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After reports first emerged Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US Secretary of State in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media.
It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from Sesame Street, on the theme of refugees, aimed at American children who might have new classmates from far away countries.
“We all have something to learn and gain from each other, even when at first it doesn’t seem like we have much in common,” Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.
After four years of an administration that separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinken’s arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least.
While Mike Pompeo has remained a national politician during his tenure as secretary of state, giving most of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the Midwest, for example, Blinken is a born internationalist.
He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harbored the dream of becoming a filmmaker. Before entering the White House with Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with American officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded to Spotify.
All those contacts and urban bilingual charm will be meant to calm the strained nerves of Western allies, assuring them that the United States is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the early days of the Biden administration will be to rejoin the treaties and agreements left by Donald Trump.
There is no doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been by the side of the president-elect for almost two decades. After serving on Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s top foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as a staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid. in 2008.
After Obama chose Biden as vice president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen in the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden.
In the last two years of the Obama administration, Blinken served as undersecretary of state. His return to the top position is the embodiment of continuity. But in recent interviews, he has acknowledged the mistakes and regrets of the Obama era.
On the decision not to intervene significantly in Syria (a decision that Blinken opposed), he told CBS News: “We could not prevent a horrible loss of life. We couldn’t avoid a massive displacement … something I’ll take with me for the rest of my days. “
He also signed an open letter with other former Obama officials in 2018, acknowledging that their initial support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen had failed to limit or end the war and had become a blank check under the administration. Trump, resulting in devastating civilian casualties. A Biden administration is expected to cut military involvement in the conflict.
Those who know Blinken well insist that its commitment to human rights is genuine and rooted in experience. He is the stepson of a Holocaust survivor and worked in the Clinton White House on interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Since Biden won the Democratic nomination, Blinken has led an effort to reach out to the party’s left, narrowing down at least some differences – on Saudi Arabia and climate goals, for example. Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ senior foreign policy adviser, welcomed the news of his long-awaited nomination.
“This is a good decision. Tony has the great confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding American diplomacy.” Duss wrote on Twitter.
“It will also be a great new thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with the progressive rank and file.”
But there were also rumors Sunday night of future tensions over old failures in America’s foreign policy. Blinken has been adamant about the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel’s security, saying that military support would not depend on Israel’s political decisions.
In her comment on Duss’s tweet, the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian rights advocate, said: “Just make sure I don’t try to silence me and stifle my first amendment right to speak out against Netanyahu’s racist and inhumane policies.”
Political struggles will eventually come to the fore, but Blinken, who at 58 comes to the state department as the father of two young children, is likely to start off with a lengthy honeymoon simply by not being Pompeo and having a stated desire to lead the US back to leadership on the world stage on global issues like Covid, climate and non-proliferation.
He told the Intelligence Matters podcast in September: “We were actually popping up again, day after day. But to involve the world, not as it was in 2009 or even in 2017 when we left it, but as it is and as we anticipate it will become: emerging powers, new actors super empowered by technology and information, to whom we have to bring it if we go. to progress “.
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