American Conversations: Secretary of State Antony Blinken

On February 4, 2021, in a speech at the State Department, President Joe Biden talked about the importance of diplomacy and the different actions he had taken in the two weeks since taking office. Then he said: “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy. Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind.  Advancing a foreign policy for the middle class demands urgent focus on our domestic…economic renewal.”

The speech made me sit up and take notice. The popular division of foreign policy and domestic policy is relatively recent, and the president seemed to be at least nodding to a more traditional vision. At the same time, it was not clear to me exactly what the underlying theory behind his statement might be and how that theory might translate to policy.

I began to pay close attention to the State Department—especially its focus on the Indo-Pacific region and Africa—and to watch Vice President Kamala Harris’s many trips to those regions and to Latin America. As she and others met with their counterparts in other countries, it was possible to see a new kind of U.S. foreign policy taking shape based primarily on creating communities centered around a shared interest, but I still was not clear on what the administration meant by integrating foreign and domestic affairs. 

Then, on September 13, 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered remarks to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In his speech, titled “The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy in a New Era,” Blinken argued that the world is witnessing the end of the Cold War era and must find a new approach to foreign policy.

The end of the Cold War, he said, had promised greater peace and stability, international cooperation, economic trade, political liberalization and human rights. Some of that had happened, but the era had also, unexpectedly, seen the rise of authoritarianism.  

The huge scale of modern problems like the climate crisis, mass human displacement and migration, and food insecurity had made international cooperation more complex, while people were losing faith in the post–World War II international order in which institutions like the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided a framework of rules through which countries could work out differences without resorting to war. 

That order had systematic flaws that exacerbated wealth inequality, Blinken said, noting that in the forty years between 1980 and 2020 the richest .1 percent accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest fifty percent. That disparity fueled distrust of international systems and political polarization. 

Those tensions, in turn, threaten the survival of democracies. They are “[c]hallenged from the inside by elected leaders who exploit resentments and stoke fears; erode independent judiciaries and the media; enrich cronies; crack down on civil society and political opposition. And,” Blinken said, they are “challenged from the outside, by autocrats who spread disinformation, who weaponize corruption, who meddle in elections.”

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to sit down with Secretary of State Blinken and ask him to explain both the theory and the details of what the administration means when they set out to protect democracy both at home and abroad through a new foreign policy.

I’ll be posting the video from that interview in two sections. Here is the first. 

And, finally, just a note that this interview does not replace tonight’s letter.