President-elect Joe Biden announced his national security brain trust Tuesday afternoon, unveiling a team with experience in the ways of Washington that is as impressive as its intellectual heft.

Antony Blinken, the nominee for secretary of state, has been a top foreign policy adviser to Biden since the 1990s and served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tapped to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a three-decade-long foreign service officer with multiple stints around the world. And Jake Sullivan, a Rhodes scholar and former senior Obama administration official, is commonly described as a leading foreign policy force in the Democratic Party.