Biden’s nominee for State will have to fix the damage done by Trump – and Obama

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In the summer of 2012, only months after he had finally pulled American troops out of Iraq, a reluctant U.S. president Barack Obama found himself being dragged into yet another Middle Eastern conflict.

The outbreak of the civil war in Syria, where various rebel groups were seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, provoked heated debate within the Obama administration over whether the United States should intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Mr. Obama, who had come to regret taking earlier military action in Libya, was loath to risk another such quagmire. He nevertheless moved to put Mr. Assad on notice.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus,” Mr. Obama fatefully said then.

Within months, evidence surfaced that Mr. Assad’s army had indeed used sarin gas or a similar nerve agent in attacks that killed hundreds of civilians. Mr. Obama’s national security team warned the president that, having set a “red line,” he would lose face if he failed to enforce it.

“Superpowers don’t bluff,” then deputy national security adviser Antony Blinken told a meeting in the White House Situation Room, according to a 2013 report in the Wall Street Journal on the Syria deliberations within the Obama administration.

Mr. Blinken’s admonition has taken on renewed salience as he prepares to become U.S. Secretary of State in president-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration. While he is seen as a firm believer in U.S. leadership in the world, he is cognizant of the cost in lost credibility that comes with making lofty declarations or ultimatums that are not backed up by deeds.

Mr. Blinken, 58, really does seem to have been born for the job he is about to assume. He spent much of his youth in Paris – hence, his polished French – and rose through the ranks of the national security apparatus in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama. He served as Mr. Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser when he headed the Senate foreign relations committee and for much of his tenure as vice-president. The two men are philosophically and temperamentally simpatico.

In his remarks after being formally introduced by Mr. Biden as his nominee for the State Department, Mr. Blinken recounted the story of his late stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, who escaped a death march at the end of the Second World War. Spotting an Allied tank, he ran to it and addressed the Black U.S. soldier who emerged with a grateful “God bless America.”

“That’s who we are,” Mr. Blinken said on Tuesday. “That’s what America represents to the world, however imperfectly.”

Or at least, that is what America once represented to the world. After four years under a clueless president in Donald Trump, the United States has lost the trust of many of its allies and allowed its adversaries to sow chaos at their will. The damage cannot be easily undone. But in choosing Mr. Blinken, Mr. Biden has demonstrated his clear intent to try.

Along with Jake Sullivan, whom Mr. Biden has chosen to become his national security adviser, Mr. Blinken belongs to the foreign policy school of liberal multilateralism, though neither are blind to its limits. They will seek to work within international institutions and military alliances rather than at odds with them. But they are clear-eyed enough to know the U.S. must act alone if it needs to.

“I think a Biden administration would, first of all, confront [Russian President Vladimir] Putin for his egregious actions, not embrace them, as this president has done,” Mr. Blinken told the Aspen Security Forum in August. “We would not trash NATO. We would seek to strengthen it, strengthen its deterrence, invest in new capabilities to deal with all sorts of challenges.”

With respect to the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China, Mr. Blinken said the challenge “is less about their strength than about some of our own self-inflicted weaknesses [such as] the competitiveness of our own economy and workers, of our democracy and our political system, of our alliances and partnerships, of our values – all of which I believe President Trump has done so much to undermine, but all of which are actually within our full control.”

What neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Blinken will do is bluff; after all, Mr. Obama’s legacy remains marred by the moment when Mr. Assad called his. Syria remains his greatest foreign policy failure and one Mr. Blinken will seek above all to avoid repeating. He knows that, if Mr. Trump was able to so easily sap the trust of American allies, it was in part because that trust had already been rattled before he took office.

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