Blinken is confirmed by the Senate
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Antony J. Blinken as the nation’s 71st secretary of state, installing President Joe Biden’s longtime adviser who has a mission to rejoin alliances that were fractured after four years of an “America First” foreign policy.
Blinken, 58, has already signaled he is prepared to roll back a number of State Department policies that were set under President Donald Trump. A centrist with an interventionist streak, he was approved by a vote of 78-22 after receiving mostly gentle prodding at his nomination hearing last week by senators who seemed eager to move past Trump’s confrontational approach to diplomacy.
However, Blinken also told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Trump “was right” to take a tougher tone against China, an overarching strategy that is certain to remain.
“I disagree, very much, with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one,” Blinken said. “And I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”
Yet Blinken described a measured willingness to rejoin other world powers in an agreement, which the Trump administration had jettisoned, to limit Iran’s nuclear program.
He promised a harder line on Russian cyber hacks and election meddling — even as the Biden administration said it would work to extend an arms treaty with Moscow — and said he would review U.S. policy toward North Korea, which he described as “a problem that has not gotten better. In fact, it’s gotten worse.”
All are departures from the foreign policies under Trump.
Blinken inherits a State Department where many diplomats say they are demoralized within an agency made up of about 1,000 fewer employees than when he left as its deputy secretary in early 2017.
He told senators last week that he will view his plans to ensure diversity and multiculturalism in the diplomatic corps “as a significant measure of whether I succeeded or failed, however long I’m in the job.”
That is another difference between his approach and those of his immediate predecessor, Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state who derided multiculturalism as “not who America is” just hours before Blinken’s defense of it.
In contrast to Pompeo’s fiery rhetoric and swaggering diplomacy, Blinken is a mild-mannered strategist who grew up in New York and Paris as the son and nephew of American ambassadors and the stepson of a Holocaust survivor.