Antony Blinken: His origins, experience and political positions

Last week, President-elect Joseph Biden announced the nomination of a portion of his foreign policy and national security team. Among the most significant appointments was that of Secretary of State, the person responsible for directing U.S. diplomacy in an unprecedented international context and at a time of sharp decline of its hegemony on a global scale. The person named to fill that position is Antony Blinken, who must undergo a confirmation process in January before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Blinken, 58, has extensive ​​foreign policy and national security experience. Born in New York City to a wealthy Jewish family, his father, Donald Blinken, was a well-known investor in the banking sector with close ties to Wall Street. After his parents’ divorce in 1970, Antony lived with his mother and her new husband in Paris. At this stage of his life, which extends from the age of 9 to adolescence, the cultural and intellectual environment of the French capital and the coexistence with his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, had a great influence on him.

Pisar was a prisoner in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In the 1950s, he graduated from Harvard University with a law degree and a doctorate from the Sorbonne University in Paris. During that decade, he worked for the United Nations in New York and Paris. He was granted U.S. citizenship and in the early 1960s served on President Kennedy’s foreign policy task force, and was an advisor to the State Department. During Blinken’s intervention after his nomination, he acknowledged his stepfather as one of the people who have significantly influenced him.

His family environment has been permanently linked to political life. As an example of this, during his confirmation hearing for Undersecretary of State in 2014, Blinken stated that during his stay in Paris, “I found myself at a very young age serving as a diplomat trying to explain aspects of the United States to my classmates.” However, Blinken always showed a strong inclination towards art and culture in general, which motivated him to seriously consider becoming a film producer and playing in a jazz band in France.

In the late 1970s, he returned to his home country and studied humanities at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1984. During his undergraduate career, he served as editor of the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He linked up with the renowned New York journalist Errol Louis, who motivated him to become editor of the influential weekly art magazine called “What is to be done.” In 1987, his thesis was published as a book entitled: “Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline.”

In 1987, he graduated from Columbia University Law School. At this time, he was a columnist for The New Republic magazine where he published articles strongly criticizing the policies of the Reagan administration. His first foray into the private sector was at a New York law firm, Rogers & Well. From a young age he joined the Democratic Party and at the age of 25 he helped his father raise funds for the 1988 presidential race of Democratic Party candidate Michael Dukakis.

His government experience began 1993 with the Clinton administration as a State Department official. He was assigned to the bureau that dealt with European and Canadian affairs. Later, and only 32, he was part of the staff of the National Security Council of the Executive Office of the president. Between 1994 and 1998, he served as Director of Political Planning and chief writer of the president’s speeches, which Blinken responsible for crafting how Clinton would present, to domestic and international public opinion, his foreign policy narrative.

Between 1999 and 2001, he was director in charge of Europe and Canada on the National Security Council. During this stage, when he was assuming high-level positions in the White House, his father Donald was appointed by Clinton as Ambassador to Hungary and his uncle Alan was appointed as head of the United States diplomatic mission in Belgium. Blinken was involved in the main foreign policy issues of the William Clinton government for 7 years, which contributed considerably to his preparation and guaranteed him visibility within the Washington elite linked to the U.S.’ international positioning.

With the arrival of the George W. Bush Republican administration, he had to abandon his political responsibilities and worked for a few months with the influential think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2002 to 2008, he served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It is at this stage when his professional and personal ties with Joseph Biden begin, who on several occasions was president of that senatorial committee, allowing both to have the need to maintain systematic and fluid communications on issues of strategic importance for foreign policy. During that time Blinken prioritized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relations with Pakistan and issues related to weapons of mass destruction.

Beginning in 2008, with the appointment of Biden as running mate of then presidential candidate Barack Obama, Blinken became involved in the campaign and was a member of the presidential transition team. Under the new Democratic administration, he served as Vice President Biden’s national security adviser from 2009 to 2013, when he became directly and more intensely involved on issues dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2013, he was promoted to deputy national security adviser to the president, which showed that he was gradually gaining a space within Obama’s circle of top advisers. In January 2015, he became Assistant Secretary of State when John Kerry was in charge of that Department.

When he left the Obama administration he began to work in the private sector at the strategic consulting firm WestExec Advisor, dedicated to political consulting of transnational U.S. companies and entities from other countries. He also served as a partner in the finance company Pine Island Capital Partners. In both he was essentially dedicated to representing the interests of powerful and influential sectors of the economic elite. In 2020, when he became the Biden campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser, he had to resign from these positions.

Several American media outlets have mentioned that Blinken is fond of playing guitar and has composed at least two songs. He also likes to play soccer. His wife is Evan Ryan and has held various responsibilities as a government official. During the Clinton administration, she worked on Hillary Clinton’s team assisting her in her duties as First Lady, and during the Obama era she served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs.

Regarding his political positions, Blinken wrote an article published in January 2019 in the Washington Post in which he states the essence of his thinking on foreign policy. The text was titled “‘America First’ is only making the world worse. Here’s a better approach.” In it he exposes the fundamentals of how the United States’ external projection should be in the current circumstances.

In its introduction, Blinken writes that the global stage is increasingly dangerous. According to his perspective, the main trends are: an increase of populists, nationalists and demagogues; autocratic powers increasing their strength and behaving in an aggressive manner; European nations battered by division and self-doubt; democracy blocked and vulnerable to foreign manipulation; as well as “new challenges” linked to cyberwar, mass migration and global warming. He points out that no nation alone can handle these challenges and that the ‘America First’ concept with a mixture of nationalism, unilateralism and xenophobia has exacerbated these problems.

The article explains that foreign policy in the future must be guided by four fundamental pillars: preventive diplomacy and deterrence; trade and technology; allies and institutions; and migration and refugees. Regarding the first pillar, Blinken points out that a responsible foreign policy must seek to prevent crises or contain them before they get out of control. To achieve this goal, he emphasizes that “a combination of active diplomacy and military deterrence is required.”

In this sense, he argues that as geopolitical competition intensifies, diplomacy must be complemented with deterrence. It specifies that “words alone will not deter Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping” and advocates finding an appropriate balance between modernization, preparation, asymmetric capabilities and the structure of the military command. In essence, it ends by highlighting that “the use of force can be a necessary complement to effective diplomacy.” This view explains why Blinken is considered a “centrist with interventionist leanings.” The second pillar focuses on the fact that the United States must use its global economic power to protect its workers and lead the competition in new technologies, mainly in the area of ​​artificial intelligence, because it is called to modify the balance of power on a planetary scale.

The third pillar, linked to allies, highlights that international challenges cannot be faced by a single nation and advocates creating an organization that integrates its allies in Europe and Asia, which could be called the “League of democracies” or “Democratic cooperative network.” He explains that this mechanism would not only have to do with military issues but also with cybersecurity and other threats facing democracies today, ranging from terrorism to interference in electoral processes. The fourth pillar stems from the premise that one of the most destabilizing phenomena in geopolitical terms is mass migration, and for this reason the U.S. needs to address the causes and consequences of this scourge.

The article concludes noting the following: “We have learned that the world does not rule itself. If the United States abdicates its leadership role to transform international norms and institutions, then two things could happen: Another power or powers will move the world in a way to advance their interests and values, but not ours, or the world will descend into chaos and conflict.” This is the essence of Antony Blinken’s political thought aligned with the unalterable foundations that have inspired the international projection of the U.S. for more than two centuries.

Taken from Contexto Latinoamericano. Translation by Progreso Weekly.