President-elect Joe Biden named foreign policy veteran Antony Blinken as his pick for Secretary of State on Monday, tasking a trusted aide with fulfilling his campaign pledge to reassert America’s standing on the world stage. 

Blinken, 58, has worked alongside the incoming president for nearly two decades, dating back to Biden’s chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Blinken also served as a senior director at the national security council and foreign policy speechwriter in the Clinton White House, and later rose through the ranks of the Obama administration to serve as deputy secretary of state from 2015-2017. Blinken was Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser during the 2020 presidential campaign. 

If confirmed by the Senate as expected, Blinken will take the helm at the State Department at a time when deadly civil wars rage in Libya, Yemen and Syria, the Islamic State poses a simmering threat and the rift among the Gulf states remains unresolved. 

Blinken would oversee a drastically different foreign policy than that of current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose embrace of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy the Biden team has vowed to reverse.