Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to turn to Mark Lambert, a veteran diplomat with a long track record of rallying allies against threats from China, as a key leader of a relatively new diplomatic office designed to coordinate State Department policy toward the communist power.

“He brings a lot of expertise to the position, great understanding of the true nature of the China regime,” a longtime Korea watcher who discussed Lambert on condition of anonymity told the Washington Examiner. “He'll be a stalwart defender of U.S. policy and U.S. values. So, choosing him for the position is a very wise one, and he will be very helpful in forwarding U.S. strategic objectives.”

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A leading role in the Office of China Coordination, also known as “China House,” will represent a variation on a familiar theme for Lambert, who is currently the lead deputy assistant secretary for Japanese affairs, Korean affairs, Mongolian affairs, and several other Indo-Pacific countries. Lambert has emerged as a trusted official for Republicans and Democrats keen to broaden a U.S.-led coalition against the challenge that China and Russia have aligned to present.

“We have never seen a threat this large [of a] scale to Europe and the Pacific, I would argue, since World War II,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said Friday while traveling in Sweden.

Lambert has spent the last several years of his career focused on the China wing of that challenge. A career foreign service officer, Lambert served two tours of diplomatic service in Beijing, along with stops in three other countries in Asia. Lambert worked as political counselor in Vietnam under then-Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink, who is now the lead State Department official for East Asia and Pacific Affairs. More recently, he has focused on U.S. relations with Japan and South Korea, two keystones of the American alliance network who have moved recently to set aside their historic tensions in favor of cooperating with each other and Washington.

“We are talking with our friends and partners, including the Republic of Korea, to make sure that we're very sober-eyed about the situation in the PRC,” Lambert said in a December appearance on a Center for Strategy and International Studies podcast. “Our two closest allies at all levels seem to be dedicated to coming up with an arrangement that will allow them to move forward. I'm cautioned more than cautiously optimistic that their wisdom will prevail and they will come through with some sort of agreement sometime in the near future.”

That forecast was vindicated by a historic summit last month when President Joe Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at Camp David. That exercise in fence-mending dovetailed with his prior efforts in Hanoi, where he was positioned “to devise a South China Sea maritime strategy and led a team that won recognition for dramatically improving U.S. relations with Vietnam,” as his State Department biography notes.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who unveiled the landmark U.S. declaration that “Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them,” soon tapped Lambert as special envoy for North Korea and special envoy for United Nations integrity. The latter of those roles was, in essence, an exercise in trying to blunt Chinese Communist influence at the United Nations, an initiative that included a showdown to prevent China’s nominee from winning an election to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization.

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Lambert’s appointment was reported by Reuters, but the State Department has not confirmed the personnel move publicly, and the prospective division of labor between Lambert and Kritenbrink remains unclear. He is expected to replace one of his former colleagues, Rick Waters, a deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan who stepped down as head of “China House” in May and left the foreign service altogether soon after.

“Having someone like Mark who is well versed in working with our allies, as well as his deep expertise on North Korea and China, I think will be an effective combination,” the longtime Korea watcher told the Washington Examiner.