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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAntony Blinken: Biden's secretary of state nominee is sharp break with Trump era
After reports first emerged on Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US secretary of state in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media. It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from 'Sesame Street', on the subject of refugees, directed at American children who might have new classmates from faraway countries. We all have something to learn and gain from one another even when it doesnt seem at first like we have much in common, Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.
After four years of an administration that has separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinkens arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least. He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify. All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.
There is little doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been at the president-elects side for nearly two decades. After working in Bill Clintons national security council, he became Bidens chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Bidens failed presidential bid in 2008. After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen at the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden.
He told the Intelligence Matters podcast in September: Wed actually show up again, day in, day out. But to engage the world, not as it was in 2009 or even in 2017 when we left it, but as it is (now) and as we anticipate it will become: rising powers, new actors super-empowered by technology and information, who we have to bring along if were going to make progress.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/23/antony-blinken-joe-biden-secretary-of-state-appointee-is-sharp-break-with-trump-era
UTUSN
(70,496 posts)MoonchildCA
(1,301 posts)I love him already!
BComplex
(7,982 posts)Can you imagine a trump appointee doing any such thing?
chriscan64
(1,789 posts)... as Grover.