4 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy in an Hour: Blinken's Diplomatic Legacy – Part 1
In the hour-long interview with the New York Times, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, offered a reflective self-evaluation of his four-year tenure, highlighting his policies and accomplishments as the nation’s top diplomat.
The interview was a fascinating glimpse into the legacy Blinken seeks to craft, revealing how he frames his tenure, accomplishments, and global impact. He touches on the most important issues that faced his administration over the past years, claiming success on almost all fronts, and displaying the bureaucratic instinct to shift blame to his successors for any failures to come.
As I analyzed the interview and began putting together this piece, it got a little out of hand, and as it approached broke the 5000 word mark I was informed in no uncertain terms by someone very close to me that no one in their right mind would read a 6000 word article breaking down an interview no matter who it was with. “Your audience is not researching a PhD thesis on Blinken’s time in office,” I was told, “be kind to your readers and break it into pieces for them.”
That gave me pause because I realized that an analysis of an hour long interview should feel shorter than the interview itself, and understanding that they were right, I decided to break down the analysis into more digestible segments that I would present in a series. So you can thank them for not having to trudge through all 6000 words in one go.
In this first part, I will present a brief take on Blinken’s conversational style, how he presented his work and achievements and framed every decision in a positive light, balancing between self-aggrandizement and criticisms of others to make himself look better. This part will also explore the broad strokes of U.S. foreign policy under his leadership for the past four years, what his strategies were and what goals he sought to achieve.
In the second part, I will breakdown his takes on the U.S. strategy on Russia and Ukraine, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how he portrays the decisions and processes on each of these issues from his point of view, and whether or not the outcomes he describes are rooted in reality or in aspirations.
In the third part, I look at his comments on U.S. policy on the China-U.S. competition to shape the future, as well as the Middle East and Israel’s war on Palestine and compare the way he presents his accomplishments to the outcomes on the ground. I will add a wrap up section at the end of this third part to tie everything together.
With that in mind, I give you the first part.
Diplomatic Spin: Blinken's Strategic Self-Portrayal
I watched the interview twice. Once for the substance and once for the style. Like or dislike Blinken and his policies, you can learn from the skills he showcased in this interview. His narrative framing and ability to portray success, even amid criticism and apparent failures, offer valuable lessons for anyone navigating organizational dynamics or preparing for high-stakes interviews.
His body language, his expressions, his active listening, and even his interruptions at key points were calculated to maximum effect. When he felt that the interviewer was venturing into a line of questioning that would frame his outcomes and decisions irrevocably negatively, he derailed through interruptions or sidestepping to mitigate any negative outcomes. He came well-prepared, armed with rehearsed talking points—some lifted almost verbatim from earlier speeches.
Throughout the interview Blinken walked a very interesting tightrope. He claimed credit for many of the successes of U.S. foreign policy over the course of the past four years, emphasizing the groundwork he did by meeting with global leaders like China’s Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Sergei Lavrov, while carefully emphasizing that the ultimate decision maker was President Biden.
This calculated approach allowed him to claim credit for positive outcomes as the president’s advisor while distancing himself from failures, attributing them to decisions beyond his control. In adopting this tactic, he paints himself as the trusted official delivering impeccable advice to the decisionmaker, who then takes responsibility for either taking the advice or failing to do so. He never disparages his boss, however, praising him for his leadership and decisions, never directly laying blame on him for any alleged failures.
He also very deftly maneuvers when faced with direct criticism. When the reporter -albeit carefully- questioned him about policy failures like Afghanistan and the U.S. role in the Middle East, he sidesteps the criticisms of broader policy failures not by directly arguing the point, but by shifting the focus on the efforts he made into delivering the outcomes and arguing that alternative outcomes would have been worse.
On Afghanistan for example, when the reporter questioned him on the seemingly ill calculated withdrawal, he stated that it was a success because he and Biden ended the longest war in U.S. history stating that that alone was an accomplishment, adding that staying in Afghanistan would have served U.S. adversaries. He did not however specify how an ill calculated U.S. departure that left a power vacuum in Afghanistan was detrimental to U.S. adversaries.
