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US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday nominated his former aide, Antony Blinken, as secretary of state. But who is he and what will his relationship with Europe be like?
Here are nine things to know about him:
1. Europeanist, multilateralist, internationalist
Tony Blinken’s ties to Europe are lifelong, deep and personal, and he is a fervent believer in the transatlantic alliance.
“Simply put, the world is safer for the American people when we have friends, partners and allies,” Blinken said in 2016. He has described Europe as “a vital partner” and has rejected the Trump administration’s plans to withdraw the American troops from Germany. like “silly, he’s spiteful and he’s a strategic loser.” It weakens NATO, helps Vladimir Putin and hurts Germany, our most important ally in Europe. ”
On every major foreign policy issue – terrorism, climate, pandemics, trade, China, the Iran nuclear deal – he has a recurring mantra: The United States must work with its allies and within international treaties and organizations. Blinken also sees US leadership as essential in multilateral institutions. “There is still a premium, and in some ways even more than before, in American engagement, in American leadership,” Blinken said earlier this year.
2. Francophones and philosophers
Blinken speaks flawless French, with the slightest hint of an accent. The future top diplomat moved to Paris as a child after his parents divorced and his mother, Judith, married Polish-American Holocaust survivor and powerful lawyer Samuel Pisar.
To the delight of French politicians, journalists and all the other ardent torchbearers of the “francophonie”, Blinken is not an “Omelette du Fromage Man” but the real Cassoulet. He has given multiple interviews in comfortable and eloquent French. Blinken attended the École Jeannine Manuel, a bilingual school in Paris, the same one attended by another Obama administration alumnus, Robert Malley.
Blinken’s half-sister, Leah Pisar, lives in France, where she runs Project Aladdin, a nonprofit organization that promotes multicultural understanding. As an undergraduate student at Harvard, Blinken even wrote a dispatch for the student newspaper, The Crimson, about the historic 1981 slide of the Socialist Party in parliamentary elections, defeating the party of then-President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom his stepfather called him. knew well. Blinken wrote seriously, but his sense of geographic distances fell short, too short. Rue de Solférino is a short street, about two and a half kilometers from the Eiffel Tower, not near the famous monument and it is not long and winding. Hopefully the State Department now has GPS.
3. Six years in the United States Senate
Blinken spent a six-year term in the Senate, as one of Biden’s top aides. Like many of Biden’s closest advisers, Blinken’s first job with the future president was on Capitol Hill. He began working for Biden in 2002 as the Democratic Personnel Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden was the top Democrat on the committee from 1997 until he became vice president in 2009.
Those years give Blinken strong ties to other close Biden advisers who served in the Senate, including Brian McKeon, who would serve as undersecretary of defense for policy; and Avril Haines, who would later serve as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy director of national security in the White House. Biden’s closest adviser in the Senate, former chief of staff Ted Kaufman, is leading the presidential transition.
4. A Tale of Two Tonys
Blinken’s close friend was the point man for Biden’s campaign in Europe. When Blinken was about 5 years old, he met another Tony: Anthony Luzzatto Gardner, the son of one of his mother’s closest friends, Danielle Luzzatto Gardner. The families lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the children attended different high schools: Blinken to Dalton and Gardner to St. Bernard. But their lives would follow parallel paths and the family friendship has endured for more than half a century.
While Blinken moved to France, Gardner spent a lot of time in his mother’s native Italy. They both ended up attending Harvard as undergraduates, and then Columbia Law School, where Gardner’s father Richard was a professor and Blinken was one of his best students. In the mid-1990s, Blinken and Tony Gardner worked together on the National Security Council under the presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton appointed Gardner’s father as ambassador to Spain and Blinken’s father, Donald Blinken, as ambassador to Hungary. (Richard Gardner previously served as President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Italy.)
Tony and Tony’s careers intersected again during the Obama administration, when Blinken served as Biden’s senior adviser and later as undersecretary of state, and Gardner served as ambassador to the European Union.
5. Public service as a family business
Government service is the Blinken family’s business. He met his future wife, Evan Ryan, in 1995, when he was working in the White House as a speechwriter for the National Security Council, and she was a programmer for First Lady Hillary Clinton. Ryan worked for Clinton during his Senate campaign, and later worked for Biden when he was vice president as an assistant for intergovernmental affairs and, from 2013 to 2017, as undersecretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. Hillary Clinton was invited to the Blinken-Ryan wedding in 2002, and Blinken toasted by thanking the 40 million Americans who voted for Bill Clinton because the elections led to the marriage.
Blinken’s half-sister, Leah Pisar, also worked at the State Department and as a communications director at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. Blinken’s uncle, meanwhile, served as the United States ambassador to Belgium, at the same time that Blinken’s father was ambassador to Hungary. And Blinken’s stepfather was an advisor to President John F. Kennedy and the French presidents.
6. Jewish roots, European consciousness
Blinken was born to Jewish parents, and his late stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor who wrote a memoir, “Of Blood and Hope,” about how he survived the Nazis, including time in the death camps at Majdanek, Auschwitz. and Dachau. .
In a 2013 interview with the Washington Post, Pisar, who became an international power attorney and confidante to French presidents, described how Blinken, as a teenager in Paris, had asked to hear about his experiences during the war. “I wanted to know,” Pisar told the Post. “He realized what had happened to me when I was his age, and I think it impressed him and gave him another dimension, another look at the world and what can happen here. When you have to worry about poisonous gas in Syria today, you almost inevitably think of the gas that killed my entire family. ”
After Pisar’s death in 2015, Biden said his memoirs should be “required reading. It is a strong reminder for each generation of our ongoing obligation to never forget. “
7. Interventionist
In his roles at the NSC under Obama and as undersecretary of state, Blinken advocated for stronger US involvement in the Syrian conflict and, in particular, broke with his boss, Biden, to support armed intervention in Libya. He was also a close associate of Biden when the then-senator supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He continues to believe that diplomacy must be “complemented by deterrence” and that “force may be a necessary adjunct to effective diplomacy.” In Syria, we rightly sought to avoid another Iraq by not doing too much, but we made the opposite mistake of doing too little. “
8. Play guitar and soccer
Blinken plays the guitar, “mainly blues and rock. Not good enough for bluegrass ”, as he tweeted in October, and he likes to improvise. In his youth, he sometimes played jazz concerts. “Patience” and “Lip Service” could be subliminal clues about the kind of foreign policy Blinken will promote if confirmed as secretary of state, and they are also the titles of his band’s two singles released on Spotify. He even had “Follow ABlinken on Spotify” at the end of his Twitter. bio before updating it on Monday. “Lip Service” is manifestly about an unfortunate evening encounter, with lyrics like “and then I ran into you, but you said let’s be friends / baby, baby lip service tonight.”
Years ago, Blinken used to play soccer, the European kind, every Sunday in Washington with some of his closest friends in foreign policy, including now-Congressman Tom Malinowski, Robert Malley, the former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Philip Gordon, and others. Here it is photographic proof of his (sweaty) exploits, trophies and all.
9. Is Antonio as the Emperor
If you write about American foreign policy, watch out for the spell checker from here on: it’s Antony, without an H, Blinken, like the Roman Emperor Mark Antony, lover of Cleopatra and protagonist of Shakespeare’s play. It also has a middle initial, J for John, if you opt for that sort of thing. His friends call him Tony. And presumably, after confirmation, Mr. Secretary will be fine too.
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