Antony Blinken Dragged US Diplomacy Into the 21st Century. Even He’s Surprised by the Results

Here’s a flash of Antony J. Blinken’s turn as US secretary of state: In his first year, he navigated America’s messy exit from Afghanistan. In his second, he tried to rally the world to Ukraine’s side following Russia’s invasion in February 2022. His third and, now fourth, have been defined by the Israel-Hamas conflict. In between, he has tried to box in rising Chinese aggression in Asia and slow Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon, even as the Islamic republic has (repeatedly) plotted to assassinate his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, for his role in killing Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. Don’t forget either about the normal mix of crises, coups, summits, treaties, global elections—more humans will vote in 2024 than in any year in world history—and, this summer, the biggest prisoner swap with Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Blinken, 62, once thought he might become a musician—or maybe, even less lucratively, a journalist. Instead he has spent virtually his entire career in the Washington foreign policy establishment, which is something of a family business: Both his father and uncle were ambassadors during the Clinton administration. In the 2000s, Blinken was the Democratic staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he cemented his partnership with then chair Joe Biden. During the Obama administration, Blinken was Biden’s national security adviser, a role that delivered him a cameo in that presidency’s most famous picture: Look carefully at the 2011 snapshot of Obama and top officials monitoring the killing of Osama bin Laden from the White House Situation Room and there is Blinken, peeking over the shoulder of White House chief of staff Bill Daley.

Blinken spent the final two years of Obama’s presidency as deputy secretary of state. So it was hardly a surprise that he was one of Biden’s first cabinet hires in 2021. At his confirmation hearing, Blinken shared that his stepfather had been the sole student—among 900 children at his Polish school—to survive the Holocaust. The job is personal and all-consuming, and it’s not even one he can escape for a few hours at home: Protesters spent months this spring and summer camped outside his house, with the hope of pressuring him to end the humanitarian crisis that has grown out of Israel’s attacks in the Gaza Strip. At times they’ve poured fake blood on the road as the family—his wife, White House cabinet secretary Evan Ryan, and their 4- and 5-year-old kids—drive in and out.

He has visited roughly 90 countries in the past three and a half years, including 15 trips to Israel. During one of his seven trips to Ukraine, Blinken found a moment to rock out and play guitar at a club in Kiev, a viral clip meant to highlight how Ukraine has survived more than two years of punishing war.

In many of those trips and meetings, technology has been top of mind. In 2022 Blinken created a Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy to lead the nation’s overseas efforts on cybersecurity and the vital intersection of economic security and technology. And this May he flew to San Francisco to give a keynote at the RSA conference, a security industry event, where he joked, “‘Move fast and break things’ is literally the exact opposite of what we try to do at the State Department.” (His team is also trying to modernize the famously outdated tech used by the State Department’s 77,000 employees across some 300 embassies, consulates, and US offices.)

In early August—after Blinken returned from a trip through Laos, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Mongolia, a journey one Chinese official labeled his “encirclement tour” —I sat down with the secretary in his personal office at State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, a small, cozy, wood-paneled room just steps (and a few very armored doors) away from the building’s more ornate and lavish diplomatic spaces. At that moment, headlines were warning of an escalating attack on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran, and Ukraine had just invaded Russia’s Kursk region. Time was, of course, tight—his daily schedule is measured to the minute—so we dove right in, and Blinken talked as casually as the nation’s top diplomat ever does.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on-camera and off-camera portions. Check out WIRED’s YouTube channel for the video.

Garrett Graff: On your first day, you promised that you were going to leave behind a department that was ready for the 21st century. I want to ask you about the digital work that the department has done. In June 2023, of course, the State Department discovered the Chinese intrusion of Microsoft systems. For those of us who cover cybersecurity, it was shocking that the State Department would be the originator of discovering an event like that.

