President-elect Joe Biden has nominated Antony ‘Tony’ Blinken as the next US Secretary of State. Blinken, a former State Department employee, has for more than a decade been the head of the trust for the former vice president’s foreign policy brains. He was the vice president’s former national security adviser when Biden was a resident of the United States Naval Observatory. Blinken had previously served as the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chairman. Later, Blinken served as John Kerry’s undersecretary. Blinken began his career as a foreign speechwriter for President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. His father was an ambassador to Hungary at the time.
As Biden’s longtime foreign policy adviser, Blinken has also helped shape Biden’s own views on the Middle East, China, Europe, Iran, and India. He helped navigate the choppy waters of the Senate when the Indo-US nuclear deal was ratified. It was particularly important because, while there was bipartisan support for the deal, it had to be approved despite some democratic opposition on the far left. Obama was one of the first skeptics of the agreement.
Blinken, earlier this summer, had spoken at the Hudson Institute when asked how he views relations with India. Here’s what Blinken said when asked about the priority India would have for a Biden administration. “I think that from Vice President Biden’s perspective, strengthening and deepening the relationship with India will be a very high priority. It is often important to the future of the Indo-Pacific and the kind of order that we all want; it’s fair, stable, and hopefully increasingly democratic, and it’s vital to being able to address some of these big global challenges. “
Blinken also mentioned in that speech how Vice President Biden played a key role in getting India to join the Paris climate agreement because without India and China, the agreement itself would not have made sense.
“Then we worked hard to persuade India that it would be more prosperous and more secure if it signed the Paris Climate Agreement. We were successful. It was not easy. It was for all the reasons you cited. It was a challenging effort, but Vice President Biden was one of the leaders in the effort to convince our partners in India and they did. I think that is a reflection, again, of the fact that we cannot solve common global challenges without India as part of the agreement, “said Blinken.
One of the top priorities for the new Biden administration would be to join the international agreements, commitments and organizations that the Trump administration caused the United States to withdraw from. In particular, the top 3 on this list would be the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and the JCPOA with Iran.
But Blinken also gave an idea of how the relationship with India is not going to be just milk and honey. He too will be forced to raise uncomfortable internal issues with India, albeit in private. “Obviously now we have real challenges and concerns, for example about some of the actions the government has taken, particularly to suppress freedom of movement and freedom of expression in Kashmir, some of the citizenship laws, but always interacting. better with a partner and a vital partner like India, when he can speak frankly and directly about areas where he has differences. “
Clearly, the South Block mandarins will be willing to involve the incoming secretary of state to get both parties off to a good start.
.
