U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on Monday nominated his longtime aide, Antony Blinken, as secretary of state. But who is he and what will his relationship with Europe be like?
Here are nine things to know about him:
1 - Europeanist, multilateralist, internationalist
Tony Blinken’s ties to Europe are lifelong, deep and personal — and he is a fierce believer in the transatlantic alliance.
“Put simply, the world is safer for the American people when we have friends, partners and allies,” Blinken said in 2016. He has described Europe as “a vital partner” and has dismissed the Trump administration’s plans to remove U.S. troops from Germany as “foolish, it’s spiteful, and it’s a strategic loser. It weakens NATO, it helps Vladimir Putin, and it harms Germany, our most important ally in Europe.”
On every major foreign policy issue — terrorism, climate, pandemics, trade, China, the Iran nuclear deal — he has a recurring mantra: the U.S. should work with its allies and within international treaties and organizations. Blinken also views U.S. leadership in multilateral institutions as essential. “There is a premium still, and in some ways even more than before, on American engagement, on American leadership,” Blinken said earlier this year.
2 - Francophone and -phile
Blinken speaks impeccable French, with just the slightest hint of an accent. The future top diplomat moved to Paris as a child after his parents divorced and his mother, Judith, married Polish-American Holocaust survivor and powerhouse lawyer Samuel Pisar.
Much to the delight of French policymakers, journalists and all other ardent torchbearers of “francophonie,” Blinken is no “Omelette du Fromage Man” but the Real Cassoulet. He has given multiple interviews in comfortable, eloquent French. Blinken attended École Jeannine Manuel, a bilingual school in Paris — the same one attended by another Obama administration alumnus, Robert Malley.
Blinken’s half-sister, Leah Pisar, now living in New York, also has a home in France, and heads the board of the Aladdin Project, a Paris-based nonprofit organization promoting multicultural understanding. As an undergraduate student at Harvard, Blinken even wrote a dispatch for the student newspaper, The Crimson, on the 1981 historic landslide by the Socialist Party in the parliamentary elections, defeating the party of then-President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom his stepfather knew well. Blinken wrote with earnestness, but his sense of geographic distances fell short, way short. The Rue de Solférino is a short street, some two-and-a-half kilometers from the Eiffel Tower, not near the famous landmark and not long and winding. Hopefully, the State Department now has GPS.
3 - Six years in the U.S. Senate
Blinken spent a six-year term in the Senate — as one of Biden’s top aides. Like many of Biden’s closest advisers, Blinken’s first job with the future president was on Capitol Hill. He went to work for Biden in 2002 as the Democratic staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden was the senior Democrat on the committee from 1997 until he became vice president in 2009.
Those years give Blinken strong ties to other close Biden advisers who worked in the Senate, including Brian McKeon, who would go on to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy; and Avril Haines, who would later serve as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy national security adviser at the White House. Biden’s closest adviser in the Senate, longtime chief of staff Ted Kaufman, is leading the presidential transition.
