Making his final trip as America’s high diplomat final week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony on the Élysée Palace earlier than awarding him the nation’s highest tribute, the Legion of Honor medal. With its crimson silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken referred to as the medal “the respect of a lifetime.”
It was a really completely different scene again in Washington a number of days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a closing speech earlier than a crowd of international coverage specialists.
“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will probably be genocide! You’ll perpetually be referred to as ‘Bloody Blinken, Secretary of Genocide,’” shouted a protester who had infiltrated the Atlantic Council event. Safety officers led her out of the room, in addition to a person waving an indication that learn “Blinken: Conflict Legal.”
An analogous drama punctured Mr. Blinken’s farewell information convention on the State Division two days later, as a journalist, shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague, was carried from the room by safety officers.
The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. Over 4 years and multiple million flight miles logged, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the opposite in Israel and Gaza. The primary, the protection of Ukraine in opposition to Russia, was a popular cause marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American porches, and Mr. Blinken basked in accolades as he invoked the very best rules of worldwide regulation and human rights.
However the warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ignited by Palestinian terrorist assaults turned a political and moral nightmare for the Biden administration as Israeli strikes with American-supplied weapons killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, a lot of them ladies and youngsters.
Whereas President Biden set the coverage, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, offered it to the general public. The diplomat was accused of gutting the very rules he had championed in Ukraine, and have become the goal of vitriol hardly ever directed at a U.S. secretary of state.
So entwined are Mr. Blinken’s work and his popularity with battle that he might simply as simply be referred to as by a retired cupboard title that’s nonetheless on workplace plaques within the outdated State Division constructing — secretary of warfare.
Mr. Blinken mirrored on the query throughout an interview this week in his wood-paneled workplace, which he had embellished with up to date artwork items from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Blinken stated, “If we wish to use the time period ‘warfare’ expansively, I feel the State Division has been” — he paused — “sure, it has taken up quite a lot of our effort and time, and sure, as a part of that, you study loads about weapons methods.”
Conflict offered the Biden administration with the chance to forge nearer international partnerships, and it’s there that the president and his aides have excelled, Mr. Blinken stated. “America is ready to interact a extra contested, a extra difficult, a extra flamable world from a place of power,” he stated. “That’s what I imagine our legacy is.”
Mr. Blinken was no stranger to warfare when he began in his present submit. Over a protracted profession as a Washington international coverage hand, together with as deputy secretary of state, he had grappled with armed conflicts, notably the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his childhood was formed by the reminiscence of World Conflict II, particularly by tales of how his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, had survived the Holocaust.
On the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken cited a lesson he had realized from his stepfather: “We’ve to stay eternally vigilant, as a result of humanity’s striving for one of the best can generally be overcome by its capability for the worst.”
However the world served up an particularly ugly parade of horrors as Mr. Blinken took cost of the State Division: strife and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, the place the secretary declared this month that combatants have been carrying out a genocide.
Bearing a flawlessly well mannered and self-effacing demeanor, Mr. Blinken spent numerous hours attempting to resolve and forestall battle. However for higher or worse, his legacy rests not on forging grand peace treaties — these conventional diplomatic prizes eluded him — however on his position in two wars that always solid him in very completely different lights.
Drawing the Line In opposition to Russia
Mr. Blinken’s first take a look at, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, was broadly seen as a fiasco.
The Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul in August 2021 caught the State Division without warning, forcing a chaotic evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers demanded that Mr. Blinken resign.
His second got here when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
As Mr. Putin was build up for the assault, Mr. Blinken delivered a speech in Berlin invoking how Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had stood as much as Soviet energy and declared that the USA would once more defend “the governing rules of worldwide peace and safety.” A day later in Geneva, he confronted down his grim Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, warning {that a} Russian assault would draw “a swift, extreme and a united response.”
It was the type of commanding, high-stakes diplomacy you may see within the Netflix collection “The Diplomat.” Mr. Blinken deployed his flawless French in Paris and Brussels, and cajoled leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The end result: a coalition of about 50 nations dedicated to supplying weapons to Ukraine or imposing financial sanctions on Russia.
Because the warfare progressed, neither aspect sought negotiations, so Mr. Blinken was much less a peacemaker than a warfare strategist. Immersed in particulars of navy {hardware} and battlefield situations, he typically argued in opposition to extra risk-averse Pentagon officers in favor of sending highly effective American weapons to Ukraine.
And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Workers, Mark A. Milley, prompt in late 2022 that Ukraine ought to capitalize on battlefield good points by looking for peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the combat ought to go on.
Visiting Kyiv in Might, Mr. Blinken, a guitar participant, took the stage at a packed music membership and led an area band in a rendition of Neil Younger’s “Rockin’ within the Free World.” The protection of Ukraine had provided him a literal rock star second.
