At the end of a tenure marked by war and division, the outgoing secretary of state defends his legacy on Gaza and Ukraine and says he’s made America stronger.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What challenges did Antony Blinken face during his tenure?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Four years ago, after the tumultuous first Trump administration, President Biden came into office promising to rebuild old alliances and defend democracy. The man tasked with doing that on the world stage was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime diplomat who'd worked with the president for decades.
The message to America's allies and enemies alike was that a new era of stability was at hand. Instead, the world blew up. Secretary Blinken was beset by an escalating series of international crises almost from the beginning, from the Afghanistan withdrawal to Russia's invasion of Ukraine to Hamas's attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza and conflict in the wider Middle East.
All the while, Blinken championed this promise of robust American diplomacy to solve the world's many problems. But as the Biden administration winds down, those conflicts around the world rage on. A new Trump administration is set to retreat from the very alliances and institutions Blinken championed. And what role America will play in the changing global order is an open question.
Chapter 2: How did the Biden administration's foreign policy evolve?
On Thursday, I sat down with Blinken at the State Department for a wide-ranging conversation about the world he's leaving behind, which, despite it all, he argues, is better than the one he inherited. Here's my conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Secretary Blinken, four years ago, you inherited the world from President Trump. And now you're about to hand it back to him.
Your tenure has been an unprecedented interregnum, if you will. Have you thought about what a strange position that is to be in?
Well, I think a lot about the two sides of this coin that you just alluded to, what we inherited and what we're handing off. In terms of what we inherited, it's so easy to lose sight because people are focused understandably on the present and on the future, not on the past.
But if you just look back four years, when we took office, we inherited arguably the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We inherited the worst public health crisis in at least 100 years.
We had a country that was divided, and we had fraught relationships with allies and partners around the world, and a perception from our adversaries, whether it was Russia, whether it was China, other countries, that the United States was in inexorable decline.
Today, as I sit with you and as we look at all of the terrain we've traveled these last four years, I think we hand over an America in a much, much stronger position. Having come through the economic crisis, having come through the health crisis, and having changed much for the better our position around the world because we've made those investments in alliances and partnerships stronger.
Thinking back to when you first came into office, you know, President Biden painted a portrait of a world that was seeing a sort of battle between democracy and autocracy, a phrase that was repeatedly used. Yet at home, voters have been skeptical of that fight. Many voters bought into Trump's vision of an America that should be less involved in the world.
Why don't you think that the Biden administration and you in particular were able to convince voters of the benefit of what you have been endeavoring to do these past few years?
I'm not sure that I agree with the premise of the question, which is, from what I see, from what I read, from the analysis that I see, most Americans want us to be engaged in the world. They want to make sure that we stay out of wars, that we avoid conflict, which is exactly what we've done, but they want to see the United States engaged. And I think they understand that if we're not engaged,
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Afghanistan withdrawal?
whether this was really about Russia's concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or NATO and the threat that it posed, or whether this was about what it in fact is about, which is Putin's imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia.
But we had to test that proposition, and we were intensely engaged diplomatically with Russia. Since then, Since then, had there been any opportunity to engage diplomatically in a way that could end the war on just and durable terms, we would have been the first to seize them. Unfortunately, at least till this moment, we haven't seen any signs that Russia's been genuinely prepared to engage.
I hope that that changes.
However, Ukraine has been left in this position now where a new administration is coming in. They have a very different view of the conflict. And one could argue that Ukraine is not in a terribly strong position to be able to navigate what comes next. We know that... President-elect Trump has members of people that surround him that are very willing to see Ukraine cede territory to Russia.
There has been no parallel diplomatic track. And the weapons are probably going to be drying up. So do you feel like you've left Ukraine in the strongest position that you could have? Or what are the things that you could have done differently?
Well, first, what we've left is Ukraine, which was not self-evident because Putin's ambition was to erase it from the map. We stopped that. Putin has failed. His strategic objective in regaining Ukraine has failed and will not succeed. Ukraine is standing. And I believe it also has extraordinary potential, not only to have survived, but actually to thrive going forward.
And that does depend on decisions that future administrations and many other countries will make. Right now, as I'm looking at this, I think the real measure of success is is whether going forward, Ukraine will continue to stand strong as an independent country, increasingly integrated with Western institutions, and able to stand on its own feet militarily, economically, democratically.
And in each of those areas, we put Ukraine on a trajectory to do that.
Do you think it's time to end the war, though?
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Chapter 4: How did the Ukraine conflict shape U.S. foreign policy?
He doesn't seem terribly interested in the work of diplomacy. I'm curious both how you would define that foreign policy philosophy and what you think of that approach.
To me, as I said before, in the absence of American diplomacy, you're going to have diplomacy by lots of other countries that are going to shape the world in ways that may not be so friendly to our own interests and our own values. So that's a choice. We can disengage. We cannot be present. We can stand back. But we know others will step in, and we have to decide whether that's in our interest.
