Its making last trip As America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken received a hero’s welcome in his former hometown of Paris last week.
French President Emmanuel Macron declared Mr Blinken an “outstanding servant of peace” before awarding him the country’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, at a ceremony at the Elysee Palace. Wearing the red silk ribbon on his jacket, Mr Blinken called the medal “the honor of a lifetime”.
A few days later, Mr. Blinken’s final speech to a crowd of foreign policy experts in Washington was a very different picture.
“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will be genocide! You will forever be known as ‘Bloody Blinken, Secretary of Genocide,’” shouted a protester. He had infiltrated an Atlantic Council event. Security officers escorted him from the room, along with a man waving a sign that read “Blinken: War Criminal.”
Similar drama followed two days later at Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department, as a journalist was escorted out of the room by security personnel shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague.
The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. For four years and more than a million flight miles, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. First, the defense of Ukraine against Russia, a popular cause It was celebrated with Ukrainian flags flying from American balconies, and Mr. Blinken praised the highest principles of international law and human rights.
But the war between Israel and Hamas, which was ignited by Palestinian terrorist attacks in Gaza, became one a political and moral nightmare For the Biden administration, approximately 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been killed in Israeli attacks with American-supplied weapons.
While President Biden was setting policy, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, made it public. The diplomat has been accused of violating the principles he stands for in Ukraine and has become the target of a rare vitriol directed at a US secretary of state.
Mr. Blinken’s work and conflicted reputation are so entwined that he could easily be referred to as secretary of war, a retired cabinet title still on the office plaques in the old State Department building.
Mr. Blinken reflected on the question during an interview this week in his wood-paneled office, which he decorates with modern artworks by the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Blinken said: “If we’re going to use the term ‘war’ broadly, I think the State Department has done it” — he paused — “yes, it’s taken a lot of our time and effort, and yes, as part of it. You learn a lot about weapon systems because of it.”
The war provided an opportunity to approach the Biden administration international partnershipsThat’s where the president and his aides distinguished themselves, Mr. Blinken said. “From a position of power, the United States is able to deal with a more contentious, more complex, more volatile world,” he said. “I believe that is our legacy.”
Mr. Blinken was no stranger to war when he took up his current position. During his long career as Washington’s foreign policy hand, including as deputy secretary of state, he has dealt with armed conflicts, particularly the American quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his childhood was shaped by the memory of World War II, particularly stories about how his stepfather Samuel Pisar survived the Holocaust.
At the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken quoted a lesson he learned from his stepfather: “We must remain forever vigilant, because the best of humanity can sometimes be overcome by the power of the worst.”
But while Mr. Blinken led the State Department, the world saw a parade of particularly ugly horrors: conflicts and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan. This month there were warriors commits genocide.
Mr. Blinken, with impeccable courtesy and self-respecting demeanor, spent countless hours trying to resolve and prevent conflict. But for better or worse, his legacy rests not in concluding the great peace treaties—those traditional diplomatic honors eluded him—but in his role in two wars that cast him in often very different lights.
Draw a line against Russia
Mr. Blinken’s first attempt, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, was widely regarded as a fiasco.
The Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul in August 2021 caught the State Department by surprise and forced a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers have called for Mr. Blinken’s resignation.
His moment came when Russian President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a large-scale intervention in Ukraine in February 2022.
As Mr. Putin prepares to attack, Mr. Blinken made a speech In Berlin, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan declared that the United States would once again uphold the “governing principles of international peace and security,” referring to how they had stood up to Soviet power. A day later in Geneva, he faced his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, warning that a Russian attack would be met with a “swift, tough and unified response.”
It was the kind of commanding, high-stakes diplomacy you might see on a Netflix series.”Diplomat.” Mr. Blinken’s impeccable French has positioned him in Paris and Brussels and impressed leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The result: a coalition of nearly 50 nations has committed to arm Ukraine or impose economic sanctions on Russia.
As the war progressed, neither side was eager to negotiate, so Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in the details of military equipment and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.
When Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should use its battlefield gains to pursue peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted that the fight must continue.
Mr. Blinken, a guitarist who visited Kiev in May, took the stage to a packed music club and led a local band in a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Ukraine’s defense offered him a literal rock star moment.
