Antony Blinken

posed. The ensuing PR headache wasn’t just Kerry’s: Both the White House and State had to deal with it too.

Biden’s inauguration had just concluded on January 20 when, across town, a pair of workers pulled down a billboard-size placard from the State Department’s marble lobby. The sign, which had been installed at thenSecretary Mike Pompeo’s behest two years earlier, spelled out a “professional ethos” that read, in part, “We protect the American people and promote their interests and values around the world by leading our nation’s foreign policy.” To outsiders, it looked anodyne, but to many staffers, it was a thinly veiled insult they had been forced to walk past every day; it was condescending, with a hint of a threat against officials who leaked to the press. Now it was gone. “We are confident that our colleagues do not need a reminder of the values we share,” said the department’s new spokesman.

Nowhere in the federal government had the Trump administration’s assault on what he called the “deep state” been more acute, and nowhere in Washington had the evisceration of expertise and confidence been more pronounced. From early in 2017, Trump’s first secretary of State, the former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson, set about “reorganizing” the department through hiring freezes and attempts to force mass attrition. He proposed axing its budget by a third and argued for billions of dollars’ worth of cuts in humanitarian aid as the administration instead emphasized defense spending. Meanwhile, Trump appointees tried weeding out perceived political enemies in the staff. The horror stories quickly became legendary within diplomatic whisper circles. One official of Iranian descent was forced out of a job because Trump allies were convinced she was disloyal; in London, another was fired because he mentioned Obama in a speech. Back home, Tillerson’s staff used an obscure provision of a 40-year-old law to give some ambassadors returning to D.C. from abroad a dismal choice: They could retire or accept a new gig reviewing and declassifying Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The exodus was dramatic. About onequarter of State’s senior ranks was soon gone, including 14 “career ministers” (the equivalent of three-star generals), 94 “minister counselors,” and 68 “counselors,” according to a Council on Foreign Relations report. Other officials, hoping to wait out Trump from a safe distance, fled their posts for the department’s foreign-language training program. Soon, for the first time since World War II, the U.S. could no longer boast the globe’s largest diplomatic presence, ceding the distinction to China.

Staffing levels kept falling as conditions worsened for career State officials reporting to partisan Trump allies. One ambassador, in Iceland, fired seven deputies. Another, in South Africa, refused to quarantine last year after returning from Mar-a-Lago, then demanded staffers sit in the same room as her for meetings. “The State Department is increasingly run by unqualified donors and political sycophants,” concluded Joaquin Castro, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a Foreign Affairs essay. This flight of seasoned staffers combined with a precipitous drop in applications to the foreign service, exacerbating the department’s generations-old reputation for being “pale, male, and Yale.” A November report written by a trio of veteran diplomats for Harvard’s Belfer Center found that the foreign service looked nothing like the country it represents: By last year, only 4 percent of senior officers were Black. According to data shared with me by Eric Rubin, the former ambassador to Bulgaria who leads the American Foreign Service Association, the officers union, the senior foreign service was 87 percent white and two-thirds male.

Tillerson’s 2018 departure did not slow the department’s deterioration. His successor, Pompeo, a blustery Koch-brothers project who had been leading the CIA after an undistinguished stint in Congress, embraced the chance to get closer to both Trump and the spotlight. He stood by during Trump’s first impeachment as the president tried to discredit career State officials working on Ukrainian issues as embedded opposition operatives, and he spoke publicly in favor of force over diplomacy, almost persuading Trump to strike Iran in 2019. Chatter about Pompeo’s political future was common among career State staffers. Even after rejecting Mitch McConnell’s pleas to run for an open Senate seat in Kansas last summer, Pompeo hosted a series of private dinners with donors, allies, and campaign strategists on the eighth floor of the State Department building; his use of agency resources for his and his wife’s personal purposes became the subject of a whistle-blower complaint and an internal investigation.

