WASHINGTON – The Senate on Thursday confirmed President Donald Trump's North Korea envoy, Stephen Biegun, for the No. 2 position at the State Department. 

As President Donald Trump’s top North Korea negotiator over the last 16 months, Biegun has managed to keep a low profile – as he struggled to turn the president’s splashy diplomatic engagement with dictator Kim Jong Un into a substantive denuclearization deal.

Now, however, the 56-year-old Biegun may be thrust on to the world stage – and into the domestic imbroglio over impeachment. The Detroit native and former Ford Motor Co. executive may replace Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – if Pompeo, as many expect, leaves the Trump administration to run for an open Senate seat representing Kansas.

That could leave Biegun dealing with the fallout over the Ukraine scandal, along with a host of other nettlesome foreign policy problems.

“Being a senior official – and especially a top diplomat – in the Trump administration is about as difficult a job as one could imagine, as we can see from watching the current impeachment (proceedings),” said Michael Fuchs, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration. “So however professional Biegan may be, and however well-equipped he may be for the job, he's starting in a position where the chances of success are just very, very low.”

The Senate approved Biegun's nomination by a vote of 90-3. During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrats grilled him about Pompeo’s possible departure and about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into opening two investigations that would help his own 2020 re-election campaign.

Biegun’s current portfolio – urging North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal, a problem that has vexed other diplomats for more than two decades – has shielded him from the Ukraine controversy. Biegun told lawmakers that he wasn’t in the loop about Trump’s push to get Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a 2020 Trump rival, and a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election are at the heart of the impeachment proceedings.

State Department officials have testified that the Trump administration withheld vital U.S. military aid to Ukraine and a coveted White House meeting for its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as leverage to get the two investigations. Those allegations are at the heart of the impeachment case against Trump; Democrats say Trump abused the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Biegun’s Senate confirmation hearing unfolded on Nov. 20 – the same day Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, told the House Intelligence Committee, there was a “quid pro quo” – the security assistance and White House meeting were conditioned on Zelensky’s willingness to publicly announce the investigations.  

“Is it ever proper to withhold access to the White House or security aide, as leverage, to secure political help for the president?” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., asked Biegun.

“It is not something that I would recommend,” Biegun responded after first trying to side-step the question.

He asked lawmakers to judge him on his own record and suggested he was going into the position with his eyes wide open about the possible tribulations ahead.

“I understand that … that I will be challenged, both on policy issues, as well as issues of propriety and that would happen in any administration,” he said.

The top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, asked Biegun if he would be more forthcoming than Pompeo has been. Pompeo has refused to turn over State Department documents related to the Ukraine probe and tried to block some of his deputies from testifying.

“Given the expectation that Secretary Pompeo will leave the department early next year to run for Senate, and that I think, if confirmed, you will be the acting secretary of State for quite some time, your nomination takes on even greater significance,” Menendez said to Biegun.

“The department you will inherit is one with plummeting morale, an insufficient budget which the administration has repeatedly — over congressional objections – tried to cut, a culture in which political retaliation against career civil servants has gone unchecked, a sharp drop in new foreign service applications, and a hollowed-out senior diplomatic corps,” Menendez added. “I hope fixing these problems will be your first job.”

Biegun tried to reassure lawmakers that he would address morale issues inside the State Department, which has been battered by the Ukraine scandal and the sense that Pompeo failed to stand up for career foreign service officers targeted by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

“I have a record of not interjecting politics into the foreign policy of the United States,” Biegun told the Senate panel. “I work with a team of a dozen professionals at the State Department. I don't know their politics and I don't care.”

A father of three who now lives in Virginia, Biegun would bring a lengthy resume to the top State Department post. He worked on Capitol Hill for thirteen years as a foreign policy adviser to Republicans on the House and Senate foreign relations committees, as well as a stint as the national security adviser to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

In 2001, then-President George W. Bush tapped him to serve as the executive secretary of the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. Biegun moved to the private sector in 2004, working as a lobbyist for Ford Motor Co., where he handled the car giant's international government relations.

Biegun's path to top Trump diplomat may have started when he in high school, and his history teacher wrote the word “czar” in the Cyrillic alphabet on the blackboard during a lesson.

“It was one of the most exotic things I’d ever seen. It left such an impression on me that I went to the town library and checked out a book to teach myself Russian,” Biegun later recounted in an interview with the University of Michigan’s alumni magazine.

Biegun’s teenage fascination with the Russian language, later nurtured by an exacting college professor, helped catapult him into a distinguished foreign policy career – albeit mostly working out of the limelight. Even

When Ford dispatched Biegun to a remote town in Russia where it had a plant, the diplomat once again found his fascination with Russian to be a useful asset. He was in Tatarstan, a republic in the Russian federation, when his colleagues mentioned a museum dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, a 20th Century Russian poet. 

"There he was in the middle of Russia and his colleagues said 'Oh well you know there's a Tsvetaeva museum here," recounted Michael Malkin, who taught Russian language and literature to Biegun at the University of Michigan. Malkin had mentioned her during his class, and Biegun didn't miss a beat.

"Tsvetaeva? Of course, I know who she is - great Russian poet." His Russian counterparts were quite impressed, Biegun later told Malkin, thanking him for a literary lesson that had bolstered his bona fides.

Biegun has said that Malkin made a significant impression on him, and Malkin said it might be because he was so demanding. An Englishman who attended Oxford University, Malkin said he arrived at the University of Michigan with a more challenging, strict style of teaching than his American students were used to.

But Biegun responded well to it. When he later asked Malkin to write him a letter of recommendation, the professor included a line saying Biegun takes criticism "unflinchingly." 

That may be a vital character trait if he does become Trump's next secretary of state. Menendez warned Biegun that he was putting his reputation on the line for the No. 2 job. 

Fuchs, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the stakes will be even higher if he succeeds Pompeo as America's top diplomat. 

"He is going up against a president ...  who has absolute disdain for career diplomats and the State Department and (for) diplomacy," Fuchs said. "The question will be if he's taking this job, is he ready to put his career and himself on the line against the attacks from the president and other senior officials against his own department. Because if he's not, then this probably is not the job for him."