Interspersed throughout the interview, Blinken made sure to hammer home the point that he and Biden inherited a disheveled global U.S. position from Trump, and that over the course of their administration they restored U.S. global standing to what it was before. He used examples to illustrate his point, claiming for instance that Chinese leadership complained to him regularly about the U.S.’s increasing global role under the Biden administration and Blinken’s leadership, implying that they somehow welcomed Trump’s approach toward China.
He framed his decisions to expand U.S. involvement in terms of urgency. He created a binary narrative where he framed Trump as an absolute isolationist whose policies were detrimental to U.S. interests, and his position as a globalist who generated international momentum and support for the U.S. in the face of international challenges. While he was not wrong in his assessment, because the U.S. benefitted from coordinating with its international partners, he amplified his role in achieving the outcomes of U.S. global hegemony.
He also strategically positioned his role as setting up the U.S. for success, stating throughout the interview that he and Biden laid the groundwork for all the coming stages of U.S. foreign policy, whether in the Middle East and handling the Israeli Palestinian war and the normalization process with Arab countries, or in Europe by setting up the Ukraine for long term success. In doing so, he claims credit for any potential foreign policy successes of the Trump administration because they would be based on the groundwork he and Biden laid out, while at the same time ensuring that any failures that may occur could be squarely blamed on Trump and his administration for not following through on these processes.
Overall, Blinken presented himself, his decisions and the outcomes of his policies as a resounding success, shifting blame for any failures to decisions made above his paygrade or to his successors, while maintaining credit for accomplishments.
Throughout the interview you can see the skills he developed over years of navigating the halls of bureaucracy and power, and how he rose through the ranks through presenting himself in the best of lights at all times. A skill we could all stand to learn from.
Rebuilding Bridges or Burning Them? Blinken on U.S. Global Standing."
Having dissected Blinken’s approach to managing the interview, we now turn to his broader reflections on U.S. global standing under his leadership.
Blinken set the stage for defining the success of his foreign policy approach by stating that Trump’s policies during his first term resulted in a receding U.S. global role that left the U.S. isolated on the global stage. He stated that U.S. adversaries welcomed Trump’s approach because it gave them an opportunity to expand their global influence and seize the opportunities left on the table by Trump.
He stated that the U.S. was seen by competitors as being in a state of inexorable decline during Trump’s administration, and that it had fraught and difficult relations with its long standing allies and partners. He was not wrong in that assessment, and leveraged it well in amplifying the value of his policy of more engaged U.S. foreign policy, one that invests in its relations with allies and mobilizes international support for its positions in multilateral settings rather than relying on transactional bilateral engagements.
He presented his strategy of international engagement as a necessary one in the context of what he described as a zero-sum game: if the U.S. did not engage on the global platform with its partners, others would move to take its place. Once again, in presenting this he was correct, and used it to frame his policies -even those that ultimately resulted in negative results for the U.S. as necessary.
He blamed domestic opposition to overextending U.S. involvement in international conflicts on lack of awareness, stating for example that the lack of understanding of the origins and role of NATO on the global stage as a security umbrella for the U.S. colored domestic American views on how many resources were invested in the Ukraine conflict. In so doing, he trivialized opposition to his government’s policies as uninformed, shifting the narrative and portraying any and all U.S. support for Ukraine as necessary.
The U.S. under Biden did achieve a very important goal in ensuring increased European reliance on the U.S. through the escalation of conflict on the continent. In late 2021, the U.S. actively sought to prevent closer ties between Europe and Russia, emphasizing the Russian threat to rally European support, particularly the previously reticent Germany to take a hardline and uncompromising position on Russia that was sure to provoke conflict in Ukraine.
This strategy bolstered NATO unity against a shared adversary and increased U.S. economic gains by exporting liquefied natural gas to replace Russian supplies halted by sanctions. It also succeeded in creating an consistently adversarial European Russian dynamic that ensures continued reliance on the U.S. for continental security. In parallel, this conflict also served the tactical goal of draining Russian resources and focus, while ensuring that Europe provided a security buffer zone for the U.S. in dealing with Russia.
