Despite the welcome speeches, the secretary of state will be remembered not for his achievements — or his guitar playing — but for the humanitarian disaster he contributed to and contributed to.
When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken took the stage on a recent Wednesday afternoon to a packed room at the Council on Foreign Relations, it was all about legacy building. Biden is no longer an effective communicator, but that hasn’t stopped his team from working overtime to tell the story of his supposed mastery of foreign policy — a story that sometimes contradicts reality. Gaza as it stands today is conspicuously absent from their thinking.
Indeed, the facts on the ground, where the figure of around 45,000 Palestinians killed is almost certain lack of distance– constantly avoided. Samantha PowerBiden’s top humanitarian official and the head of the US Agency for International Development, which is tasked with helping the Palestinians, recently gave a speech that didn’t even mention Gaza. The same thing Avril Hayneswho is stepping down as director of national intelligence. “There will be time, maybe a long time, after this administration is over for people to appreciate what we’ve done,” Blinken said. told Reuters. “I don’t have time for that right now.”
But he had time for one more public appearance in New York. Michael Douglas chatted with Gay Tales, while retired ambassadors—Democrats and Republicans—sat knee to knee. There was wine and cheese. Blinken’s mother and half-sister sat in the front row.
Blinking reminded crowd how difficult it was in 2021 when he took office amid the Covid pandemic and economic crisis. And it’s true that the Biden administration has had some foreign policy successes since then. Through intensive diplomacy, they avoided a heated conflict with China, despite the Chinese hot air balloon incident over American skies. They are rightly proud of their renewed global alliances, especially in support of Ukraine. And Biden deserves credit for pulling troops out of Afghanistan (although the resulting quagmire and rapid fall of the government there complicates the political discussion, not the one Blinken raised). But the biggest threat is the destruction of Gaza.
Beyond the shocking loss of life, Israel’s destruction of Palestine will have a far greater and more lasting impact on America: it will undermine international humanitarian law around the world. This will embolden the military to conduct indiscriminate operations against marginalized populations. And without a credible human rights claim, despite what Biden has accomplished, America will be morally weaker than ever on the world stage.
Blinken mentioned — very briefly — the need to reconstruct Gaza and “solve the Palestinian question.” He noted the “huge human cost to the children, women and men in Gaza caught in this crossfire created by Hamas,” but he mostly focused on the heavy blows Israel had inflicted on Hamas and Hezbollah.
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No one in that friendly audience expected him to say that Biden’s bear hug with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had done little to stop the massacre or that the Palestinians had not received enough humanitarian aid. But he could at least gesture toward how, in retrospect, the administration might have done things differently, or offer new insights into why he did things the way he did. “It would be nice to hear them admit firsthand that there were some missteps in Gaza,” a former senior administration official told me. “It is only fair to celebrate foreign policy successes and receive accolades while showing humility and humanity by acknowledging that not everything was a victory.”
I had hoped to ask the outgoing Secretary of State how he is dealing with the growing number of experts who say Israel’s behavior amounts to genocide, exemplified by the case of South Africa against Israel at the UN International Court of Justice. Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pizarro, was a Holocaust survivor, and Blinken often said that the American military’s rescue of Pizarro from the Nazi death camps shaped his view of America’s power. But in Gaza, it has become impossible to argue that the United States is still a force for good. In the US government, the secretary of state is usually the one who does determination that a military campaign is genocide. Palestinians have long described the Israeli campaign in such terms, and recent reports Amnesty International, Doctors without bordersand Human Rights Watch supports the claim of genocide with new documentary evidence.
Sitting next to me was human rights lawyer Sarah Leah Whitson. The organization she heads, Democracy for the Arab World Now, has just organized a federal meeting lawsuit against Blinken and the State Department on behalf of Palestinian families who point to the Biden administration’s arbitrary and capricious failure to enforce US law to their detriment. The lawsuit says Blinken signed off transfer of weapons to Israel, despite a large number of documents on gross violations of human rights. Whitson wanted to ask how the Secretary of State can be sure that no unit of the Israeli army has committed human rights abuses. As she scrolled through her social media feed, shocking photos of mutilated Palestinian children continued to appear.
None of us got our question.
Biden’s team has been incredibly careful to care for their legacy. Even a questionnaire in a Proustian manner from Esquire was thoroughly vetted for Blinken by four senior communications officials, according to internal emails I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Elizabeth Allen, assistant secretary for public affairs at the time, wrote in an email that “this was my favorite project.” Another senior aide shared the published questions and answers with “validators” to promote them, including TV commentators close to the administration such as Richard Stengel and Jeremy Besh. It’s a snapshot of just how much high-level work goes into every move the Secretary of State makes.
Just as often, however, this hereditary projection fails. Blinken and national security adviser jake sullivan tried to mend their legacies through important stories for Foreign affairs which were soon overtaken by events. Sullivan took credit for the Middle East being “quieter than it has been in decades.” essay which clumsily found its way into print just before the attacks on October 7, 2023. (He updated text online.) A year later Blinken wrote announcing a renewal of American leadership on October 1, 2024. — on the same day that the Israeli military sent ground forces into Lebanon, making Blinken’s claim that “the Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago” a little harder to believe.
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In recent days, Sullivan has not been able to completely avoid the topic of Gaza. But he stands by the president’s strong support for Israel and continues to reject any self-reflection about what went wrong. He assured last month 92nd Street Yu that he made many efforts, through private conversations with the Israelites, to obtain help. He said Reagan National Defense Forum Dec. 8: “We believe we have taken a course that has stood up for our ally, stood up to our common enemies, and at the same time done everything we could to alleviate the humanitarian suffering in Gaza.” Experts say the Palestinians there need at least 500 trucks daily, but on this day, according to Ionly 23 aid trucks were able to enter the area. By the way, Sullivan was also the headliner of the symposium Henry A. Center for Global Affairs. Kissinger— but it was closed to the press and the White House refused to share any information about it.
Earlier this month, Sullivan delivered a main report at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on how the administration has rebuilt America’s defense industrial base — including arms factories, arms shipments and arms sales. He touted the increased production of 155mm projectiles, which human rights experts have warned are “inherently nonselective.” However, Blinken gave the green light to transfer them to Israel for millions of dollars. Overall, America has provided 17.9 billion dollars military aid to the country starting in October 2023, and Biden just notified Congress of additional aid 8 billion dollars arms sales – even though researchers have documented many cases where US arms and ammunition were likely used to commit war crimes.
For Blinken, a rare moment of candor — or at least self-deprecation — came in response to a question from an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations about the Democratic foreign policy establishment being “remote and out of touch.” Could this have been one of the reasons they lost key states like Pennsylvania in the presidential election? – Look, – began Blinken, rising from his white chair. “As someone who originally grew up on the Upper East Side not far from here, who went to private schools, then spent a lot of time in Europe, ended up in the Ivy League, and now I’m in this job — well, only in America.” The room filled with laughter as he seemingly self-consciously poked at his elitism and the elitism of the room without engaging in further reflection.
And then he left the townhouse, got into his SUV, and his motorcade turned onto Park Avenue. But when Blinken returns to his private life, Gaza’s legacy follows him — and the president he served.
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