WILMINGTON, Del. – Four years ago, President-elect Donald Trump picked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state after meeting him just once. After running against the Washington establishment, the only president in American history to take office with no prior governing or military experience picked someone with no prior governing or military experience to be the nation’s chief diplomat. It did not go well.On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate Antony Blinken to be secretary of state during an event here. He will also name Jake Sullivan as national security adviser and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the United Nations. All three are alumni of the Obama administration. More than that, they are stylistically and experientially the opposites of the people Trump tapped for the same roles. After working for President Bill Clinton, Blinken became Biden’s staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was chairman and then his national security adviser when he became vice president. Then Blinken became President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser and John Kerry’s No. 2 at State. Blinken, 58, is poised to get the top job at least in part because Biden decided he does not have the stomach for a tough confirmation fight to confirm Susan Rice as secretary of state. Three people close to Biden’s orbit say he has seemed uninterested in an all-out brawl with the Senate, which weighed against her – though there were other concerns, including that she openly considered running against Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate whose vote she would probably have needed. He is wary about spending limited political capital and apparently feared that Senate Republicans would block Rice after using the process to relitigate the Benghazi imbroglio. Once Tillerson got the job, he never clicked with Trump. Worse, the president repeatedly and publicly undermined his first secretary of state. In October 2017, while Tillerson was visiting Beijing and trying to establish a dialogue with North Korea, Trump tweeted that he was “wasting his time.” Foreign governments often found that they could bypass the State Department by reaching out to Trump directly or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. A perception among allies and adversaries alike that Tillerson did not even have Trump’s ear made him ineffective. In March 2018, Trump fired Tillerson over Twitter while the secretary of state was in Africa trying to clean up the damage caused by the president’s disparaging comments about “shithole countries.” No one will ever doubt that Blinken speaks for Biden when he travels the world. That has been a key ingredient of success for previous occupants of the job, such as Jim Baker under President George H.W. Bush or Condi Rice under President George W. Bush. Blinken has often been at Biden’s side during this year’s campaign, and he helped set up his foundation after he left the White House. Four years ago, Trump picked South Carolina’s then-governor, Nikki Haley, to be ambassador to the United Nations. Haley has an inspiring personal story as the daughter of Sikh immigrants, but she had no foreign policy experience. She used the U.N. job to boost her national profile and has used the years since she left New York to lay the groundwork for a potential 2024 run for president. While Trump has denigrated civil servants as part of what he disdainfully refers to as the Deep State, and routinely marginalized experts inside the government, Biden has chosen a career Foreign Service officer to be the country’s representative at the United Nations. Thomas-Greenfield rose to become the assistant secretary of state for African affairs during Obama’s second term – a few years after a tour of duty as ambassador to Liberia during George W. Bush’s presidency. She was in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, where she found herself held at gunpoint and was able to convince the gunman not to kill her. She grew up in the segregated South and attended Louisiana State University at the same time as David Duke, who would later run the Ku Klux Klan. She gave a 10-minute Ted Talk about these experiences last year:  | | |
So far, everything Biden has done since winning the election was predictable and foreseeable. Nothing he has said or done since being declared the winner has been surprising to political observers. And that’s just the way he wants it: Biden seeks to project that he will hold a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state after the four year roller-coaster ride under Trump, which has been characterized by perplexing personnel moves, erratic firings and a herky-jerky policy-making process. Substantively, Biden also hopes to undo as much of Trump’s foreign policy as possible. He has promised to rejoin the Paris climate change agreement, undo the U.S. exit from the World Health Organization and rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. He pledged to shore up global alliances, starting with NATO, to take a harder line on Russia and to restore human rights as a top-tier priority in foreign policy. | 
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