Biden picks Peter Haas as US ambassador to Bangladesh

US President Joe Biden has chosen Peter D Haas as his nominee for ambassador to Bangladesh, the White House says.

Haas will replace Earl R Miller who has been serving as the US ambassador to Bangladesh since November 2018.

Haas, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, currently serves as acting assistant secretary of state and, concurrently, as principal deputy assistant secretary for economic and business affairs for the Department of State.

Over his career, he has served in positions across five geographic bureaus of the State Department, including as consul general of the US Consulate General Mumbai, India.

Haas holds a BA in International Studies and German from Illinois Wesleyan University. He attended the London School of Economics as a Marshall scholar, where he earned MSc (Econ) degrees in both the Politics of the World Economy and Comparative Government. His foreign languages are French and German.

Biden also picked Los Angeles Mayor and climate advocate Eric M Garcetti as a nominee for the country’s ambassador to India.

Garcetti, a Biden loyalist who co-chaired the successful Biden-Harris 2020 election campaign, has served as mayor of Los Angeles since 2013.

The White House biography accompanying the announcement of Garcetti's nomination highlighted his role in co-founding the bipartisan "Climate Mayors" network and in leading more than 400 US mayors to adopt the Paris Climate agreement.

Peter D Haas

It said Garcetti is the current Chair of C40 Cities, which it described as "a network of 97 of the world’s biggest cities taking bold climate action," and led the organisation’s engagement and expansion in India and its global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

India is the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States, albeit with far lower emissions per capita than those countries. It is under pressure from the United States and others to commit to a target of decarbonising its economy by 2050.

“As Mayor, Garcetti oversees the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere, the largest municipal utility in the country, and one of the busiest airports in the world.  He led LA’s successful bid to return the summer Olympic Games to American soil for the first time in three decades,” the White House said.

Garcetti was a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and also lived and conducted fieldwork on nationalism, ethnicity, and human rights in Southeast Asia and Northeast Africa, the White House said.

It said he spent 12 years as an intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve Component, serving under the commander of the US Pacific Fleet and with the Defense Intelligence Agency, before retiring in 2017 as a lieutenant.

Biden has sought to strengthen ties with India, particularly through the Quad group of countries, which also includes Australia and Japan, all of which share concerns about China.

The White House says Biden will host a summit of Quad leaders this year focusing on infrastructure after a virtual meeting in March.

The grouping agreed at that meeting that Indian drugmaker Biological E Ltd would produce at least a billion vaccine doses by the end of 2022, mainly for Southeast Asian and Pacific countries.

However, India, the world's largest vaccine producer, was subsequently hit by a catastrophic wave of infections and halted vaccine exports amid intense criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's domestic vaccination efforts.

[With details from Reuters]