Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Pick Has Been an Avid Backer of American Military Intervention

President-elect Joe Biden will soon formally announce his appointments for top foreign policy and national security positions, including longtime adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state.

As a veteran of the U.S. State Department and Democratic foreign policy establishment, Blinken’s forthcoming nomination has garnered praise for the extensive experience he’ll bring to the job as the country’s top diplomat. But advocates of a more restrained foreign policy caution that his appointment signals that the incoming Biden administration will do little to roll back America’s web of global entanglements.

Biden’s very conventional secretary of state pick offers little hope for anyone who’d want “a new and fresh foreign policy that doesn’t involve global military primacy, continued intervention overseas, and this massive military footprint” overseas, says Kelley Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, a non-interventionist foreign policy think tank.

When working as Biden’s national security adviser, she notes, Blinken supported the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya campaign, despite the vice president being opposed to that particular intervention.

In 2015, Blinken—then assistant secretary of state—was also a proponent of the Obama administration’s policy of shipping arms to and sharing intelligence with Saudi Arabia in support of that country’s war in Yemen, which has proven to be a humanitarian disaster.

He served as Biden’s chief policy adviser in 2002 when the then-Delaware senator voted in favor of the use of military force in Iraq.

“In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them,” wrote Daniel Larison in a