A Greek-American will be part of the new Biden Administration’s Foreign Policy team, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
Evyenia Sidereas will belong to the select group of the new president of the United States for foreign policy in the wider Middle East region.
“Meanwhile, career foreign service officer Evyenia Sidereas will take over as Arabian Peninsula director,” writes the American magazine. She will be part of the team under Brett McGurk, the new White House National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.
McGurk’s appointment was not seen in a positive light in Ankara. “McGurk has long been a friend of the PKK and the Kurdish rebels in Syria. It is possible that Biden will bring this man back to work,” the daily Turkiye reported. In fact, the Turkish newspaper wonders without hiding Ankara’s intense annoyance: “Couldn’t he find anyone else?”…
As the Foreign Policy points out “Harris and Sidereas served in key roles on North Africa in the State Department during the Trump administration, when U.S. policy initiatives in the region were at times upended by surprise tweets from the president. Harris served as the top diplomat for Libya before Trump tapped Richard Norland as ambassador to the country in 2019.”
In the first phase – according to the American magazine – the Greek-American diplomat is expected to “play an important role in the efforts of the United States to bring Iran back to the negotiating table for nuclear talks, but also for the revival of peace talks in Yemen between the Saudi-backed government and the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels.”
Sidereas’s ancestral origins are from the village of Tseria in Messinian Mani. She was born in Chicago where her parents moved during the junta. She studied at St. Paul’s University and graduated in 1996.
She did her postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and then worked as a researcher for a non-governmental organisation for the promotion of human rights in the Middle East.
