Confirmed as secretary of state, Blinken reviewing Trump policies

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Antony J. Blinken as the nation’s 71st secretary of state, installing President Joe Biden’s longtime adviser with a mission to rejoin alliances that were fractured after four years of an “America First” foreign policy.

A centrist with an interventionist streak, Blinken was approved by a vote of 78-22, a signal that senators were eager to move past the Trump administration’s confrontational approach to diplomacy.

Blinken, 58, inherits a State Department that he said had suffered from low morale and a workforce of about 1,000 fewer employees than when he left as its deputy secretary in early 2017. In his nomination hearing last week, Blinken said his plans to ensure multiculturalism in the diplomatic corps would be “a significant measure of whether I succeeded or failed, however long I’m in the job.”

Beyond the nation’s borders, it will be his ability to coalesce skeptical allies and manage a range of adversaries that will be the true test of his influence. His past roles at the center of President Barack Obama’s blunders in Syria, Iraq and Libya also remain a sticking point for his critics.

Some of the policies Blinken is now reviewing are decisions that were issued in the final days of the Trump administration and were “clearly designed to box in” Biden, said Anne W. Patterson, a former career diplomat.

Blinken “has to reverse some of these,” said Patterson, an ambassador during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations and the assistant secretary of state for Middle East policy from 2013-17.