By Lara Jakes, Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger

 WASHINGTON — Antony J. Blinken, a defender of global alliances and President-elect Joe Biden’s closest foreign policy adviser, is expected to be nominated for secretary of state, a job in which he will try to coalesce sceptical international partners into a new competition with China, according to people close to the process.

Blinken, 58, a former deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama, began his career at the State Department during the Clinton administration. His extensive foreign policy credentials are expected to help calm US diplomats and global leaders alike after four years of the Trump administration’s ricocheting strategies and nationalist swaggering.

Biden is also expected to name another close aide, Jake Sullivan, as national security adviser, according to a person familiar with the process. Sullivan, 43, succeeded Blinken as Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, and served as the head of policy planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, becoming her closest strategic adviser.

Together, Blinken and Sullivan, good friends with a common worldview, have become Biden’s brain trust and often his voice on foreign policy matters. And they led the attack on President Donald Trump’s use of ‘America First’ as a guiding principle, saying it only isolated the United States and created opportunities and vacuums for its adversaries.

Biden plans to announce their selections even as Trump continues his ineffectual push to overturn the election. A growing number of Republicans are calling on Trump to concede and begin the official transition process.

Biden is also expected to name Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year veteran of the Foreign Service who has served in diplomatic posts around the world, as his ambassador to the United Nations, according to two people with knowledge of the process. Biden will also restore the post to Cabinet-level status after Trump downgraded it, giving Thomas-Greenfield, who is Black, a seat on his National Security Council. The selections of Blinken and Sullivan were reported earlier by Bloomberg News, and Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination was reported by Axios.

Blinken has been at Biden’s side for nearly 20 years, including as his top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as his national security adviser when he was vice president. In that role, Blinken helped develop the US response to political upheaval and instability across the Middle East, with mixed results in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

But chief among his new priorities will be to re-establish the United States as a trusted ally that is ready to rejoin global agreements and institutions — including the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the World Health Organization — that were jettisoned by Trump.

“Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions,” Blinken said at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July . “Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.”

Working with other countries, Blinken said at the forum, could have the added benefit of confronting another top diplomatic challenge: competing with China by choosing multilateral efforts to advance trade, technology investments and human rights — instead of forcing individual nations to choose between the two superpowers’ economies.

That is likely to mean diplomatic time spent forging stronger ties with India and across the Indo-Pacific region, where 14 nations recently signed one of the world’s largest free trade agreements with China. It could also bring an effort to deepen engagement across Africa, where China has made inroads with technology and infrastructure investments, and recognize Europe as a partner of “first resort, not last resort, when it comes to contending with the challenges we face,” Blinken said at the forum.

In taking the White House’s top national security job, Sullivan will be the youngest person to hold that position since the Eisenhower administration. Sullivan made his name in the Obama administration, finding admirers even among conservative Republicans in Congress while playing a key role in the negotiations leading to the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.

A Minnesota native and Yale Law School graduate, Sullivan in recent months has helped spearhead a project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace re-conceiving US foreign policy around the needs of the American middle class.

In recent years, Sullivan has taught at Yale Law School and Dartmouth, and moved to New Hampshire with his wife, Margaret Goodlander. Goodlander is a former aide to Sen. John McCain, and then a law clerk to Judge Merrick B. Garland and Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Blinken, described by some as a centrist with a streak of interventionism, has also sought to lessen refugee crises and migration. On the last day of the Obama administration, the State Department set a cap of 110,000 refugees who would be allowed to resettle in the U.S. in the 2017 fiscal year. That number has since dwindled to 15,000 in the 2021 fiscal year.

He has said he will look to further assist Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the Northern Triangle countries of Central America — to persuade migrants that they will be safer and better off remaining home.

Blinken grew up in New York and in Paris, graduating from Harvard University and Columbia Law School. The son of an ambassador to Hungary during the Clinton administration and the stepson of a Holocaust survivor, Blinken has often spoken of the moral example the United States sets for the rest of the world.

“In times of crisis or calamity, it is the United States that the world turns to first and always,” Blinken said at a speech at the Centre for a New American Security in 2015.

“We are not the leader of first choice because we’re always right or because we’re universally liked or because we can dictate outcomes,” he said. “It’s because we strive to the best of our ability to align our actions with our principles, and because American leadership has a unique ability to mobilize others and to make a difference.”

-New York Times