Now that former Vice President Joe Biden has locked up the Democratic presidential nomination, myriad advocacy and lobbying groups are vying for his ear as he fleshes out his foreign policy platform. And to get Biden’s ear, they need to go through his advisers.

Biden has already staked out drastically different positions from President Donald Trump with vows to reassess US-Saudi relations and reenter the Iran nuclear deal as well as his opposition to Israel annexing the West Bank. But as always, the devil is in the details. 

Will Biden fully undo the decades-long US-Saudi security partnership? What about the troubled US-Turkish alliance? To what extent and at what pace is he willing to move to lift Iran sanctions? How will he stop Israel from annexing the West Bank without using military aid restrictions as a pressure point? 

The man tasked with calibrating the answers to these questions is Tony Blinken, Biden’s former national security adviser who has been in the vice president’s orbit for the better part of 18 years. Blinken now oversees a growing cadre of familiar faces from the center-left of Washington’s foreign policy establishment who are tasked with advising the campaign both formally and informally.