Antony Blinken, one of President Biden’s longest and most trusted advisers, will take the lead in the State Department, where he plans to reaffirm US leadership in the world and unravel some of former President Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
Blinken, a longtime government official who has worked for the Senate and the Clinton and Obama administration, said his priorities are to build the diplomatic corps and revive nuclear alliances.
“American leadership still matters,” Blinken said during his Senate confirmation hearing.
He earned double praise for his long expertise in foreign policy and for his reactions during a smooth confirmation hearing on 19 January. Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who voted against Blinken’s nomination as deputy secretary of state under President Obama, said he supports Blinken this time around and calls him an excellent choice. ‘
Asked by Graham, Blinken said he agreed that China was involved in the genocide of the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority population, and that Iran was the largest state sponsor of terrorism. Blinken also told the Honduran trailer on its way to the U.S.-Mexico border: “Don’t come.”
“We have a good start here,” Graham said of Blinken’s responses.
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Blinken will be critical of Biden’s intention to re-enter the nuclear deal in Iran, take a new direction with Cuba, halt the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization, re-introduce the Paris climate agreement, ‘ to forge a new START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia and face China, which according to Blinken is the “biggest challenge of any nation state” for American security.
Blinken said the US should approach the world stage with ‘humility and confidence’.
Elected President Joe Biden listens to his nominated Secretary of State Tony Blinken at The Queen Theater on Tuesday, November 24, 2020 in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster) speaks.
Blinken, however, was criticized for being wrong in foreign policy. He was Biden’s adviser in 2002 when the then Delaware senator supported the war in Iraq. Biden later called the voice a mistake. Blinken also supported military action in Libya and thought the US should have been more aggressive against Syria, according to the Washington Post.
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“I think it would be a serious mistake to confirm a Secretary of State proving that he has repeatedly made wrong decisions regarding U.S. foreign policy and national security,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo, said. reference to Obama-era ‘failed’ policies in Libya, Syria and Iran.
Blinken, 58, is studying at Harvard and Columbia Law School. He was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council staff from 1994 to 2001. He began his long relationship with Biden in 2002 when he became the Democratic Human Resources Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Biden.
When Biden became vice president in 2009, Blinken also transferred to the Administration as Biden’s national security adviser and later promoted to deputy national security adviser to President Obama.
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“We would not have come out of Iraq in a way that left the government with a chance to fight it without Tony Blinken’s hard work,” Biden told the Washington Post in 2013. “He was the go-to man. He’s still the go-to guy. ‘
Blinken was confirmed once by the Senate on December 16, 2014 when Obama nominated Blinken as Deputy Secretary of State under John Kerry. The vote was 55-38.
Several of Blinken’s family members also served in the Senate-confirmed positions. His father, Donald Blinken, was ambassador to Hungary and his uncle, Alan Blinken, served as ambassador to Belgium during the Clinton administration. And Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, was also confirmed as assistant secretary of state for education and culture during the Obama administration.
Blinken has thrived since the Obama administration ended. Ethics and DC revolving door questions were raised about how Blinken’s companies became the starting point for Biden’s Cabinet.
FILE – On this Thursday, September 29, 2016, file photo, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified on Capitol Hill in Washington, ahead of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria. According to many people familiar with the planning of the Biden team, Blinken is the leading candidate to become Joe Biden’s nominated candidate as Secretary of State. (AP Photo / Jose Luis Magana, file)
Blinken becomes an adviser to the private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners in 2017 and he co-founded WestExec Advisors in 2018. The retired Genl. Lloyd Austin, who was confirmed as Biden’s secretary of defense on January 22, was also a partner at Pine Island. and Avril Haines, Biden’s new director of national intelligence, was a principal at Blinken’s WestExec.
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Blinken’s financial disclosure forms show that he earned almost $ 1.2 million from WestExec Advisors. His advisory clients included Facebook, Uber, Microsoft and LinkedIn. He was also paid $ 144,483 for the Biden campaign and another $ 21,666 from Turner Broadcasting, where he served as a global analyst for CNN.
Blinken grew up in New York, the son of a prominent global venture capitalist and an art patron, the Washington Post said during a 2013 profile piece. In 1970, his parents divorced and the following year, his mother, Judith, remarried to world-renowned lawyer Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. Blinken and his mother moved to France and he studied high school in Paris.
His experience of his stepfather surviving concentration camps informed Blinken’s belief that America should lead the world.
During a news conference with Biden in November, Blinken told the story of how Pisar was the only one of 900 children in his school in Poland who survived the Holocaust after four years in concentration camps.
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“At the end of the war, he made a break from a death march to the forest in Bavaria. From his hiding place, he heard a deep thunderous sound. It was a tank,” Blinken said of the US military tank.
“He ran to the tank. The hatch opened. An African-American GI looked at him,” Blinken continued. “He got down on his knees and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother had taught him before the war. ‘God bless America.'”
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Blinken said it was an example of how important the United States is to the rest of the world and how maintaining alliances can be a force for good.
“That’s who we are,” Blinken said. “This is what America represents to the world, no matter how imperfect.”