Antony Blinken: It was a little surprising for me too—both a pleasant surprise, because I was very proud of the fact that we have remarkable people in place who are able to do that—but of course, when you have any kind of cyber intrusion, it’s a deep and ongoing concern. It’s exactly why we’ve tried to make this department, among other things, fit for purpose when it comes to cybersecurity.

One of the things you’ve done is create this new cybersecurity bureau with Ambassador Nate Fick. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the effort.

Look, what I’ve seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy.

There’s almost a perfect storm that’s come together over the last few years, several major developments that have really brought this to the forefront of what we’re doing and what we need to do. First, we have a new generation of foundational technologies that are literally changing the world all at the same time—whether it’s AI, quantum, microelectronics, biotech, telecommunications. They’re having a profound impact, and increasingly they’re converging and feeding off of each other.

Second, we’re seeing that the line between the digital and physical worlds is evaporating, erasing. We have cars, ports, hospitals that are, in effect, huge data centers. They’re big vulnerabilities. At the same time, we have increasingly rare materials that are critical to technology and fragile supply chains. In each of these areas, the State Department is taking action.

We have to look at everything in terms of “stacks”—the hardware, the software, the talent, and the norms, the rules, the standards by which this technology is used.

Besides setting up an entire new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy—and the bureaus are really the building blocks in our department—we’ve now trained more than 200 cybersecurity and digital officers, people who are genuinely expert. Every one of our embassies around the world will have at least one person who is truly fluent in tech and digital policy. My goal is to make sure that across the entire department we have basic literacy—ideally fluency—and even, eventually, mastery. All of this to make sure that, as I said, this department is fit for purpose across the entire information and digital space.

Your tenure here at Foggy Bottom has coincided with what feels like the fracturing of the dream of a global internet. We’ve begun to see this splintering into separate realms—a European regulatory web, and authoritarian regimes using the internet as a surveillance tool. Of course, we’ve seen this play out in US policy on Huawei and TikTok.

Ideally we don’t have that fracturing, and certainly that would be the preference. We’ve done a number of things actually to try to move in another direction—to try to build broad consensus on the way technology is used. Let me give you an example on AI. We had incredible work done by the White House to develop basic principles with the foundational companies. The voluntary commitments that they made, the State Department has worked to internationalize those commitments. We have a G7 code of conduct—the leading democratic economies in the world—all agreeing to basic principles with a focus on safety.

We managed to get the very first resolution ever on artificial intelligence through the United Nations General Assembly—192 countries also signing up to basic principles on safety and a focus on using AI to advance sustainable development goals on things like health, education, climate. We also have more than 50 countries that have signed on to basic principles on the responsible military use of AI.

The goal here is not to have a world that is bifurcated in any way. It’s to try to bring everyone together. Having said that, you’re right—there are areas where, of course, we’re in intense competition with other countries. If we can’t come together on rules that make sure that we’re elevating the good and minimizing the bad, we have to make sure we’re protecting our values and protecting our interests.

For example, when it comes to the highest-end technology—say the highest-end chips—we want to make sure that a country like China is not able to acquire those and then feed them directly into its military program. They’re engaged right now in an extensive expansion of their nuclear program—very opaque—and it’s not in our interest for them to have the highest-end technology.

Also, technology is unfortunately used to repress people, for surveillance and to repress their human rights. We want to make sure our technology is not used for that. We want to make sure that we’re protecting—as opposed to promoting—technology in a way that has the smallest possible yard, along with the highest possible fence.

Broadly speaking, we see technology profoundly as a source for good, for progress. But for discrete parts of the ecosystem, we have to make sure we’re protecting. We have to have supply chains that are not only resilient but diversified, so we’re not dependent on any one place for any critical input. We went through Covid—we saw where that can lead. We don’t want to see the same thing on critical technology.

Let me ask you also about Russia and ransomware, another issue that has defined your tenure and the administration’s national security agenda over the past couple of years. Is there more that the United States and the Western Alliance could be doing to push Russia to be a better actor, or is this an intractable problem?