Bombs and corpses in Gaza
Five days after the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in October 2023, Mr. Blinken stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a military base in Tel Aviv and told the world how the killings had moved him personally.
“I come before you not only as the Secretary of State of the United States, but also as a Jew,” he said. “I understand on a personal level the terrible repercussions that the massacres of Hamas have for the Jews of Israel and for Jews everywhere.”
There was a noble glow at that moment. Mr. Blinken was rushing to rescue his American friend, who had been horribly mutilated in the attacks. Hamas and its allies took and killed more than 1,200 Israelis, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
But this time the story will be more complicated. In private meetings on the same trip, Mr. Blinken and his aides told the Israelis to respond in a measured manner. But they heard comments about the possible difficulties of avoiding high civilian casualties in Gaza, including Dire reminders from Israeli officials America was once ready to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.
Mr. Blinken will war trips with them to the Middle East. Unlike the European tours where he was hailed as the savior of Ukraine, they were miserable affairs. One day Israeli officials were complaining about Washington’s pressure, the other day Arab monarchs were fuming about Israel getting out of control.
He got involved in military affairs again. Meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, he would study maps of Gaza and discuss the details of the strategy, though often with a critical eye, insisting that Israel do more to protect civilians. On one trip, they went into a bunker when Tel Aviv came under rocket attack.
He asked the Israelis to send more humanitarian aid and limit civilian casualties as they pounded Gaza, turning hospitals, schools and mosques into dust. Some State Department officials have argued in vain that Israel is deliberately withholding food and medicine from desperate Palestinians. For several months, Mr. Blinken said the department had been “assessing” reports of Israeli war crimes.
As time passed, Mr. Blinken’s visits with Mr. Netanyahu seemed less and less effective. At times, the Israeli leader openly violated the positions of the American guest a few hours after receiving them.
Critics of the war said that only cutting off military aid would change Israel’s approach. This never happened.
In keeping with Mr. Biden’s “hug the bear” approach, Mr. Blinken and the State Department He continued to send weapons to IsraelIncluding some 2,000-pound bombs that U.S. military officials say are unsuitable for urban combat. Last summer, Mr. Blinken convinced Mr. Biden to halt the shipment of these bombs to prevent them from being used by the Israeli military in an attack on the city of Rafah, which remains frozen.
During the 16-month war, Mr. Biden approved $26 billion in aid to Israel. Mr. Blinken has never expressed regret for refraining from using that leverage to influence Mr. Netanyahu. According to him, signs of “daylight” between the US and Israel only encouraged Hamas.
State Department officials sent Mr. Blinken letters of opposition opposing the policy. A handful resigned and became public dissidents.
“We don’t have a policy,” said Michael Casey, a diplomat and Iraq war veteran who resigned last year from his position at the State Department in Jerusalem, where he worked on Gaza. “We support the goals of the Israeli government more than our own interests.”
He said “the most disappointing of all in the above cast of characters is Antony Blinken”. He said that despite his empathy for the Palestinians, Mr. Blinken never shied away from Israel.
Protesters camped outside his home in Virginia, splattering fake blood on the black suburb. A descendant of a Holocaust survivor was accused of committing “genocide.”
Such indifference “works”, Mr Blinken said, warning that the trend of stalking public officials in private spaces such as their homes could discourage people from entering government.
For a while, it looked like he and his colleagues might have nothing to show for the months they’ve been pressing the warring parties for a cease-fire deal. Then came this week’s agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Even if he comes under pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, it could be a welcome part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy if he agrees. But his larger ambition to broker a historic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would theoretically include the first open path to a Palestinian state has run out of time.
Such a pact could earn him some forgiveness from angry Western liberals and Muslims around the world.
He admits that public opinion against the United States has grown “very hard” in places where America is considered hypocritical for condemning Russia’s war while defending Israel’s war.
It must also accept frustrating uncertainties. This may be the fate of Ukraine under threat under Mr. Trump. As for Gaza, some doubt the ceasefire will last.
That’s the nature of war, says Mr. Blinken: “Most of these problems don’t have a Hollywood ending.”
He haunts her, staring down the same abyss of humanity that her stepfather survived decades before. “What drives me more than anything else is the demonization we’re seeing on all fronts,” he said. “Not being able to accept the suffering of each side, not being able to see the humanity on the other side.”
