Blinken confirmed as secretary of state
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Tony Blinken as the nation’s 71st secretary of state, installing President Joe Biden’s longtime adviser with a mission to rejoin alliances that were fractured after four years of an “America First” foreign policy.
A centrist with an interventionist streak, Blinken was approved by a vote of 78-22, a signal that senators were eager to move past the Trump administration’s confrontational approach to diplomacy. “Blinken is the right person to reassure America’s prerogatives on the global stage,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, said before the vote.
“This is the person for the job,” said Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Blinken, 58, inherits a State Department that he said has suffered from low morale and a workforce of about 1,000 fewer employees than when he left as its deputy secretary in early 2017.
In his nomination hearing last week, Blinken said his plans to ensure multiculturalism in the diplomatic corps will be “a significant measure of whether I succeeded or failed, however long I’m in the job.”
Minutes before Tuesday’s vote, Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY., made a lone speech to oppose Blinken, blaming him for helping draw the
United States into conflicts in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2014 that have fueled regional instability.
Some of the policies Blinken is now reviewing are decisions that were issued in the final days of the Trump administration and were “clearly designed to box in” Biden, said Anne Patterson, a former career diplomat.
Blinken “has to reverse some of these,” said Patterson, an ambassador during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations and the assistant secretary of state for Middle East policy from 2013 to 2017.