[ad_1]
During Donald Trump’s nearly four years in power, Washington’s foreign policy establishment was sidelined. Qualified diplomats and security experts took the lead when Democrats tried to topple Trump through the Supreme Court last winter.
With Antony Blinken as Biden’s foreign minister, the aristocratic Foreign Office will definitely establish itself as a social and political force in Washington. A revenge that shows at the reception in the United States: Obama circles cheered the news that Blinken is expected to take over the Foreign Office on January 20.
58-year-old Blinken is a veteran diplomat who began his foreign policy career as a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. Blinken has been around Biden for at least two decades, first as an adviser to the Senate and then as a foreign policy and security adviser when Biden was Obama’s vice president (internationally oriented).
With gray-chested side legs, a cultured education in Paris and New York, and degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities, Blinken is the epitome of the socially refined and academically enlightened establishment on the East Coast.
At Harvard, Blinken wrote in the prestigious school magazine Crimson, considered a career as a filmmaker, today he plays guitar in a band. (There are a couple of songs available on Spotify with diplomatically loaded titles like Lip Service and Patience.)
Proximity to the future president gives Blinken a head start as foreign minister. Distance to the White House is often crucial to one’s influence among foreign leaders. Blinken described as “Bidenite“Biden’s closest family member.
Situation room in the White House the night the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden
Photo: Pete Souza / AP Photo / The White House
He was one of the trusted advisers in the situation room the night the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden.
As foreign minister, Blinken is expected to restore America’s relations with Europe. Rejoin the United States to the Paris Agreement, repair the Iran Agreement, and prevent the United States from withdrawing from the World Health Organization. That is, ending America First, the aggressive nationalism of the Trump administration.
In other ways Blinken learns to build on Trump’s legacy (even if Biden or Blinken would never put it that way). Blinken, along with the states of Europe, India and Africa, will try to form a counterweight to China’s claims to power.
Along with Iran, the Trump administration viewed China as its main enemy; a deal that Biden did not object to, although Blinken hopes to strengthen trade relations and human rights by establishing a coalition with China.
The Trump administration has drastically reduced the number of quota refugees the United States admits, 1,10000-15,000. Rather than open wide the southern border, Blinken will try to “help” the poor and refugees on the ground in their home countries in Central America, among other places.
But the isolationism, which has permeated Trump’s international rhetoric and views, is likely just a memory of Blinkens as foreign minister. His vision of the role of the United States in the world is marked by the fate of his stepfather. As a teenager during WWII, (stepfather) Samuel Pisar managed to escape Auschwitz and establish himself as a successful lawyer in Hollywood and Paris, with culturally prominent people as clients.
Tony Blinken considers that fateful issues such as pandemics, the climate crisis and nuclear weapons cannot be resolved by one country alone: a foreign policy for our time must be multilateral.
Before he takes office, Blinken will be questioned in the Senate, and then Republicans will clarify the shortcomings of the Obama administration, especially in Syria and Libya after the Arab Spring.
But when it comes to the Arab Spring, where Obama was divided, Blinken was one of the phalanxes in the White House pushing for a more radical American line and active American intervention.
The foreign policy establishment, then represented by Biden and Hillary Clinton, warned Obama to take a pro-insurgent stand as they protested old corrupt regimes.
By contrast, a younger generation, to which Blinken belonged and led, felt that “it seemed both strategically wise and morally correct for the United States to take a stand on changing forces.” That’s what Barack Obama writes in “A Committed Country”, the first part of his recent memoirs (where Tony Blinken is mentioned four times).
In the case of Syria Obama hesitated. He made Congress decide whether the United States would attack dictator Bashar al-Assad by military force. Washington decided against. A mistake, said Blinkens, who believed that the United States had a duty to try to stop al-Assad from killing its own people, a conclusion inspired by the life of stepfather Samuel Pisar.
“When you are concerned about poisonous gas in Syria, you inevitably think of the gas that killed my entire family,” Samuel Pisar said in a portrait of Blinken in the Washington Post in 2013.