On China, he stated that the U.S. under Biden managed to reign in its growing influence on the world stage. He added that the U.S. succeeded in averting the signing of a trade deal between the EU and China early in his tenure, which reflected renewed European trust in the U.S. under Biden’s leadership. He emphasized that through leveraging European partnerships, the U.S. stood a better chance in containing the rise of an increasingly competitive China, thereby maintaining the global order that has been in place since the end of WWII.
His assessment of increased U.S. influence and standing under the Biden administration, and the strong maneuvers in Europe and Asia to contain both Russia and China are largely correct, but only as far as 2023, where things began to take a turn for U.S. global standing. The U.S. reactive and poorly formulated Middle East strategy has since caused setbacks for its general foreign policy across the international stage.
In the wake of the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestine, and the contrast between the U.S. position in both theatres when it came to the applicability of international humanitarian and human rights law damaged U.S. standing with the Global South. The diametric inconsistency in positions in two parallel theatres reduced notions of U.S. adherence to international law or principles as far as the Global South was concerned.
Russia and China both leveraged the U.S. Middle East policy to their advantage in their efforts to reduce U.S. global influence, and since then we have seen a global shift toward alternatives to the existing global order. On several occasions, the U.S. was outmaneuvered in the UN and other international platforms, where it used its veto in the security council to restrain any accountability for Israel while denouncing Russia, and where it was often left standing in isolation in the UN General Assembly voting against resolutions that saw global support not only from the Global South but from Western Europe as well.
This period also saw the growth of BRICS and its expanding membership and influence, something that was likely spurred by the increased frustration with an increasingly incoherent global leadership and rigid systems that skewed increasingly against the interests of emerging states. As a result of the increased weaponization of sanctions by the U.S. and Europe, there is considerable incentive to divest from reliance on existing financial systems dependent on U.S. and European financial infrastructure, something that the growing BRICS membership has been exploring.
While the U.S. retains significant global influence, it is increasingly seen as an unreliable partner for long-term strategies, given the frequent and drastic policy oscillations between administrations. European states, including long standing U.S. partners like Germany have already shifted their positions in the wake of Trump’s election, with the German Chancellor for example reaching out to Russia in the first time for two years immediately after the U.S. election results. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has stepped back from the defense deal that was slated between it and the U.S., a deal that would have consolidated more U.S. leverage in the region moving forward.
In Asia, China’s burgeoning influence is unabated, with its economy on track to overtake the U.S. in less than a decade, and its relations in south Asia and central Asia expanding through bilateral engagement and through platforms like BRICS.
Russia, which the U.S. sought to isolate over the past three years remains well engaged across the global stage, despite having lost significant ground in the Middle East recently as a result of Syria’s ouster of the Assad regime. However, even that change was not a direct result of U.S. maneuvering but rather Türkiye’s, a matter that highlights the emergence of regional powers challenging absolute U.S. regional hegemony.
The overall strategy of increased U.S. engagement was solid in principle and was proving effective up to 2023, when the rigidity of U.S. policies toward the Middle East conflict set back its global standing among traditional allies and adversaries alike, and was compounded by the reelection of Trump to a second term in the presidential elections.
Moving forward, it is likely that allies and adversaries of the U.S. will realign their engagement strategies with the U.S. to reflect medium and short term engagement strategies rather than long term plans due to increased perceptions of oscillating and potentially inconsistent policies across different administrations.
Wrapping Up Part 1: Key Takeaways from the Interview
Overall, Blinken managed the interview skillfully, presenting his position with professionalism and defending his perspectives through carefully chosen examples. He painted himself in the best light and framed the narrative in a way that focuses on him and his accomplishments, while dismissing criticisms as either unfounded or uninformed.
On the other hand, in terms of substance, while his overall assessments were partially correct, they were predictably skewed to favor his decisions and policies. In drawing a comparison with the previous administration under Trump, he managed to make his own foreign policy approach look better. However, when examined independently, the narrative appears less favorable, particularly in light of Trump’s reelection and the anticipated revival of his prior policies.
As we move into the next part, we’ll unpack Blinken’s perspectives on the U.S. approach to Russia, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, examining the realities behind his carefully framed narratives.