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Who is Tony Blinken?
The person a US president taps to assume the coveted role of secretary of state, the nation's top diplomat, says a lot about that president's foreign policy ambitions and global vision.
Indeed, the selection of Henry Kissinger (Nixon and Ford), James Baker (George H.W. Bush), Hillary Clinton (Obama) and Rex Tillerson (Trump) to head the State Department, provided an early window into the foreign policy priorities — or lack thereof — of their respective bosses.
President-elect Joe Biden has now tapped his longtime adviser Antony (Tony) Blinken to head the US State Department, a sprawling bureaucracy with some 70,000 employees. The nomination of Blinken — an aide Biden has referred to as his "go-to-guy" — suggests that the president-elect has an ambitious foreign policy agenda that he wants to be driven only by a person he knows well and trusts.
What do we know about Tony Blinken and how he might shape US foreign policy?
Global alliances are key. Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state under president Obama, has long maintained the importance of strong global alliances. It is through revitalizing relationships strained during the Trump years, he has said, that the United States can reassert leadership on the world stage and better position itself to meet a host of pressing challenges: "Even a country as powerful as the United States can't handle them alone," he said this past July.
Indeed, this offers insight into how Biden might tackle key foreign policy issues like China's increasingly assertive policies in Asia and beyond. But Blinken has also argued that traditional alliances need to be redesigned in order to better tackle issues like global health, cybersecurity, and climate change: "Why shouldn't Germany and France work with India and Japan on strategic issues?" he says.
Rebuilding the State Department itself. Under President Trump, who mistrusts non-partisan civil servants, the State Department — which oversees an annual budget of $54 billion (2019) — has fallen on hard times. Career foreign service personnel reported that morale hit rock bottom in recent years amid sharp budget cuts, hiring freezes, and the politicization of the agency. (In 2017, the Atlantic reported that "the normal day-to-day operations at the department had stopped, leaving employees with little to do and anxious about the future.")
Blinken will surely prioritize the refilling of senior State Department positions that have remained vacant under Rex Tillerson (2017-2018) and Mike Pompeo (2018-present), President Trump's secretaries of state. He may even rehire career diplomats who were fired after threatening to expose Trump administration misdeeds, a process that Foreign Policysays led to "the State Department hemorrhaging its own talent."
Blinken the centrist. As deputy secretary of state under President Obama, Blinken was instrumental in laying out America's Middle East policy during the tumultuous years of the "Arab Spring." As civil war gripped Syria — and later Libya — Blinken advocated a more interventionist position, breaking with Obama — and even Biden at times — who favored a more restrained approach.
Indeed, during his years in the Obama orbit, and more recently, Blinken has made no secret of his belief that America should sometimes intervene in foreign conflicts to safeguard human rights. (He has described US retrenchment in recent years as the "progressive cousin" of Trump's "America First" foreign policy.) Blinken attributes his support for humanitarian intervention to his experience as stepson of a Polish-born Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Bottom line: If President Trump's administration aimed to topple the global order and deprioritize America's relations with traditional allies, Biden's choice of Blinken to head the State Department shows that his administration plans to do the exact opposition: deepen engagement with allies and bury the "America first" mantra as quickly and fully as possible.
No honeymoon for Joe Biden
The US presidential election has yet to be called, but as things currently stand, Joe Biden is on track to win the 270 electoral college votes needed to clinch the US presidency. The horse race is still being closely monitored, and questions about why certain states and counties went for Trump or Biden will be addressed in the days ahead. But when all is done and dusted and the next president (likely Biden based on current projections) assumes his place in the White House on January 20, 2021, the issues he will have to tackle on day one will be as varied as they are challenging
Lame-duck shenanigans. The lame-duck interval — the 11-week period before a sitting president is replaced by a successor — is often chaotic and unproductive. In previous lame-duck periods, Congressional leaders have ignored requests from outgoing presidents, while the chief executive has issued 11th-hour executive orders and occasionally controversial pardons for some accused or convicted of crimes. (FiveThirtyEight has recorded a spike in presidential pardons towards the end of lame-duck terms.)
But if Biden wins, the upcoming lame-duck session could be more tumultuous than ever. Facing a string of legal troubles, Trump could opt to self-pardon, a move with no precedent in American history that could further inflame tensions within a deeply divided nation. He could also resign and ask acting president Mike Pence to pardon him. (There is no pardon that covers state and local tax fraud charges Trump might face in New York.)
