The Senate approved President Biden’s choice to lead the State Department, Antony Blinken, in a fast-tracked vote to round out the top ranks of the new president’s national security team.
Blinken is expected to begin work immediately as the new administration faces several global challenges, including an Iran that has shown signs of moving ahead with its nuclear arms program while causing trouble in the Middle East, an increasingly aggressive and defiant China, and a Russian president in Vladimir Putin who has shown continued willingness to attack the United States through cyberspace and protesters at home with police batons or self-ordered prison sentences. But the list does not end there, and Biden’s top diplomat will be his point man around the world as the president tries to bring about the “unity” he says is needed at home while also trying to enact his ambitious left-leaning agenda.
The Senate confirmed Blinken as the country’s 71st secretary of state 78-22 during the midday vote. Though some Republicans raised concerns about his views, Blinken received ample bipartisan praise — a break from the combative years under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
“Confirming Mr. Blinken is not just about the nominee himself,” incoming Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, who shepherded the Blinken nomination through the process, said this week prior to the vote. “It’s about doing what the American people expect and that the Constitution requires — providing advice and consent to ensure that national security officials are in office in a timely matter.”
Blinken is well known in the Senate, where he worked for several years as Foreign Relations Committee staff director under then-Sen. Biden before ascending to the top echelons of the State Department under Obama. That familiarity entails a record vulnerable to GOP attacks, but his nomination process was marked more by an effort to signal a united front on foreign policy after a tumultuous presidential transition.
“If we treat each other with kindness and respect, we get things done,” outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, said at the beginning of Blinken’s hearing this week.
Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, credited Risch with “working with me to try to accelerate Mr. Blinken’s nomination to the floor,” but the process wasn’t all carefree conviviality. Blinken’s role as one of Biden’s closest advisers put him near the center of a litany of foreign policy disputes between Republicans and the Obama administration.
“Mr. Blinken has a long and distinguished history when it comes to statecraft and foreign relations matters,” Risch said Tuesday on the Senate floor before the vote was called. “Certainly, he is very qualified for this job.”
The outgoing chairman signaled his support even as he said, “We don’t agree on everything. No one ever does.” He added, “In speaking with Mr. Blinken on these matters, there is a tremendous amount of agreement that we have.” Still, he criticized the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, saying Blinken and Biden intending to reenter that deal “is a mistake.”
However, other GOP senators seem less convinced about Blinken’s qualifications and judgment.
“Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense under President Obama, noted that Joe Biden ‘has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,’” Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, said in one of the frostiest exchanges of the Tuesday hearing. “I bring this up because you were an integral part in advising both Biden and Obama on these failed foreign policy decisions. Even with years of experience in foreign policy, when it came time to make the right decisions, in your own words, you say you failed.”
Blinken adopted a bipartisan posture in his confirmation hearing, particularly on China, as he endorsed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last-minute determination that China is committing genocide against Uighur Muslims and paid qualified compliments to his predecessors.
“President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Blinken said. “I disagree very much with the way he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one.”
He also sought to assure Republicans that the Biden administration wouldn’t inaugurate a simple repetition of the Obama-era policies they opposed. “We’ll engage the world not as it was, but as it is,” Blinken said.
