Targeted News Service targetednews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from targetednews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The nominations signal an effort by the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken
The announcement is for seven senior State Department positions and nine ambassador posts in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. A majority of the nominees are career Foreign Service Officers with extensive experience in their designated regions.
ADVERTISEMENT
The nominees also feature a significant number of women and people of color, also part of the Biden administration’s push to increase diversity among senior staff and diplomats.
This includes Karen Erika Donfried, the president of the German Marshall Fund, a premier transatlantic policy think tank, to be assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Donfried also served as president and senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
Ms Leaf has extensive experience in the Middle East, having served as ambassador to the UAE from 2014 to 2018 and before that in a number of positions in the State Department, including deputy assistant secretary of state for the Arabian Peninsula, deputy assistant secretary for Iraq and the first director of the Office of Iranian Affairs.
A career diplomat, Ms Leaf has served across the region over the last two and half decades. She has held posts in Tunis, Basra, Kuwait City, Cairo and Jerusalem. She speaks Arabic, French, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, according to the State Department.
Her policy views point to advocating robust US diplomacy in the region. As a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ms Leaf co-authored a report that rebuked the Trump administration for threatening to close the US embassy in Baghdad.