Jakarta: Delays in confirming US President Joe Biden’s nominees to the post of ambassador is hampering efforts to tackle foreign policy challenges, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.
Blinken made a plea on Tuesday to the US Senate to speed up the confirmations. Biden had pledged to restore US leadership in the world through diplomacy, after four years of a unilateral approach espoused by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump and having Senate-confirmed nominees was crucial in achieving that goal.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has pleaded with the US Senate to confirm ambassador nominess.Credit:AP
”This is a huge problem,” Blinken told a news conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, the first stop on a Southeast Asia trip that will cover Malaysia and Thailand. “For the sake of our national security, the Senate must act.”
Nominees do not become ambassadors until they are confirmed by the US Senate.
By last week, just 16 per cent of the Biden administration’s ambassadors were confirmed, Blinken said, compared with the level of 70 per cent to 90 per cent by the same point in the three previous administrations.
And despite signing the AUKUS security and defence pact in September, the posts in Canberra and London also remain vacant. The US ambassador to Australia is widely rumoured to be Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of president John F. Kennedy.
“Virtually every challenge we face, including dealing with Russia, with China, with non-state factors, we’re hampered by the fact that we don’t have our full national security and foreign policy team on the field,” Blinken said.
He added that he had spoken about the problem with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday night.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz has put a hold on Biden’s nominees as he wants the President to impose sanctions that would halt Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Cruz has wielded power by being a lone holdout on a fast-track confirmation process that requires consent by all 100 senators for non-controversial nominees.
In November, Republican Senator Marco Rubio put a hold on Nicholas Burns, Biden’s nominee to be US ambassador to Beijing.
Blinken and Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne discussed the issue at their meeting in Liverpool, England at the weekend.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said: “They also agreed on the importance of having a Senate-confirmed ambassador in place in Canberra as soon as possible in light of the scope and scale of shared challenges we face.”
In Britain, the US has temporarily filled the post with Philip T. Reeker, who has assumed the role of Chargé d’Affaires, but there has been no equivalent stop-gap sent to Australia.
However, because the White House has centralised national security policy within its remit and the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, it means that Australia’s chain of communications are currently essentially straight to the top.
The delays are still nowhere near those seen under the Trump Administration. He first named an Ambassador for Australia in November 2018, around two years after Trump’s shock win in 2016.
Arthur B Culvahouse Jr was eventually confirmed by the Senate and he was delivering his first media conference to the press in Canberra in March 2019, more than two years after President Trump’s inauguration.
Reuters
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