Additionally, funding for the federal government is set to expire on December 11, requiring the Trump administration and Congress to work together to avoid a government shutdown like the one seen in 2018 when the government shuttered for 35 days. An aggrieved (and outgoing) President Trump may not be in a very cooperative mood, resulting in a shutdown-standoff that could bruise an already ailing US economy burdened with an ongoing pandemic.
A government divided. If Joe Biden wins, he will be the first president in almost four decades to take the helm without his party controlling both chambers of Congress — the House of Representatives and the Senate. (In case things don't appear complicated enough, it's worth noting that two tight Senate races in Georgia — a traditionally red state — are likely headed to run-off elections in January that could determine which party holds a Senate majority.)
As vice president, Biden saw up close the perils of divided government when the Republican-controlled Senate obstructed his boss, Barack Obama, from confirming judicial appointments and passing key legislation.
Biden's plans on tax reform (including an overhaul of Trump's tax cuts for high-earning Americans), as well as his ambitious agenda for tackling climate change, would be dead in the water under a (very likely) Republican-controlled Senate led by majority leader Mitch McConnell.
That would also undermine his ability to deliver financial aid to Americans whose pocketbooks have been hit hard by the pandemic. If Biden wins but Republicans retain Senate control, a new stimulus package is likely, analysts say, but the amount of cash doled out would be significantly less than the $3 trillion Democrats in the lower house have been pushing for.
Remember COVID? Over the past 48 hours, Americans — and non-Americans — have been fixated on vote tallies in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. But while we were distracted, the US passed a grim milestone Wednesday, recording 100,000 new cases of COVID-19, the biggest single-day count since the pandemic started. States including Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota (mainly in rural areas) are grappling with ballooning outbreaks as the US surpassed 9 million total coronavirus cases, the most of any country in the world.
Biden has campaigned largely on Trump's failure to contain the virus and his own promise to defer to health officials on issues like how and when to reopen schools safely. But those decisions are largely made at a local level. Biden has also said that he would consider a nationwide mask mandate, but he would need to convince all 50 governors to enforce mask-wearing in their respective states — a very difficult feat at this hyper-partisan time.
In sum: Once all the votes are counted, we'll see that more than 70 million Americans voted to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The United States is more politically polarized than at any time in decades, and even as president, Joe Biden will have to negotiate and compromise to advance any of his agenda.
What We're Watching: Lingering US presidential race, Ethiopia's ethnic strife,Trump's recount antics
The lingering US presidential race: As counting continues in several key battleground states, the American people are still none the wiser as to who will be their next president. At the time of this writing, the road to victory — that is, to clearing the 270 electoral votes threshold needed to clinch the presidency — is clearer for Joe Biden, but President Trump could still win a second term. Millions of mail-in-ballots still being counted in several closely-watched states — Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — will decide the outcome of the election in the next few days. Many analysts say that the bulk of these votes will likely favor Biden because the Democratic Party has encouraged voting early and by mail due to the pandemic, while the Trump campaign promoted in-person voting on Election Day. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has presented a legal strategy to contest the counting of mail-in-ballots — a tactic rejected by many mainstream Republicans. The margin of the race is razor-thin, reinforcing what many observers already knew: the country is bitterly divided.
Civil war in Ethiopia? Ethiopia's military has been deployed to the northern Tigray region after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accused the ruling Tigray People's Liberation Front (TFLP) party of trying to provoke a war by attacking an army base there. Abiy's move is widely viewed as payback for the regional government's recent decision to defy Addis Ababa by holding elections in Tigray that were cancelled in the rest of Ethiopia due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the root of the mutual animosity has always been ethnic— and political: Tigrays only account for 5 percent of Ethiopia's population but for decades punched above their weight in domestic politics thanks to their role in ousting former dictator Haile Mengistu, a fellow Tigray. The region's grip on national power ended with the 2018 election of the reformist Ahmed, a member of the Oromo, the country's largest ethnic group but long marginalized by the political establishment in Addis Ababa. Since then, the TLFP and the prime minister have accused each other of stoking ethnic tensions in a deeply fragmented country. Will Ethiopia — which just months ago was on the brink of civil war after the murder of a nationalist Oromo singer — descend into full-blown ethnic conflict?
