(Jan 13, 2021)
Campbell, the top U.S. diplomat for Asia under Democratic President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is considered an architect of their “pivot to Asia” strategy, a vaunted but so far still limited rebalancing of resources to the region.
The deliberate cherry picking of allies and partners is the brainchild, insiders tell me, of Biden’s key Asia policy czar, Kurt Campbell. It is likely to continue, as Campbell has pointed out in a discussion earlier this year at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
A glance at the Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”
(06.07.2020)
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.
(Apr 20, 2020)
Brian McKeon, Jeffrey Prescott and Julianne Smith, three of the vice president’s former deputy national security advisers under Blinken, are also advising the campaign. Notably, Prescott went on to serve as Obama’s senior adviser for Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf states after working for Biden.
Of the 35 people listed as advising Warren, including Baker, nine have spent time at the Pentagon and 13 at the State Department.
Most others have spent time at the big four Democratic foreign policy think tanks, with six from the Center for American Progress (CAP), three from the Century Foundation, five from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and five from the Truman Project. Meanwhile, three members of the team worked at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s two main vehicles for funding regime change activity.