Antony Blinken, President Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, appears to be sailing through the Senate. Blinken’s hearing last week illustrated how fresh leadership can return diplomacy to its rightful place at the center of U.S. foreign policy. But it also emphasized Biden’s need to be more circumspect of Blinken’s advice.
The contrast between Blinken and his predecessor, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is stark. While Pompeo spent his last two weeks in office tweeting about “swagger,” Blinken is a diplomat of the classic midcentury style. He boasts an elite education and fluency in French. Rebuilding America’s diplomatic infrastructure is necessary to “revitalize American diplomacy to deal with and take on the most pressing challenges of our time,” Blinken said, to “engage the world, not as it was, but as it is.” This call for realistic, robust diplomacy is long overdue. So too is Blinken’s push to “restore Congress’s traditional role as a partner in our foreign policy.”
Yet, at odds with all this (and, equally, at odds with the best of Biden’s foreign policy promises and Blinken’s own pledge of humility in U.S. foreign policy) is the nominee’s vision of America’s global role. Although more eager for multilateral cooperation than the Trump administration, Blinken assumes that America must maintain global leadership across the range of international issues. “The reality is, the world simply does not organize itself,” the Obama administration veteran said in his case for Washington to keep its role as the world’s police.
This is a fundamental strategic mistake that has contributed greatly to recent decades of foreign policy failures. It is, to borrow Blinken’s phrase, a misunderstanding of the world as it is. Moreover, it displays hubris about the capabilities and limits of the country’s might. It also misunderstands the exigent purpose of U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy included, which is not to “organize” the world but to defend the United States. We should be wary. During the Obama administration, Biden and Blinken repeatedly came down on opposite sides of debates about military action, with Blinken the reliable interventionist. The nominee’s comments on the war in Afghanistan Tuesday define this divide. Biden appears to understand that the U.S. cannot go to war to right every global wrong and has committed to withdrawing all but a small contingent of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But Blinken is opposed to concluding the war without the (impossible) guarantee that U.S. nation-building progress will be preserved, and he wants a conditions-based withdrawal. History suggests that this will mean no withdrawal at all.
The distance between the president and his chief diplomat doesn’t doom Biden’s foreign policy agenda, but it will complicate his adherence to key campaign commitments. Biden will need to keep Blinken’s interventionist impulse in check if he is to fulfill his inaugural promise of making the U.S. “a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a contributing editor at The Week, and a columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets.