What We're Ignoring:
Trump's recount antics: After Wisconsin's electoral officials announced on Wednesday that Joe Biden had won a majority of votes in the crucial battleground state, the Trump campaign said it will request an "immediate" recount of the ballots, saying that "Wisconsin has been a razor thin race" that could readily flip in the incumbent's favor. While it's true that the race in the Badger State has been tight, Trump currently trails Biden by some 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, a significant margin that's unlikely to change even if votes are retallied. We're ignoring this because even Republican stalwarts like former governors Chris Christie and Scott Walker acknowledged that the Trump campaign's tactics were unfounded and unlikely to yield the President's desired results. Indeed, recounts only ever reveal discrepancies of a few hundred votes here and there, experts say. We're also ignoring the fact that the Trump administration prematurely claimed victory in Pennsylvania even though over a million votes have not been counted there — as well as his appeal for the courts to block continued counting of ballots in Pennsylvania and Michigan — because, well, … democracy!
What We're Watching: A nail-biter for the Senate, the losers' future, Trump's baseless claims
Control of the US Senate: For months, the Democrats expressed cautious optimism about retaking the Senate, which they will need in order to pass key legislation on healthcare, immigration, and climate change. A strong show in the Senate races would also give Democrats a good chance of regaining full control of the federal government — the House of Representatives, Senate, and the presidency — for the first time in a decade. While the Democrats picked up a coveted seat in the battleground state of Arizona, results remain in flux in closely watched races in Georgia, North Carolina, and Maine. Meanwhile, Democratic losses in Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas mean that even if they do squeak out control of the Senate for the first time since 2014, it will be with an extremely slim majority. This means that even if Joe Biden does win the presidency, he will have a hard time getting his legislative agenda through a Senate with a heavy Republican presence. At the time of this writing, Republicans and Democrats are at 47 seats a piece, with six spots still up in the air. More results will trickle out in the hours and days ahead, but either way, it's clear that the US Senate race did not amount to the "blue wave" (53 seats) that Democrats had been hoping for.
The future of the losing party: The losing party in the US election always faces a bit of an existential reckoning about what it did wrong and how to become more competitive next time around. How might that look this year? The stakes don't seem equal. Even if Trump loses by a hair, his better-than-expected performance shows that his brand of conservative populist nationalism is very popular — he is on track to get more popular votes than in 2016 — and it will continue to exercise broad influence over Republican politics, with 2024 hopefuls such as senators Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley, and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley waiting for Trump's blessing to throw their hats in the ring. On the other hand, a shock Biden defeat will be crushing for the Democrats, who will have failed to unseat the president despite having spent four years training their fire on his erratic and divisive leadership, and more recently his mismanagement of the pandemic. The Dems are already increasingly split between centrist moderates and the activist progressive wing of the party. Given the realities of the electoral college, which forces Democrats to win votes in several large battleground states, will they double down on centrism but with a stronger candidate, or will they opt for a progressive populist who can dent some of Trump's appeal among working-class voters and turn out a large base of their own (like many believe Bernie Sanders could have done)? Either way, if Biden loses the Democratic Party is in for some major existential angst.
What We're Ignoring:
Trump's "victory" speech: With some incomplete battleground results going his way, President Trump broke US election night tradition by prematurely and unilaterally declaring victory and calling for "all voting to stop." He claimed wins in Georgia and North Carolina while millions of votes are still being counted there, and said that he's "on track" to win Pennsylvania even though the Keystone State's final tally may not be known until Friday. He also claimed, without evidence, that many of his voters had been disenfranchised, and vowed to take any contested result all the way to the Supreme Court, where after the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett conservatives now hold an ample 6-3 majority. We're ignoring Trump's speech because there is no legal basis for the Supreme Court to stop counting votes that were already cast according to the rules set by each state (which even his buddy, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, recognized when criticizing Trump's move).Hard Numbers: Three keys to the White House, early voting records, Florida's minimum wage, searching for mail-in-ballots
3: As votes continue to trickle in, three yet-to-be-called battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — now appear to hold the key to the White House. It could take days to find out the final tallies as each of the states works through its own count of early votes, mail-in ballots, and election day votes.
101 million: More than 101 million Americans voted early in this year's presidential election, according to the US Elections Project. Social distancing restrictions and fears about the pandemic caused an influx of mail-in ballots and early in person voting. In 2016, some 47 million Americans voted early, while 32 million people cast their ballots early in 2012. Analysts are predicting unprecedented levels of voter turnout when all is done and dusted.
15: Floridian voters have approved "Amendment 2," which will raise the state's minimum wage to $15 by 2026. (Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25.) While in recent years the move towards a $15 minimum wage has gained momentum across the country — and is a key part of the Democratic party's platform — Florida is the first southern state to approve the measure.
