Secrets of the State Department: what the investigation into the activities of the past head Anthony Blinken showed

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The fact that Joe Biden will appoint Anthony Blinken to lead American foreign policy became known back in the days when Trump challenged the victory of his Democratic rival in the November 2020 elections.

Then, speaking about the prospects of Blinken to take the post of Secretary of State of the United States, the New York Times described this politician as Biden’s “protector of global alliances and closest adviser” on foreign policy. He was expected to help calm the foreign policy of both U.S. diplomats and world leaders after four years of “the Trump administration’s rebounding strategies and nationalist swagger.”

Blinken’s top priority ahead of his appointment as secretary of state was to rebuild the United States as a credible ally ready to join the global agreements and institutions (including the WHO, the Paris climate accord, and the Iran nuclear deal) that were rejected under Trump.

But the current head of the American foreign policy department owes his career not only to his political views and professional experience. And also the fact that he truly established himself as a Joe Biden man.

Indeed, before his appointment as head of the State Department, Blinken was in Biden’s inner circle for almost 20 years, including as his top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then as his national security adviser when he was U.S. Vice President. In this role, Blinken helped develop an American response to political upheaval and instability in the Middle East—albeit with mixed results in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Libya, as The New York Times notes. “Mixed” – this word can be taken as a euphemism for such concepts as “not very successful”, and even “failure”.

The head of the State Department is a man not only of Biden, but of the Democratic Party in general, who has long won the image of a representative of its foreign policy establishment. Anthony Blinken, who served as Under Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, began his career at the State Department during the Clinton administration. And in 2020, he became a foreign policy adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.

Blinken – along with Jake Sullivan, the current national security adviser to the President of the United States – has been called Biden’s “think tank” and even his “voice” on foreign policy issues. It was they who led the attack on Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, saying that he only isolated the United States and created opportunities for America’s adversaries.

Even a country as powerful as the United States cannot deal with global problems alone, Blinken said before Biden won the 2020 election. Engaging with other countries could give the US an added advantage in another critical diplomatic challenge, he said: competing with China by opting for multilateral efforts to promote trade, investment in technology and human rights rather than forcing individual countries to choose between the economies of the two superpowers. .

As you know, from the point of view of Washington, the main challenge for America is China. Blinken has criticized the Trump administration for allegedly objectively “helping” China achieve its own key strategic goals. He said that by his actions, Trump weakens American alliances and gives Beijing “the green light to trample on human rights and democracy from Xinjiang to Hong Kong.” True, Blinken clearly liked Trump’s aggressive approach towards the Celestial Empire.

With regard to Russia, Blinken’s position became more and more hawkish. And this was long before the start of the NWO in Ukraine. And after the Ukrainian conflict broke out, the head of the State Department became one of the symbols of the anti-Russian policy not only of the United States, but of the entire “collective West”. Perhaps the only moment where he was ready to lend a hand to Moscow was his position on the extension of the new START treaty with Russia. But, as you know, recently, Mr. Secretary of State has no chance of anything here: the Russian Federation announced the suspension of its participation in this agreement.

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“For three decades and three presidential administrations, Mr. Blinken has helped shape U.S. foreign policy, ensuring that it defends U.S. interests and delivers results for the American people,” reads his brief biography on the State Department website.

Before taking a job at the State Department’s European Policy Bureau in 1993, Tony Blinken dreamed of becoming a journalist or film producer. He honed his media skills by writing President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy speeches and later overseeing European and Canadian policy at the White House National Security Council, The New York Times writes.

The foreign policy path in the case of Blinken looks like a completely logical choice. He grew up in New York and Paris and graduated from Harvard and Columbia Law Schools.

In addition, his father was the ambassador to Hungary during the Clinton administration, and his stepfather was Holocaust survivor Polish-American lawyer and writer Samuel Pisar, who was an adviser to John F. Kennedy, as well as to French presidents.

The uncle of the future secretary of state, Alan Blinken, served as the US ambassador to Belgium. And the great-grandfather was the writer Meir Blinken, who worked in Yiddish.

Blinken himself speaks impeccable French with a barely noticeable accent. No wonder, because Tony attended Jeannine Manuel’s bilingual school in Paris.