Look, it is an ongoing challenge. President Biden engaged President Putin on this early in his term—this was before the invasion of Ukraine—and we were making some progress on getting Russia to act in a more responsible way when it came to ransomware. Then the invasion of Ukraine happened. It’s obviously made the entire relationship much more difficult than it already was. I think, unfortunately, there are probably limits to what we can achieve. Having said that, we’re also working increasingly collaboratively—not only with the private sector, but also with other countries—to develop common strategies, to build solidarity, because so many companies and countries are afflicted with the scourge of ransomware.

Your predecessor, Mike Pompeo, came to this job with “swagger.” The word characterized his tenure and approach to the world. It feels like there’s been a different tempo in world events in the past few years, as if your tenure has been more defined by the limits of American power—Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Middle East, China.

I actually question the premise. I don’t see the experience that we’ve had highlighting the limits of our power. On the contrary, I see in many ways a rejuvenation of American power.

When President Biden came in, the first thing he said was, “I want you to go out and reinvigorate, reengage, and, if necessary, reimagine our partnerships and our alliances around the world.” He did that for a very clear reason. As we saw the world and America’s place in it, we had two basic conclusions: One is that when the United States is not engaged, when we’re not leading, either you’re going to get someone else who is—and probably not in a way that advances our interests and values—or maybe, just as bad, you get no one, and then you have a vacuum filled by bad things. American engagement and leadership was one side of the coin, but the flip side is finding ways to cooperate, to collaborate, to communicate with all sorts of actors who have an increasingly powerful role in shaping the direction of the world. The fact is that for all of the power that we have—which remains extraordinary over virtually every domain—we’re simply not as effective in getting solutions and solving problems alone as we are when we’re doing it with others.

Where have you seen those alliances and partnerships come into play?

We see it with Ukraine, where we’ve brought together more than 50 countries in defense of Ukraine—not just in Europe, but halfway around the world, in Asia—and taking steps to support Ukraine, to penalize Russia, to strengthen our own alliance at NATO that are genuinely historic. That’s a product of our leadership.

We see tremendous convergence on the approach to China and the challenges that it poses—both in the transatlantic community and also with critical allies and partners in Asia. In the time that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen greater convergence on how to think about the challenges and then what to do about them.

We built alliances on everything from global health, dealing effectively with Covid and getting vaccines out there, to maybe the biggest affliction that the United States faces—fentanyl. This is the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45—not guns, not car accidents, not cancer. Fentanyl. Not only have we used our diplomacy to get greater cooperation from China in starting to limit the flow of the chemical precursors—the ingredients that go into making fentanyl—we built an alliance, now more than 150 countries, that is working together to curb the diversion of these precursors around the world.

When we engage, when we lead, when we do it in a way that brings others along, this has actually been a manifestation of American power.

What do you feel like you’ve learned about the world in this job that you didn’t know coming into it?

I had obviously some ideas built up over more than 30 years of doing this. But like anything, you’ve got plans, you’ve got ideas, and then you’ve got first contact—and you have to adjust.

Two things have … I’m not sure if they surprised me, but they’ve clearly been spotlighted in ways that were even sharper than I might have imagined. One is that there is a greater multiplicity, greater complexity, and greater interconnectedness of the challenges we face than at any time since I’ve been doing this. That’s really stood out. I knew that intuitively, but you don’t really know it until you’re dealing with it. We always have rose-tinted glasses about the past to some extent.

The second thing is, in the time that I’ve been working in government, the single biggest change for me has been in the information environment. When I started out at the beginning of the Clinton administration, basically everyone did the same two things—you got up in the morning, you opened the front door of your house or apartment, and you picked up a hard copy of The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. Then if you had a TV in your office, at 6:30 pm you turned it on and watched the network news, CBS, NBC, ABC. Those were your basic sources of information. They defined your day. Now, of course, we’re at an intravenous speed where every millisecond we’re getting some new jolt of information. The pressure to respond, to react, is so much more intense. This has driven home the need to have as much discipline as possible in taking a breath—not simply reacting and responding, but to take the time to collect your thoughts, to get together with all the other stakeholders on a given problem, and to spend some time thinking it through. The pressure in the other direction is more intense than it’s ever been.