Bombs and Our bodies in Gaza
5 days after the terrorist assaults carried out by Hamas in October 2023, Mr. Blinken stood subsequent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a navy base in Tel Aviv and instructed the world how the killings had seared him personally.
“I come earlier than you not solely because the U.S. secretary of state, but in addition as a Jew,” he stated. “I perceive on a private stage the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and for Jews in every single place.”
That second, too, had a noble glow. Mr. Blinken was dashing to the rescue of an American good friend who had been horribly violated within the assaults. Hamas and its companions took hostages and killed greater than 1,200 Israelis — the biggest single-day bloodbath of Jews because the Holocaust.
However this time the narrative would develop much more difficult. In personal conferences on that very same journey, Mr. Blinken and his aides heard about warfare plans for Gaza that foretold extra mass killing — together with ominous reminders from Israeli officials that America had as soon as been prepared to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.
Mr. Blinken would make a dozen wartime trips to the Center East. They have been grim affairs, in distinction to the European excursions the place he was hailed as a savior of Ukraine. Israeli officers complained about strain from Washington on sooner or later whereas Arab monarchs fumed on the following that Israel was uncontrolled.
Once more he immersed himself in navy issues. Assembly with Israel’s warfare cupboard, he would research maps of Gaza and focus on particulars of technique. On one go to, they scrambled right into a bunker when Tel Aviv got here beneath rocket assault.
He beseeched the Israelis to let in additional humanitarian assist and restrict civilian casualties as they pummeled Gaza, turning hospitals, colleges and mosques to mud. Some State Division officers argued in useless that Israel was deliberately withholding meals and medication from determined Palestinians. For months, Mr. Blinken has stated the division was “assessing” stories of Israeli warfare crimes.
Over time, Mr. Blinken’s visits with Mr. Netanyahu appeared to turn out to be much less and fewer efficient. Typically the Israeli chief would publicly undermine his American visitor’s positions hours after internet hosting him.
Critics of the warfare stated that solely withholding navy assist would change the Israeli method. That by no means occurred.
In line with Mr. Biden’s “bear hug” method, Mr. Blinken and the State Division kept sending Israel weapons, together with 2,000-pound bombs that U.S. navy officers name unsuited for city fight.
Over the 16 months of warfare, Mr. Biden has authorised $26 billion in assist to Israel. Mr. Blinken has by no means expressed regrets over refraining from utilizing that leverage to affect Mr. Netanyahu. Indicators of “daylight” between the USA and Israel solely inspired Hamas, he says.
State Division officers despatched Mr. Blinken dissent cables opposing the coverage. A handful resigned and have become public dissidents.
“We don’t have a coverage,” stated Michael Casey, a diplomat and Iraq warfare veteran who resigned final 12 months from his State Division submit in Jerusalem, the place he labored on Gaza. “We assist the Israeli authorities’s targets over our personal pursuits.”
He stated that “of everybody within the solid of characters on the high, Antony Blinken has been essentially the most disappointing.” Regardless of displaying flashes of empathy with Palestinians, he stated, Mr. Blinken by no means veered from the method to Israel.
Protesters camped outdoors his Virginia residence and splashed pretend blood on his black Suburban. The descendant of a Holocaust survivor was accused of enabling “genocide.”
Such invective “comes with the job,” Mr. Blinken stated, whereas warning {that a} development of hounding public officers in personal areas like their houses might deter folks from getting into authorities.
For a time, it appeared that he and his colleagues may need nothing to point out for his or her many months urgent the fighters for a cease-fire deal. Then got here this week’s settlement between Israel and Hamas.
Even when it took strain from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the deal, if it holds, could possibly be a welcome a part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy. However the clock has run out on his larger ambition of brokering a historic settlement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that may, in principle, have included a first-ever express pathway to a Palestinian state.
Such a pact may need received him some forgiveness from livid Western liberals and Muslims worldwide.
He admits that public opinion towards the USA has grown “very difficult” in locations the place America is seen as hypocritical for denouncing Russia’s warfare whereas defending Israel’s.
He should additionally settle for irritating uncertainties. Ukraine’s destiny could possibly be in peril beneath Mr. Trump. And as for Gaza, some doubt {that a} cease-fire can endure.
That’s the nature of warfare, Mr. Blinken says: “Most of those challenges don’t have neat Hollywood endings.”
He leaves haunted by his gazing into the identical abyss of humanity that his stepfather survived a long time in the past. “What actually drives me greater than anything is the demonization we see in all instructions,” he stated. “The lack to acknowledge struggling on all sides, the shortcoming to see the humanity within the different.”
