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His other Foreign Service posts include: “executive secretary of the State Department and special assistant to former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright; minister-counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy in Moscow; acting director and principal deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff; and special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council.” He has the institutional knowledge of decades of foreign policy, a key factor in restoring stability in the CIA.
When he retired from the Foreign Service in 2014, he didn’t cash in by exploiting his overseas connections with some multinational corporation, he joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, where he currently serves as president. From that vantage point, he blasted Trump in an interview with NPR in 2019. “In my experience, what animates American foreign policy at our best has been a sense of enlightened self-interest—in other words, the view that our self-interest as a country, which we always are going to put first, is best served by making common cause. I think what President Trump has done is turned that on its head, so enlightened self-interest is a lot more about the ‘self’ part than the ‘enlightened’ part.”
Another former CIA operations officer, John Sipher, told NBC that Burns is “respected by Biden and his team. He is a longtime practitioner and consumer (of intelligence). Knows all of our allies. Perfect choice.”
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