I mean, it's not that he wants to stand back. It's that he uses other methods to make countries bend to America's will. You're seeing some of these actions.
Let's take an example. Let's take a concrete example. Let's talk about China for a minute. I think President Trump was right during his first administration in identifying some of the challenges posed by China. No country has the capacity that China does to reshape to its own will and designs the international system that we and many others put in place after the Second World War.
It has the military power, the economic power, the diplomatic power to do that in ways that no other country does. And we also know that many of the practices it's engaged in have been grossly unfair to our workers, to our companies, undercutting them, driving them out of business. So I think he was right in identifying that problem.
Where I would disagree with the approach he took and where I would commend to him the approach that we pursued is we're so much more effective in dealing with the challenges posed by China when we're working closely with other countries.
So if you're trying to take on the China problem, but at the same time, you're taking actions that in one way or another alienate allies and partners, you're likely to be less effective in dealing with China. When we took office, the European Union was on the verge of signing a major trade agreement with China. They were hedging. They weren't sure if they could count on the United States.
We'd had real challenges in the relationships in the preceding four years, and they were hedging toward China. So were many other countries. We were really on the decline when it came dealing with China diplomatically and economically. We've reversed that. And so I think the difference is the way we've approached it is we've sought to bring other countries in to dealing with this challenge.
When we're dealing with China's economic practices that we don't like and we're doing it alone, we're 20% of world GDP. When we aligned Europeans, key allies and partners in the Asia Pacific, we're suddenly 40, 50, 60% of world GDP, something that China can't ignore.
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Chapter 5: What is the current state of U.S.-China relations?
Israel's prime minister— They went into Rafah in a very different way than they were planning to.
Benjamin Netanyahu never seemed to listen to you, though.
No, I disagree with that. And again, I— mentioned how we've gone at humanitarian assistance from day one, and that's been a perennial and ongoing effort throughout this time. When it comes to Rafah, we had deep concerns about a direct attack and the use of the 2,000-pound munitions in densely populated areas.
What Israel wound up doing in Rafah was very different from what they were planning to do before we engaged with them. So... So you feel like you've been effective in shaping the conduct of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's— I think the question we had was how can we most effectively both shape the conflict but also bring an end to the conflict.
And the focus on getting a ceasefire hostage agreement was what was, in our estimation, the quickest and most durable way to get an end. And as I said, Hamas won. When they saw Israel under pressure publicly, they pulled back. The other thing that got Hamas to pull back—
was their belief, their hope, that there'd be a wider conflict, that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands full and Hamas could continue what it was doing. So we've worked very hard to make sure that that didn't happen.
Part of that was making sure that Israel had what it needed to defend itself to deter broader aggression. The second part of that was when we were on the precipice on multiple occasions of having the wider war that Hamas wanted, we found ways through diplomacy and through defense and deterrence to avert it.
Did you have a partner in Benjamin Netanyahu? Because it was reported that he blocked a ceasefire deal in July that would have led to the hostages being released. Is that true?
No, that's not accurate. What we've seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded. There have been times when actions that Israel has taken have, yes, made it more difficult, but there's been a rationale for those actions, even if they've sometimes made getting to a conclusion more difficult. For example, the killing of Sinwar.
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Chapter 6: How has the war in Gaza influenced U.S. diplomacy?
Your tenure, as we've said, has been filled with many complicated conflicts. At the same time, there's been a lot of reporting on President Biden's declining abilities over the course of his term. You are one of the closest people to him. You have worked with him for decades. By some accounts, he considers you a surrogate son.
This is a delicate question to ask, but I do feel that many Americans want to understand that. If you saw changes from the man that you knew so well.
Look, here's what I can tell you. Look at everything we've done, everything I believe that we've achieved in this administration at home and around the world. And whether you agree or not, I think there's a very strong record of achievement, historic in many ways.
Every single one of those achievements has been the product of a decision that was made by the president of the United States, by President Biden, not by me, not by others in the administration, by the president. His judgment, his decision, his action has been proven reflected in what we've done, what we've achieved. That's the basis upon which to judge whether he's been an effective president.
And I believe the answer is resoundingly yes.
Last summer, my colleague Robert Draper reported that people in the diplomatic corps worried that the president's memory, for example, was showing signs of slipping while he was meeting with foreign leaders.
Look, we all change. We all age. I have a I have a four, soon to be five-year-old daughter. I was sitting with her the other day and now four years in, and she was saying, oh, daddy's wearing a white shirt. He's got on a blue suit. He has black shoes and he has gray hair. And I said, no, no, no, my hair's brown. And she said, no, it's gray. We all get older. We all change as we get older.
But again, what I've seen when it comes to judgment, when it comes to decisions that do right by the country. He's shown that judgment. He's made those decisions.
On a personal note, your own story is very much defined by this fight against autocracy. Your stepfather was a Holocaust survivor who was saved from the death camps by American soldiers. It's an incredible story. You've said that you learned lessons from him about what our country is and what it represents and what it means when the United States is engaged in leading the
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