300,523: The US Postal Service said that some 300,523 mail-in-ballots around the country could not be found Tuesday afternoon, having received incoming scans at processing depots but not exit scans. A federal court ordered the agency — and law enforcement — to "sweep" processing plants by the time polls closed, but the mail service (represented by the US Justice Department) said it would make decisions about its own inspection schedule. Voting rights advocates are up in arms as the situation gets messier and messier.
Anne-Marie Slaughter on a Biden administration’s top foreign policy priorities
"The top priority will be to announce to the world that the United States they've known for decades is back." Former top Obama diplomat and current CEO of the think tank New America Anne-Marie slaughter predicts an American revival on the global stage if Joe Biden wins the presidency. But at a time when the United States has never been more divided, can any nation, even the world's most powerful, be a global leader if it cannot even keep its own house in order? Ian Bremmer's conversation with Slaughter is part of a new episode of GZERO World.
Watch the episode: How a "President Biden" could reshape US foreign policy
Can Joe Biden change American foreign policy?
Joe Biden has vowed to radically change the US' approach to foreign policy and international diplomacy should he win next week's election.
But a lot has happened in four years under Donald Trump that could impede Biden's ability to simply return to the status quo ante. How different would US foreign policy really be under a Biden presidency? What will the two-term former vice president likely be able to change, and what's bound to remain the same, at least for now?
Quick fixes.
Climate. Biden has said from the get-go that on "day one" he would reenter the Paris Climate Accord that the Trump administration abandoned back in 2019, a move that left global powers scrambling as to how to tackle climate change without the world's second largest emitter of carbon and largest economy.
The US' official exit only occurs on November 4, a day after the US election, and therefore, Biden could readily recommit to the treaty without having to make up for much lost time (though there are some compliance issues he would need to address).
US allies. Should he win in November, one of Biden's key policy priorities will be repairing damaged alliances, particularly with European partners. (In 2018, for example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "we can't rely on the superpower of the United States.") To do so, Biden could readily fall back on deep relations cultivated during his two terms as vice president.
Indeed, to counter Russian aggression, Biden says he will seek to bolster NATO, not only economically, but also by reinforcing the United States' commitment to its shared values.
Iran nuclear deal. Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal was one of Trump's signature foreign policies. Biden, on the other hand, says he will rejoin the accord and resume direct negotiations with Tehran on the condition that "Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal."
While notionally — with the backing of US allies like Germany and France — this process seems achievable in the near term, Biden's plan still relies on the Iranians playing ball. For its part, Iran has its own elections coming up next summer, and as journalist Negar Mortazavi recently told GZERO, the future of diplomacy between the US and Iran is also largely contingent on whether Iran's (anti-American) hardliners prevail at the polls in 2021.
Harder to shift.
Trade. Biden has said repeatedly that Trump's erratic trade policy has disaffected allies like Canada, Mexico and Europe, and deterred China from making concessions in general. The former VP says he will work with allies to get China in check. But as the global economy suffers its worst recession in decades — while China's economy continues to recover, putting it ahead of other global heavyweights— Beijing isn't likely to stop playing hardball anytime soon. At the same time, even if Biden is committed to reducing tensions with Beijing by eliminating some tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by Trump, walking back on $360 billion worth of dues is never going to be a cakewalk.
Meanwhile, while Biden believes in global economic integration, he has to contend with the Democratic party's dominant pro-labor progressive wing, which would likely complicate his administration's efforts to rejoin multinational treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
North Korea and arms control. While President Trump has held three face-to-face summits with Kim Jong-un in recent years, relations between Washington and Pyongyong are as tense as ever. Biden says he will rally allies — as well as China — to reengage the North in denuclearization talks. However, Kim has shown very little willingness to do so, and North Korea has in fact recently made progress in developing nuclear weapons that could strike US territory.
While at this stage, Biden has little leverage with the North, he can — and likely will — renew America's commitment to broader arms control by extending the New START treaty — a 2011 deal limiting long-range nuclear weapons between the Kremlin and the Obama administration that expires next February — without preconditions. (So far, the Trump administration has failed to reach an agreement with Moscow on terms for the extension.)
Bottom line: Leaders are always constrained by the actions of those who came before them. In this particularly tumultuous global moment, what Biden wants to do and what he actually can do will be divergent agendas.
"American exceptionalism" has outlived its usefulness: Anne-Marie Slaughter
"The 'American exceptionalism' that I grew up with, the 'American exceptionalism' of the Cold War…I do think has outlived its usefulness." Those words coming from Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former top State Department official under President Obama, indicate how much the world has changed in the past few decades. Her conversation with Ian Bremmer is part of the latest episode of GZERO World.
Watch the episode: How a "President Biden" could reshape US foreign policy