Frustration with Pompeo boiled over in his final days in the form of two “dissent cables” signed by hundreds of department officials after he took his time condemning the January 6 Capitol riot. Pompeo had supported Trump’s desperate election-fraud lies; the siege occurred well into a flood of actions he had undertaken to tie the new administration’s hands—such as declaring Yemen’s Houthis a terror group and labeling Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism—and the bizarre barrage of hundreds of valedictory tweets he started unleashing on New Year’s Day. One, sent just hours ahead of Trump’s second impeachment, suggested the president deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. Increasingly isolated, Pompeo canceled his final trip to Europe after officials from Luxembourg refused to meet with him. A few weeks later, a Trump-appointed State official was arrested by the FBI for his role in the insurrection. He had jammed a riot shield into Capitol doors the police were trying to close while yelling for reinforcements from the mob.

The relief among State’s career officials was palpable, if provisional, when Blinken arrived and began taking care of elementary management: reinstituting regular staff meetings; meeting with unions; saying he would advocate for more funding from Congress, not less. He stacked his closest ring of aides with State veterans. Biden helped by returning the U.N. ambassador to the Cabinet (Trump had demoted the role), naming a respected diplomat, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to the job, then installing another, William Burns, at the CIA. The new president’s first trip to any agency was to State, where he singled out a foreignservice officer for praise while lauding those staffers who had stuck with their jobs. “You’re among the brightest, most involved, best-educated group of people America has to offer,” he said. “In our administration, you’re going to be trusted, and you’re going to be empowered.”

Lest Blinken be accused of pandering to the downtrodden, he has a history of incorporating rank-and-file policy experts into his daily work. Ben Chang, a former State and National Security Council official, recalls Blinken urging him to take a seat at the center table in the White House Situation Room during one Obama-era meeting, insisting, “You’re the expert. This is where you belong.” Under Kerry, Blinken made his first stop as deputy secretary a lunch with foreign-service officers in the employee cafeteria, and he often took junior aides stationed abroad out to dinner. Now, according to people familiar with the interactions, he has asked for his briefings to be delivered by desk officers, not their assistant-secretary or office-director bosses, ahead of his meetings with foreign counterparts.

Yet, two months into the job, few of Blinken’s top deputies have been confirmed by the

Senate, and the department still faces both a significant staffing deficit and serious questions about its internal direction. Blinken created, but hasn’t yet filled, the position of chief diversity-and-inclusion officer. And there’s a rift between workers who stayed with the department through the worst of the Trump years and those who left but now want to come back, competing for ambassadorships and other prime gigs.

Meanwhile, everyone is aware that their time may be limited. Hours after Biden was inaugurated, Pompeo tweeted, “1,384 days”—the length of time before the 2024 election. Even if Trump doesn’t run again, Pompeo himself may; he recently headlined a conservative club’s breakfast meeting in Iowa and made plans to beam into a Republican fund-raiser in New Hampshire. After the blowup in Anchorage, he resumed his countdown: “1,327 days.”

When blinken and I first Zoomed, he had been in the job for six weeks and, thanks to the pandemic, had yet to leave Washington. He was sitting in front of a bland gray wall, flanked by two flags, staring at a screen instead of deploying the kind of diplomacy he knows best and with which he has been most effective: the in-person handgrabbing, schmoozing, and eye-to-eye confrontation he honed under Biden, who likes to say foreign policy “is a logical extension of personal relationships.” Blinken had sat for roughly 70 video and phone calls with other countries’ leaders and foreign ministers. One greeted him with a cry of “How are you, my dear friend?” Another told Blinken he had “waited 30 years” for the call. This is the easy part of the job—reengaging with eager and exhausted allies while rejoining international pledges and institutions that Trump had deserted, like the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the Paris climate accords.

For some nations, Biden and Blinken’s promise to return to a consistent, recognizable policy-making order has been enough to welcome them enthusiastically, but suspicion lingers even among their closest partners. Gallup recently found that approval of American leadership had hit historic lows in countries across Europe (in Germany, it’s 6 percent). The same day Biden declared America’s return during a virtual meeting of the Munich Security Conference in February, Emmanuel Macron promoted the notion of European “strategic autonomy,” and Angela Merkel welcomed him but made a point of noting that “our interests will not always converge,” as the Americans reregistered their opposition to a pipeline between Russia and Germany. “Many allies are delighted to have a like-minded, consensual, principled government in Washington that wants to work with them rather than act unilaterally,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the U.S. “But even some of America’s closest allies are saying, ‘You know what? America always looked after its own interests. We’ve got to find ways of looking after our own which don’t mean always relying, or being dependent, on Washington.’ Maybe that’s not an unhealthy basis for future policy-making.”

