That's who Antony Blinken is

In the end, the choice fell on the “hawk” Antony Blinken: the president elect of the United States Joe Biden has chosen him as his next Secretary of State. According to the Adnkronos agency, the ABC broadcaster cites its own sources and specifies that the official announcement should arrive tomorrow. Biden's Homeland Security Advisor when he was vice president, before becoming deputy Secretary of State, Blinken was also Barack Obama's candidate to head the State Department. Except then renounce it given the clear opposition of the Republicans. Blinken began his career in the State Department under Bill Clinton and later moved to the White House and the National Security Council, also under Clinton. When Biden was a senator, Blinken headed his staff on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

 

 

58, from New York, Antony Blinken is a liberal interventionist, strongly convinced of the American leadership and of the "exports of democracy" to the world. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School and has long been a mainstay of the Democratic Party on foreign policy matters. Blinken, the Associated Press reports, is a point of reference for many former national security officials who are calling for greater emphasis on the global commitment of the United States. In short, under the Biden administration, the US must once again be the “beacon” of world democracy: putting aside Donald Trump's reluctance, Washington must return to fulfilling its “Manifest Destiny”.

 

“Democracy is in retreat all over the world, and sadly it is retreating here too, because of Donald Trump”, Blinken told The Associated Press in September. “Our allies know who Joe Biden is, as do our opponents.” Blinken, former undersecretary of state between 2015 and 2017, assisted Biden when he was US vice president, and in 2008, when he participated in the primary of the Democratic Party, won by Barack Obama. He was a columnist for the New York Times and an analyst for CNN, and one of the staunchest supporters of Russiagate, the alleged theory of collusion between President Donald Trump and Moscow, later denied after three years of investigation.

 

Beatles fanatic, reports the Financial Times, plays guitar and began promoting American values ​​as a high school student in Paris during the Cold War. He speaks a perfect French.

 

 

As Corriere della Sera recalls, as a liberal interventionist in 2011-2012, Blinken sided in favor of the “Arab Spring” and the “forces of change” especially in Egypt and Libya. As reported by former President Barack Obama in his latest book A Promised Land, speaking of Egypt and its administration's support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama writes that “Samantha, Denis, Susan Rice and Joe's [Biden] National Security Advisor Tony Blinken were convinced that Mubarak had completely and irreversibly lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the Egyptian people. Instead of keeping our chariot attached to a corrupt and authoritarian regime on the brink of collapse (and appearing to approve of ever-increasing use of force against protesters), they felt it was strategically prudent and morally right that the American government sided with the forces of change”. Forces of “change” that soon resulted in the oppressive and Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi, representative of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

 

Antony Blinken was a staunch supporter of the US military intervention against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. According to the Financial Times, Blinken, in 2013, supported military action against Syria after the Syrian regime's alleged use of chemical weapons, a path that Barack Obama refused to follow. The next Secretary of State also publicly welcomed Donald Trump's decision to strike Syria in 2017 with a demonstration action.

 

Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, said Blinken and other Democrats founded, in unsuspecting times, a group called the Phoenix Initiative, arguing that the American Democratic Party needed a national security approach more “hard” after John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in the 2004 elections. Interventionism perfectly in line, in short, with the neo-conservatives of the Republican Party. As McFaul reveals, Blinken has also always been a strong advocate for the use of US power to defend human rights around the world. “I was very impressed that he was passionate about this,” he said.

 

 

As Secretary of State, Antony Blinken will take a much tougher stance towards the Russian Federation than the Trump administration. However, as Corriere della Sera also points out, the international community expects [Blinken] to bring the United States back into the agreements torn apart by Donald Trump: the Paris Protocol for climate change and then the agreement with Iran on nuclear power. However, the real challenge for him, as for the entire Biden administration, will be the relationship with China. Blinken, recovering the strategy of the Obama era, in the course of discussions in various Washington think tanks, foreshadowed a soft alliance with European and Asian partners, to persuade Beijing to observe international standards on trade, currency, rights intellectuals, rejecting the Trump administration's tariff strategy.

 

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Original column by Roberto Vivaldelli: