Four years ago, after the tumultuous first Trump administration, President Biden came into office promising to rebuild old alliances and defend democracy. The man tasked with doing that on the world stage was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime diplomat who had worked with Biden for two decades. The message to America’s allies and enemies alike was that a new era of stability was at hand.
Instead, Blinken was beset by an escalating series of international crises almost from the beginning. The self-imposed wounds of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal were quickly followed by the generational challenge of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hamas’s savage attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent scorched-earth war in Gaza plunged the region into crisis and destabilized the political climate in America.
All the while, Blinken continued to champion Biden’s original vision of robust American diplomacy to solve the world’s many problems. But the United States got involved in other ways, sending billions of dollars and weapons to both Israel and Ukraine, which caused political fallout at home. Now, as the Biden administration winds down, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East rage on. A new Trump administration is set to retreat from those very alliances and institutions that Blinken sought to reinforce. And that whiplash in America’s foreign policy has left an open question over its leadership in the changing world order.
On Jan. 2, I sat down with Blinken at the State Department for a wide ranging conversation about the world he is leaving behind, which, despite it all, he argues is better than the world of four years ago.
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