then he began to tell me that the Biden Center is on the 6th floor and you can visit it when you have time.
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No matter be sincere or polite, anyway xiao Wang passed two days of innocent took colleague Huang Zhuo to visit! And Blinken personally greeted us and showed us around some of the center’s facilities. In return, Wang gave Blinken a Chinese New Year card at the end of 2017. Wang had already finished reading Biden’s book and exchanged a few thoughts with Blinken. “Next time you bring your book,” he said in a friendly voice, “I’ll ask Joe to sign it for you.” Unfortunately, Xiao Wang did not meet Blinken in the office building again.
Joe Biden’s right-hand man
Anyway, Blinken’s selection as Biden’s choice for secretary of state did not surprise anyone in Washington, since he had been either a secretary of state or a national security adviser until Biden’s victory. Blinken is seen as a central figure in Biden’s world, having served as chief foreign policy adviser since 2002, when Biden served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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He then joined the Obama administration with Joe Biden as his national security adviser.
Blinken was in the White House situation Room where Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011
Blinken was a key figure in Obama’s second term as deputy secretary of state in persuading Congress to accept the Iran deal. Blinken also appeared regularly on television during this year’s election campaign to defend the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement.
Biden announced the first wave of his cabinet much earlier than usual, knowing that at this point in 2016, Trump was still interviewing candidates for secretary of state. Mr Biden’s move is not just a sign that the transition process is not shifting in Mr Trump’s favour. It is another signal to the world that America is back.
Some media have compared Blinken to Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state. If Tillerson is a complete Washington outsider, Blinken is an insider. The two men also have very different foreign policies and philosophies than Pompeo, the second secretary of state. Mr. Biden’s choice of Mr. Blinken for secretary of state also highlights a sharp difference between him and Mr. Trump.
Rich second generation, lawyer, journalist, rock uncle
Born in 1962 to Jewish parents in New York, Blinken moved to Paris with his mother, Judith, after his parents divorced when he was five. Blinken’s mother remarried, marrying the well-connected and powerful Polish-American lawyer Samuel Pisar.
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Pisar and Mother Blinken (third from right)
Pisar served on President John F. Kennedy’s economic and foreign policy advisory panels, as well as advising the U.S. State Department and Congress. Growing up in Paris, Blinken’s French is mostly his native language, and he has given many interviews in French to the media.
Blinken received an elite education from an early age. In Paris, his parents sent him to Ecole Jeannine Manuel, a prestigious English-French bilingual school last year. At university, blinken returned to the United States. After Harvard, Blinken also worked for a while as a reporter for The New Republic, a liberal publication.
After Columbia, Blinken worked in law in New York and Paris. His stepfather brought Mr. Blinken, 26, into politics in 1988, when they raised money for then-PRESIDENTIAL candidate Michael Mukakis.
Blinken began working for the U.S. government five years later, joining the State Department in 1993, starting with a position as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. Four years later, he became a speechwriter for the President of the United States, became President Clinton’s chief foreign policy writer, and later became a member of the Clinton National Security Council.
The Obama years were also a period of rapid career growth for Blinken, from vice president national Security adviser to deputy secretary of state. Starting in 2017, Blinken led former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and others to launch WestExec Advisors, an advisory firm that specializes in advising clients on investments, assessing geopolitical risks, and analyzing the regulatory and policy dynamics of U.S. and international markets.
Blinken also did something “big” in 2018! He formed his own band, ABlinken, and became an uncle rock. There are also two singles on Spotify! And surprisingly good, Xiao Wang has looped it several times.
Blinken expounded on foreign policy
Blinken elaborated on his view of international affairs in a public speech in July at the Hudson Think tank in Washington. It also gives us an idea of what the nominee for secretary of state is thinking.
Blinken thinks, the moment we are living in and alliances relationship during the transfer of the strength of a country, government, economy, population, technology, environment, geopolitics all are changing, change so fast, that the blinken think that most people think the United States lost the direction of the pole star, people feel confused, confusion, even don’t know what the future holds.
It also brought inequality to the United States and the world. Blinken believed that the United States was facing the most challenging and complex international and security situation in the coming decades. Still, Both Biden and Blinken believed in America’s ability to shape things for a better future. So what does the US need to do? First, America’s engagement and leadership in world affairs must be sustained. If the US doesn’t do it, if it doesn’t make the rules, then other countries will step in and do it in ways that are not in the US interest. So Biden believes in American engagement and American leadership. Second, countries need to find new ways of working together, whether it’s climate change, pandemics, or weapons of destruction.
This included cooperation between the United States and China. Blinken believed that the democratic and Republican parties in the United States had reached a consensus on the challenges posed by China, and that the status quo could not be maintained. Worrying blinken, in trump administration, China is more advantageous than the United States strategic advantage, trump the practice of ignoring us Allies, push forward China’s strategic interests in the whole world, so the government must rebuild biden status in the United States, to improve the competitive power of the United States to defend the values of the United States, strengthen democratic institutions.
Emphasising American ideology and institutions has long been ignored by Mr Trump himself, and this would be the most fundamental difference between Mr Biden’s foreign policy and Mr Trump’s. Blinken acknowledged that Biden inherits a divided America and a troubled world, and that the best way to meet these challenges is fundamentally democratic. Because in their view, this is the foundation of American power at home and abroad, and it reflects who the United States is? How does America see itself? How does the world see America?
And over the past four years, American democracy has been challenged as never before. Blinken said the Obama administration’s strategy of rebalancing the Asia Pacific worked, allocating U.S. time, energy and resources effectively. Over the next four years, he would like to see the US model once again regain its appeal to asia-pacific countries. But when Biden and Blinken took office, the Asia Pacific they faced was no longer the Asia Pacific they had been four years ago, and the United States was no longer the only or inevitable choice for countries in the region.
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