Public service is the Blinken family business, writes Politico. He met his future wife Evan Ryan in 1995 while working at the White House as a speechwriter for the National Security Council and she was a planner for First Lady Hillary Clinton. Ryan continued to work for Clinton during her Senate campaign and later worked for Biden when he was vice president as his assistant for intergovernmental affairs and from 2013 to 2017 as assistant secretary of state for education and cultural affairs. Hillary Clinton was a guest at Blinken and Ryan’s wedding in 2002, and Blinken toasted the 40 million Americans who voted for Bill Clinton because that election led to their marriage.

Blinken’s half-sister, Leah Pisar, also served in the State Department and as director of communications for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

Six years in the US Senate as one of Biden’s top aides ensured Blinken had strong ties to other close Biden Senate advisers to Biden, including Brian McKeon, who later became Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and Avril Haynes, who later became deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser to the White House.

However, Blinken’s career is not limited to civil service alone – he has worked in the private sector, civil society and journalism. In particular, he became the founder of the international strategic consulting firm WestExec Advisors, specializing in geopolitics and national security. From 2001 to 2002 he was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Before joining the government, Blinken practiced law in New York and Paris. He was also a reporter for The New Republic magazine and is best known as the author of the 1987 book Allies vs. Allies: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis.

In general, with such a family and professional background, Blinken at the head of the State Department does not look like a black sheep.

Some call Blinken a centrist with a touch of interventionism. The top American diplomat loves to talk about the “moral example” the United States is setting for the rest of the world. And it is likely that he himself believes in it. Apparently, he was guided by this very “morality” when he supported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 arranged under fake pretexts.

In 2002, he was appointed director of staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Blinken assisted then-Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in articulating Biden’s support for US aggression against Iraq. Blinken described the vote for the invasion of Iraq as “a vote for tough diplomacy”.

Speaking of the “moral example” that America offers to the rest of the world, Blinken supported the 2011 military intervention in Libya and the supply of arms to Syrian militants. And in April 2015, Blinken voiced support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, saying that “as part of this effort, we have accelerated arms transfers, expanded our intelligence sharing, and established a joint coordination planning team in the Saudi operations center.” In his positions on the Obama National Security Council and as Deputy Secretary of State, Blinken has advocated for greater U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict.

While the situation in the Middle East had previously preoccupied Blinken in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the American aggression against Iraq in 2003, as Secretary of State for the Middle East, he was, as they say, not quite on horseback.

But it was Blinken who at one time helped prepare Biden’s proposal in the Senate on the creation of three autonomous regions in Iraq, divided along ethnic and religious lines (Shiastan in the Shiite south, Sunnistan in the Sunni north, and Iraqi Kurdistan). However, this project ended in fiasco. During the Obama presidency, Blinken was considered a key player in diplomatic efforts to engage more than 60 countries in the fight against the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria.

But unlike Trump, who threatened to reduce allied relations with European partners, Blinken has earned himself a reputation as a “Europeanist.” As Politico notes, his ties to Europe “are lifelong, deep and personal – and he believes passionately in a transatlantic alliance.”

“Simply put, the world is safer for the American people when we have friends, partners and allies,” Blinken said in 2016, calling Europe a “vital partner” and dismissing the Trump administration’s plans to withdraw US troops from Germany as “stupid, evil and strategic losers.

On every major foreign policy issue — terrorism, climate, epidemics, trade, China, the Iran nuclear deal — Blinken has a recurring mantra: The US must work with its allies and within international treaties and institutions. Blinken at the same time considers it necessary for US leadership in multilateral institutions, writes Politico.

The head of the State Department still believes that diplomacy should be “complemented by deterrence” and “strength may be a necessary complement to effective diplomacy.”

“Blinken agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama have made, and he has generally been more of an interventionist than either of them,” wrote a November 2020 author of a Responsible Statecraft article with the telling title “ Tony Blinken: the good, the bad, and potentially evil.” And as life has shown, since then the head of the State Department has already made quite a few, to put it mildly, controversial steps. Alas, it looks like there are still a lot of mistakes – and fatal mistakes – from American diplomacy.