Ken Salazar to Mexico and Tom Nides to Israel

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden revealed Tuesday that he would choose previous Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to be the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and Morgan Stanley vice chairman Tom Nides to be ambassador to Israel.

The elections are amongst Biden’s very first slate of political ambassadors. Until now, the only ambassadors the president had actually openly revealed were profession foreign service officers.

Salazar is a previous Colorado state attorney general of the United States and a previous Democratic senator who left the Senate to sign up with President Barack Obama’s administration in 2009 and lead the Interior Department.

During the 2020 governmental race, Salazar chaired Biden’s Latino Leadership Committee and acted as an honorary co-chair of the Biden project’s Colorado Latino Leadership Council.

Nides acted as a deputy secretary of State in the Obama administration. He was likewise a leading assistant to then-U.S. trade agent Mickey Kantor throughout the Clinton administration.

Biden likewise revealed that he will choose Capt. C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger as an ambassador-rank U.S. agent to the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Sullenberger is a retired airline company pilot, understood finest for effectively landing United States Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009.  

For the prominent, ambassador-rank post of U.S. long-term agent to NATO, Biden has actually selected Julianne Smith. A previous deputy nationwide security consultant to Biden when he was vice president, Smith likewise directed NATO policy at the Pentagon.

Los Angeles-based psychiatry teacher Dr. Cynthia Telles is Biden’s choice for ambassador to Costa Rica. Telles teaches at UCLA, and for 30 years she has actually been the director of the UCLA Spanish-Speaking Psychosocial Clinic and the school’s Hispanic Neuropsychiatric Center of Excellence.

In addition to the desired candidates above, Biden likewise tapped 4 profession foreign service officers for ambassadorships:

• Julie Chung, for ambassador to Sri Lanka 
• Sharon L. Cromer, for ambassador to Gambia
• Troy Damian Fitrell as ambassador to Guinea
• Marc Ostfield for ambassador to Paraguay

The statements were mostly anticipated. But coming as they did while Biden is taking a trip overseas, they highlight Biden’s wider goal of staffing U.S. embassies abroad with skilled and highly regarded experts.

They likewise represent a break with the enduring (and bipartisan) custom of presidents administering eminence ambassadorships like Britain and France initially, frequently to their greatest project donors.

Not just did Biden select not to call his envoys to vacation locations like the Bahamas and Brussels Tuesday, he did the precise reverse:

The 2 prominent ambassadorships that Biden did reveal, Mexico and Israel, are thought about amongst the most difficult diplomatic posts worldwide.

If Salazar is verified, as anticipated, he will have an uphill struggle ahead of him, assisting to fix a U.S.-Mexico relationship that has actually ended up being deeply torn over the last few years.

Former President Donald Trump implicated Mexico of sending out bad guys over the border and invested billions of dollars to develop a wall in between the 2 countries.

Biden entered workplace assuring a brand-new method to migration and reversed numerous of Trump’s more oppressive border policies.

But his pivot likewise set off an avalanche of brand-new, undocumented migrants who came to the U.S.-Mexico border, lots of from Central America’s “Northern Triangle” nations, and asked for asylum.

The result is a humanitarian crisis in Mexico in addition to the United States.

Like Salazar, Nides would likewise take control of among the most difficult portfolios in American diplomacy if he is verified.

Israelis just recently chose a brand-new union federal government, ending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year period.

The management modification in Israel comes less than a month after the nation consented to a cease-fire with Hamas, ending 11 days of combating that was the worst violence the location has actually seen given that 2014.