Tony Blinken served as United States secretary of state under Joe Biden. John Kiriakou knew him from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Blinken was staff director and where Kiriakou inherited his desk, and offers him as an illustration both of how senior American foreign-policy appointments are made and of what happens when the appointment does not fit the man.[1][2][3]
The two men crossed at the committee rather than overlapping on it. Kiriakou’s tellings vary on the exact handover: in one he took the desk when Blinken “finally went to the White House”, in another Blinken “moved to State when I moved to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee”, and in a third Blinken left the committee the week Kiriakou arrived.[4][3][5]
A career spent working for one man
Kiriakou’s central claim about Blinken is a career ladder with a single employer at every rung. Out of Harvard he became a junior legislative aide to Senator Joe Biden; after some years he became Biden’s legislative director; he moved to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as staff director when Biden took the chairmanship; when Biden was elected vice president Blinken became his national security adviser; in Obama’s second term he became deputy secretary of state; and when Biden was elected president he became secretary of state.[2][6] The earlier telling of the same ladder runs through years in Biden’s personal Senate office and puts the vice-presidential job as national security adviser and then deputy national security adviser.[4][7]
“He owes his entire adult life to Joe Biden. Every job he’s ever had in his life has been working for Joe Biden.”[1] On Kiriakou’s reading, Blinken was not appointed “because he’s the smartest, most forward-thinking strategist that the United States could identify” but because he had been Biden’s friend and employee for thirty years. “That’s it.”[8]
Kiriakou’s assessment
Kiriakou is careful to separate the man from the appointment: “I know Tony Blinken. I worked with Tony Blinken on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He’s a very nice man.”[1] The fuller judgement is warmer and harsher at once — “Tony is a lovely guy, he’s very smart, and he is in completely over his head. He’s a great intellect, and he belongs at a think tank, not on the president’s cabinet as the secretary of state.”[9][10] He returns to the same formula years apart: Blinken is “a great guy and a smart guy, but he was not equipped to be Secretary of State.”[11]
The de facto secretary of state
The evidence Kiriakou offers for the mismatch is not an opinion but a pattern of assignments. Bill Burns had also been deputy secretary of state, in Obama’s first term, and held the rank of career ambassador — the highest a diplomat can attain — with postings in some seven places including Russia. Putting him at the CIA meant that if Blinken “screws things up, you have an adult in the room.”[9][12]
So when war broke out in the Middle East, the ceasefire negotiations between the warring sides went not to the secretary of state but to the director of central intelligence. “Why do you do that? You do it because he’s a better diplomat than the secretary of state is.”[12] Kiriakou states the conclusion flatly: the one anomaly of Burns’s tenure was that he was “the de facto Secretary of State”, flying all over the world whenever there was sensitive or difficult diplomacy to be carried out.[3][11]
Foreign policy and the confirmation that never happened
Kiriakou places Blinken in a continuity rather than a break. Blinken “parrots the Biden neoliberal foreign policy”, and the reason Republicans did not challenge him at his confirmation hearing is, in Kiriakou’s account, that “there is no difference between a neo-liberal foreign policy and a neoconservative foreign policy. It’s interventionist no matter who’s in the White House.”[4][7]
On Gaza he describes Blinken as the top of a divided department: an upper echelon that would give the Israelis everything they wanted, and lower-ranking State Department officers who were angry and wanted the administration to cut off arms, or at least threaten to.[13]
The context of the criticism
Kiriakou raises Blinken as the third element of a three-part diagnosis of American decline abroad. The first is the reliance on the military; the second is the domestic hostility to foreign aid that leaves the United States with nothing to offer countries whose votes and cooperation it wants. The third is “in many cases poor leadership.”[1]
He immediately pairs the point with his admiration for Sergey Lavrov, whom he describes as having outperformed far better-resourced Western ambassadors at the United Nations — the comparison that gives the criticism its force.[14][15]