US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken has been known for years for his tough line on Russia.
WASHINGTON. From the US Secretary of State of Antony Blinken has become a familiar face to Finns over the course of many years.
Blinken’s poker face and thoughtful comment style hide the foreign minister’s personality almost completely under a professional shell. So who is Visiting Blinken in Finland today?
At least in terms of Europe, possibly the best possible foreign minister, who Joe Biden could have chosen.
Blinken, 61, is a lawyer by training and long-term foreign policy professional. He is particularly known as a defender of strong transatlantic relations and a critic of Russia.
Blinken has worked at the heart of US foreign policy alongside Biden for almost a quarter of a century. Blinken first served as Biden’s adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then as the vice president’s national security adviser.
Barack Obama’s in his second term, Blinken worked directly under the president as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state.
It was during these years relations between the West and Russia were in crisis after Russia seized the Crimean peninsula and started the war in the northwestern parts of Ukraine.
Already in 2014, Blinken loudly supported the arming of Ukraine, which, however, did not materialize then. He was also involved in formulating sanctions against Russia immediately after the annexation of Crimea.
For these reasons, Kiev was pleased with Blinken’s appointment as foreign minister when Biden became president. As the icing on the cake, Blinken has a direct blood tie to the country: his Jewish great-grandfather immigrated to the United States specifically from Ukraine at the beginning of the century.
Originally, Blinken supported the West’s attempts to integrate Russia into the international rules-based community, which Obama sought during the so-called “restructuring of relations”.
Blinken later said In an interview with the PBS television channel, that the administration later realized its mistake. According to him, over the years, Washington understood that Putin’s main goal was to maintain the kleptocracy he built and not to develop Russia in a more open direction.
Blinken in terms of Europe as a whole has been the foreign minister of dreams in this very state of the world.
Like Biden, Blinken represents a liberal worldview in his foreign policy thinking.
According to it, the United States best secures its own interests in the world by maintaining strong alliances with countries that share liberal democratic values.
This way of thinking has been the undercurrent of American foreign policy since World War II. Its continuity has been maintained in Washington by a group of foreign and security policy officials known by the nickname “mommöelit”. They are the professionals who travel from one place to another and between political appointments and the numerous think tanks in Washington as the balance of power fluctuates between the parties in the White House.
Donald Trump was the first president to systematically deny the value of alliances.
Blinken’s election as foreign minister was indeed a relief for Europe after the Trump era.
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Blinken to Russia instead is a nightmare. Although liberal foreign policy sounds soft, Blinken has no doubts about using force as an extension of diplomacy. For example, Blinken supported the US military operation in Libya, even though his superior at the time, Biden, opposed the idea.
Blinken’s foreign-policy Pokka and commitment to strengthening US-allied relations are likely to accelerate the rapprochement of Finland-US relations.