Antony Blinken, one of President Biden’s oldest and most trusted advisers, is expected to take charge of the State Department, where he plans to reaffirm U.S. leadership on the global stage and unravel some of former President Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
Blinken, a former government official who worked for the Senate and the Clinton and Obama administrations, said his priorities are to build the diplomatic corps and revitalize central alliances.
“American leadership still matters,” Blinken said during the Senate confirmation hearing.
He won bipartisan praise for his long experience in foreign policy and for his responses during a smooth confirmation hearing on January 19. Senator Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who voted against Blinken’s nomination for President Obama’s deputy secretary of state, said she supports Blinken this time, calling him “an excellent choice”.
Asked by Graham, Blinken said he agreed that China is involved in committing genocide against Uighurs, a Muslim minority population, and that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism. Blinken also told the caravan of Honduran migrants heading for the US-Mexico border: “Don’t come.”
“We are starting right here,” said Graham of Blinken’s responses.
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Blinken will be central to Biden’s intention to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, forge a new direction with Cuba, prevent the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization, rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, forge a new START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia facing China, which Blinken said represents “the most significant challenge of any nation state” for US security.
Blinken said the United States should approach the world stage with “humility and confidence”.
President-elect Joe Biden listens to Tony Blinken’s speech, nominated to the Secretary of State, at The Queen Theater, Tuesday, November 24, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)
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 that vote a mistake. Blinken also supported military action in Libya and thought the United States should have been more aggressive towards Syria, according to the Washington Post.
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“I think it would be a serious mistake to confirm a Secretary of State who has a proven track record of making wrong decisions over and over with regard to American foreign policy and national security,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Referencing policies ” failures “of the Obama era in Libya, Syria and Iran
Blinken, 58, graduated from Harvard and Columbia Law School. He was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council team from 1994 to 2001. He began his long relationship with Biden in 2002, when he became the Democratic Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Biden served as president.
When Biden became vice president in 2009, Blinken also joined the government as Biden’s national security adviser and was later promoted to President Obama’s deputy national security adviser.
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“We would not have left Iraq in a way that would leave the government with a chance to fight without Tony Blinken’s hard work,” Biden told the Washington Post in 2013. “He was the right guy. He’s still the right guy.”
Blinken was confirmed before by the Senate on December 16, 2014, when Obama nominated Blinken to become John Kerry’s deputy secretary of state. The vote was 55-38.
Several members of the Blinken family also served in positions confirmed by the Senate. 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 educational and cultural affairs during the Obama administration.
Blinken has prospered since the end of the Obama administration. DC’s revolving door and ethics issues were raised about how Blinken’s companies became the launch pad for the Biden Office.
ARCHIVE – This Thursday, September 29, 2016, archival photo, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies at the Capitol in Washington, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria. Blinken is the leading candidate to become President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, according to several people familiar with Biden’s team planning. (AP Photo / Jose Luis Magana, Archive)
Blinken became a consultant to the private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners in 2017 and co-founded WestExec Advisors in 2018. Retired general Lloyd Austin, who was confirmed on January 22 as Biden’s defense secretary, was also a partner at Pine Island and Avril Haines, Biden’s new director of national intelligence, was a director of Blinken’s WestExec.
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Blinken’s financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned almost $ 1.2 million in revenue from WestExec Advisors. His consulting clients include Facebook, Uber, Microsoft and LinkedIn. He also received $ 144,483 for working for the Biden campaign and another $ 21,666 for Turner Broadcasting, where he served as a global affairs analyst for CNN.
Blinken grew up in New York, the son of a prominent global venture capitalist and patron of the arts, the Washington Post said during a profile article in 2013. In 1970, his parents divorced, and the following year, his mother, Judith, married again with world-renowned lawyer Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. Blinken and his mother moved to France and he graduated from high school in Paris.
His stepfather’s experience surviving concentration camps informed Blinken’s belief that America needs to 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 at his school in Poland to survive the Holocaust, after four years in concentration camps.
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“At the end of the war, he interrupted a death march in the forest in Bavaria. From his hiding place, he heard a loud sound. It was a tank,” said Blinken of the American military tank.
“He ran to the tank. The hatch opened. An African-American GI looked at him,” Blinken continued. “He knelt down and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother taught him before the war. ‘God bless America.'”
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Blinken said that this is 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.
“This is who we are,” said Blinken. “This is what America represents to the world, although imperfectly.”