NEW YORK (TIP): In a reshuffle of top foreign policy posts in his second term, U.S. President Barack Obama, on June 5, announced the appointment of the controversial and blunt-spoken U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice to replace Tom Donilon as his national security adviser.

He also announced that another longtime aide on the National Security Council staff who began working with Obama when he was still a freshman senator from Illinois, Samantha Power, will replace Rice as Washington’s U.N. envoy, a cabinet position. The moves, which had been anticipated but whose precise timing was uncertain, are considered unlikely to signal major changes in U.S. policy, despite the fact that both Power and Rice have been associated with the more-interventionist tendencies within the Democratic Party.

“I don’t think this change in personnel marks a turning point in policy,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “From the get-go, foreign policy under Obama has been run from the Oval Office, and Obama’s brain trust has included primarily a small inner circle of folks that cut their teeth on the (2008) campaign. Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been part of that inner circle all along.”