Blinken insisted to me that he has no interest in merely rewinding American foreign policy back to the pre-Trump era—and that he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. “This is not simply pretending the last four years didn’t exist; it’s not starting the machine again where it left off in 2016 or where it started off in 2009,” he said. He characterized the moment as an inflection point. Part of his task is to make the Biden administration’s foreign policy less of an elite sport, translating it for everyday Americans, instead of maintaining its status as an abstraction meant for people who still read the international pages in print. “It’s something the president feels really strongly. He’s said—I don’t know how many times I’ve heard him say it in the years that I’ve worked for him—that no foreign policy can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people,” Blinken said. “Well, we’re about, in a very focused way, trying to get that informed consent.” In practice, that would mean making moves with more of a mind to the homeland and then explaining them in a higher-profile, more digestible way: This deal will lower the cost of your equipment, which will bring jobs back to your factory; renegotiating this alliance will make your food more affordable; giving other countries vaccines will end the pandemic sooner so you can send your kid back to school. “There’s an obligation on us,” Blinken said, “to look at all of this with a fresh set of eyes.”

One of his first orders of internal business was to arrange a series of deep-dive meetings in which he gathers a rotating cast of advisers to reconsider issues in which circumstances have shifted significantly in the past four years. At each session, he asks for a wide range of opinions about what’s likely to happen next for the matter at hand— recent topics have included Iran, migration, “Havana Syndrome,” American hostages, and embassy security—and possible policy directions. And in each meeting, Blinken has asked his aides to consider how one particular variable factors into the day’s given topic: “China, China, China, and, if you have time, China,” said one senior official. “It’s central to everything we’re trying to do.”

In Anchorage, after two days of discussions with the Chinese delegation, Blinken emerged from the Captain Cook and climbed into an SUV for a motorcade ride to the airport. The immediate news coverage was fairly shocked in tone, but I observed aloud that he didn’t seem surprised with how the public portion had gone. “Well, you know—no, not surprised,” he said, shrugging. He had assumed China would be defensive, he said, but once Yang responded as he did, Blinken wanted to make the point “more than implicitly” that the United States deals with its problems openly, “exactly the opposite of what you do.”

Blinken leaned forward as we sped toward Ted Stevens international airport. “One of the things I tried to lay out was we’ve made a major investment over many, many decades and many generations in this infamous rules-based international order. But we did that based on the hard lessons we learned after pulling back after World War I and then, after World War II, making these investments and actually binding ourselves to the same rules that others were under,” he said. “In the aggregate, we think it accomplished what it set out to do: no more Great Power wars and a more predictable overall environment, which other countries—like China—used to grow.”

He got more solemn again as the exit neared. “So I said we have a real investment in this. And the reason we come at you on some of these issues is not only from a rights and moral perspective—although we believe that deeply—but also because, relatedly, a lot of these things reflect commitments that you’ve made that you’re violating. You made a commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; if you’re violating that, and that happens with impunity, then the edifice starts to crumble. And similarly, on Hong Kong, the commitments you made during the handover were actually enshrined at the United Nations as a treaty,” he continued. “Well, if you’re reneging on that—and this is something that’s good through 2047—then that undermines the rules-based order that we believe in.”

Blinken’s first trip as secretary was coming to a close as we approached the runway. Three days later, he would be back in the air en route to Brussels, just as Russia’s foreign minister was due in Beijing to discuss what had happened in Anchorage. I asked how the trip matched up with his expectations, and he thought for a second. He had traveled plenty as deputy secretary, he said, but added, “I’ll tell you, the biggest single difference from last time is I’ve got a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old. There’s a little bit of a pang, I’ve gotta say. This is the longest time I’ve been away from my kids since I’ve had them.” The SUV pulled up to Blinken’s plane, and he stepped out onto the vast, mountain-ringed tarmac.