How did Antony Blinken, America’s top diplomat, become Secretary of War?

Make him The final journey As America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome.

French President Emmanuel Macron declared Blinken an “outstanding servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Elysee Palace before awarding him the country’s highest honor, the Legion of Honour. With a red silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken described the medal as “the honor of a lifetime.”

The scene was very different in Washington a few days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a final speech to a crowd of foreign policy experts.

“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will be genocide! You will forever be known as ‘Bloody Blinken, Minister of Genocide.’” I snuck into an Atlantic Council event. Security officers escorted her from the room, along with a man waving a sign that said “Blinken: War Criminal.”

Similar drama played out at Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department two days later, where a journalist was escorted from the room by security officers shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague.

The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as Secretary of State. Over the course of four years and more than a million miles of flights, Mr. Blinken has been the face of deep American involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. The first, defending Ukraine against Russia, was A Popular issue Marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American balconies, Mr. Blinken received accolades when he invoked the highest principles of international law and human rights.

But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, sparked by Palestinian terrorist attacks, has become a war A political and moral nightmare For the Biden administration, Israeli strikes with US-supplied weapons have killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.

While President Biden was crafting the policy, Mr. Blinken, his aide and surrogate son for decades, presented it to the public. The diplomat was accused of subverting the very principles he defended in Ukraine, and became the target of harsh criticism rarely directed at a US secretary of state.

Mr. Blinken’s work and reputation are so intertwined in the conflict that he could easily be called the retired Secretary of War that still exists on office boards in the old State Department building — Secretary of War.

Mr. Blinken pondered that question during an interview this week in his wood-paneled office, which he has decorated with contemporary art pieces from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. “If we want to use the term ‘war’ broadly, I think the State Department has been” — he paused — “yes, it has consumed a lot of our time and effort, and yes, as part of and from that, you learn a lot about weapons systems,” Mr. Blinken said.

The war has provided the Biden administration with an opportunity for rapprochement International partnershipsBlinken said the president and his aides excelled there. “The United States is capable of dealing with a more conflicted, complex, and combustible world from a position of strength,” he said. “That’s what I think our heritage is.”

Mr. Blinken was no stranger to war when he began his current position. Over the course of his long career as a foreign policy aide in Washington, including as deputy secretary of state, he faced armed conflicts, particularly the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. His childhood was shaped by the memory of World War II, specifically by stories of how his stepfather, Samuel Pizar, survived the Holocaust.

At the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken cited a lesson he learned from his stepfather: “We must remain eternally vigilant, because humanity’s quest for the best can sometimes be overcome by its capacity for the worst.”

But the world witnessed a particularly ugly display of atrocities when Mr. Blinken took charge of the State Department: conflict and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, where the secretary announced this month the fighters were Carrying out a genocide.

With an impeccable polite and humble demeanor, Mr. Blinken spent countless hours trying to resolve and prevent the conflict. But for better or worse, his legacy rests not on the forging of major peace treaties — those traditional diplomatic prizes that have eluded him — but on his role in two wars that often put him in very different lights.

Drawing the line against Russia

Mr. Blinken’s first test, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, was widely viewed as a dismal failure.

The Taliban’s rapid takeover of Kabul in August 2021 caught the State Department by surprise, leading to a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers called for Mr. Blinken’s resignation.

His moment came when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

As Mr. Putin prepared to attack, Mr. Blinken He gave a speech In Berlin, we recalled how Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan stood up to Soviet power and declared that the United States would once again defend “the governing principles of international peace and security.” A day later in Geneva, Trump confronted his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, warning that any Russian attack would result in a “rapid, severe, and united response.”

It was the kind of controlling, high-stakes diplomacy you might see in a Netflix series.DiplomatBlinken used his impeccable French in Paris and Brussels, and cajoled leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The result: a coalition of about 50 countries committed to supplying weapons to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

As the war progressed, neither side sought negotiations, 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 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Blinken insisted that the fight must continue.

During his visit to Kiev in May, Blinken, a guitarist, took the stage at a packed music club and led a local band in a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Defending Ukraine gave him a rock star moment.

