Secretary of State Antony Blinken is perhaps the most accomplished musician to lead the State Department in recent years, but his recent release of a Spotify playlist showed a tin ear, according to GOP critics and observers.
“We’re in the middle of a pretty tense crisis with Russia and some pretty tough-nosed diplomacy there,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “So, just as a tone thing, I think it struck a bunch of foreign policy experts as being a bit strange.”
Blinken, a self-described “(very) amateur guitarist,” published the Spotify playlist last month to limited controversy or acclaim. Then, the State Department’s Twitter feed kept promoting it, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s saber-rattling put U.S. and European allies on guard for a major new conflict.
Have you heard the news? @SecBlinken is now on @Spotify! Check out his latest recommended playlist, listen to some tunes from around the world, and follow the Secretary here: https://t.co/z5SyMkIJqz. pic.twitter.com/ytz8t4JQAM
— Department of State (@StateDept) January 2, 2022
“It was probably put together by some 20-year-old intern,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, said Tuesday during a televised interview. “I mean, when you look at the playlist, that’s what it appears to me to be. And this is what Antony Blinken listens to when he doesn’t want to deal with the world’s problems and do his job. … With the world as it is right now, with this administration under such deserved scrutiny, it shouldn’t be promoting silly playlists that were clearly meant for teenagers.”
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Blinken had a series of phone calls with his counterparts across NATO on Monday, including a conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu about “the importance of continued coordination regarding the threat of Russian escalation in Ukraine” and another call with a bloc of central and eastern European members of NATO known as the Bucharest 9.
“The secretary and foreign ministers discussed Russia’s destabilizing military buildup along Ukraine’s border, the need for a united, ready, and resolute NATO stance for the collective defense of Allies, and trans-Atlantic cooperation on issues of shared concern,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
Blinken has described conversations about music as “a nice change of pace from, say, Middle East peace,” and his supporters followed a similar line this week. “You still have to eat every day and listen to music while you’re plotting strategy against the Russians,” said former Defense Department official Evelyn Farkas, who worked in parallel to Blinken when he was the senior Senate Foreign Relations staff director and she was on staff with the Senate Armed Services Committee when the late Michigan Sen. Carl Levin led the Democratic side. “He’s on the phone constantly with the Europeans about Russia, so if he’s tweeting about playlists in between on an off moment, give the guy a break.”
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Cooper acknowledged that the Spotify playlist hardly qualifies as a new crisis in foreign policy, but in music and diplomacy, timing matters. “He’s not well known outside of Washington, so my guess is that this was an effort to become slightly better known outside of his usual circles,” he suggested. “I’m just not sure that this is going to be an effective way of doing that.”
The playlist, as of Tuesday, had about 25 fewer followers than Blinken’s personal band’s Spotify page, which plays a style of music that he has called “wonk rock.”