Bombs and bodies in Gaza

Five days after the October 2023 Hamas terror attacks, 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 hurt him personally.

“I stand before you not only as US Secretary of State, but also as a Jew,” he said. “I understand on a personal level the horrific repercussions that Hamas’s massacres have for Israeli Jews and for Jews everywhere.”

And that moment also had a noble glow. Mr. Blinken was rushing to rescue an American friend who had been horribly abused in the attacks. Hamas and its partners took hostage and killed more than 1,200 Israelis – the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

But this time the narrative will become much more complex. In private meetings on the same trip, Mr. Blinken and his aides heard about war plans in Gaza that portended more mass killing — including Ominous reminders from Israeli officials That America was once prepared to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

Mr. Blinken will do that Dozens of trips during wartime To the Middle East. It was bleak affairs, in contrast to the European tours where he was hailed as Ukraine’s savior. Israeli officials complained about pressure from Washington one day, while Arab kings the next fumed that Israel was out of control.

Once again he immersed himself in military matters. During his meeting with the Israeli war cabinet, he would study maps of Gaza and discuss details of strategy. On one visit, they rushed to a bunker when Tel Aviv came under a missile attack.

He appealed to the Israelis to allow more humanitarian aid to enter and limit civilian casualties as they invaded Gaza and turned hospitals, schools and mosques into dust. Some State Department officials have argued unsuccessfully that Israel is deliberately withholding food and medicine from desperate Palestinians. For months, Mr. Blinken said the department has been “evaluating” reports about Israeli war crimes.

Over time, Mr. Blinken’s visits to Mr. Netanyahu appeared to become less effective. Sometimes the Israeli leader publicly undermined the positions of his American guest hours after hosting him.

Critics of the war said that only withholding military aid would change Israel’s approach. This never happened.

In keeping with Mr. Biden’s “bear hug” approach, Mr. Blinken and the State Department He continued to send weapons to Israelincluding 2,000-pound bombs that US military officials describe as unsuitable for urban combat.

Over the course of 16 months of war, Biden approved $26 billion in aid to Israel. Mr. Blinken has never expressed remorse for refraining from using that leverage to influence Mr. Netanyahu. He says signs of “daylight” between the United States and Israel only emboldened Hamas.

State Department officials sent Mr. Blinken cables opposing the policy. A handful of them resigned and became open dissenters.

“We don’t have a policy,” said Michael Casey, a diplomat who fought in the Iraq war and who resigned last year from his post at the State Department in Jerusalem, where he had been working on Gaza. “We support the goals of the Israeli government above our own interests.”

“Of all the figures at the top, Antony Blinken was the most disappointing,” he said. Despite showing flashes of sympathy for the Palestinians, Mr. Blinken has never deviated from the approach toward Israel, he said.

Protesters camped outside his home in Virginia and sprayed fake blood on his black suburban car. The descendant of a Holocaust survivor has been accused of enabling “genocide.”

Blinken said such invective “comes with the job,” while warning that the trend toward hounding government officials in private places like their homes could keep people out of government.

For a time, it seemed that he and his colleagues might have nothing to show for the many months in which they pressured the warring parties to reach a ceasefire agreement. Then came the agreement reached this week between Israel and Hamas.

Even if it takes pressure from President-elect Donald Trump, the deal, if implemented, could be a welcome part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy. But time has run out on his larger ambition of brokering a landmark agreement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have, in theory, included the first-ever clear path to Palestinian statehood.

Such an agreement would have given him some tolerance from angry Western liberals and Muslims around the world.

He admits that public opinion towards the United States has become “very difficult” in places where America is seen as a hypocrite for condemning Russia’s war while defending Israel’s war.

He must also accept frustrating doubts. It may be the fate of Ukraine at stake Under the leadership of Mr. Trump. As for Gaza, some question the possibility of continuing the ceasefire.

That’s the nature of war, Mr. Blinken says: “Most of these challenges don’t have glamorous Hollywood endings.”

He left haunted by staring into the same abyss of humanity that his stepfather escaped decades ago. “What really drives me more than anything else is the demonization we see in all directions,” he said. “The inability to acknowledge the suffering on each side, and the inability to see the humanity on the other side.”