You’ve been part of a big arc in how Washington has thought about China over the past 30 years.

There was a Washington consensus for many, many years that China’s integration—particularly economic integration—would have an effect on its political system and the way it engaged around the world. We’ve seen that consensus in recent years evaporate, because we do see a China that, from their perspective for maybe understandable reasons, does seek to be the preeminent actor in the world—militarily, diplomatically, politically, economically. Now, if they had the same basic value set that we do, if they had the same basic interests, that would be one thing, but they don’t. They have a different worldview. So this represents for us an intense competition, because we’re at the dawn of a new era. We’re past the post–Cold War era, and there’s an intense competition to shape what comes next. We’re competing with China to do that.

What have you learned about China here, in this job?

You can’t simply define the relationship on a bumper sticker. If I had to pick one word, it’s “competition.” For Americans, there’s nothing wrong with competition—on the contrary, competition, as long as it’s fair, as long as it’s on a level playing field, usually brings out the best in us. But we also want to make sure that it’s competition that doesn’t generate conflict.

There are other aspects to the relationship that are important too, and this is why the bumper sticker would have to be a pretty long one. As arguably the two most important players in the world, there are places where it’s going to be in the interests of the American people and the Chinese people—and those of people around the world—to cooperate, to effectively communicate, so we minimize the chances of conflict even as we’re competing. We restored military-to-military communications—it’s critical to avoid any misunderstandings—and that’s happening at all levels. That’s good.

Elon Musk is an American citizen with an enormous amount of geopolitical power. We’ve seen it in Ukraine with Starlink. We’ve seen it with X and the Venezuelan elections. How worried are you about Elon Musk’s role in the world, and the divergence between US tech platforms and US foreign policy?

I’m not going to focus on any one individual. We of course see the extraordinary power—the extraordinary impact—that platforms have, just as we do with companies that have developed foundational technologies, including generative AI. We want to see platforms, companies, and innovators act responsibly, and that involves a number of things.

First, it involves—hopefully—collaboration between the federal government and these companies. We’ve done that intensely and extensively. I’ve met many times with the leaders of different critical companies to talk through how they’re seeing the world, how we’re seeing it. How “We’re from the federal government, we’re here to help,” how we can do that.

A big part of this is making sure that we’re helping to establish the rules, norms, and standards by which technology is used. In an ideal world, companies and platforms will do a lot of that themselves. In many ways that would be preferable—sometimes when government comes in, it does things with a two-by-four instead of with a scalpel.

How do you use tech in your life—do you have a burner account on Instagram that you scroll in the evening? TikTok? What websites do you visit during the day?

I’ve got a lot of go-to places that I start my day with on my iPhone, but I shouldn’t be doing brand advertising, so I’ll probably stay away from that. The big thread in my life is music. It’s the thing I come back to again and again. Tech makes my ability to connect to and to consume music much, much easier. It’s really opened whole new worlds.

Has being a dad changed the way that you look at tech?

Like any parent with young kids, it’s both exhilarating and a little bit frightening. You see the extraordinary facility children have with technology, and you see technology designed so brilliantly and intuitively. When my son was maybe 3, he wanted to watch some Sesame Street videos on my iPhone—we, of course, limit the amount of time that they spend on TV, but they see some of it. I couldn’t believe watching him as a 3-year-old, and then my daughter, intuitively scroll and swipe. But when I saw my son go on a site to get to a video of Sesame Street and hit “Skip Ad,” that was an eye opener.

What are the stakes of this election? Is it challenging to go around the world and talk about the glories of democracy as our democracy has struggled so at home?

In a funny way, no, to the latter part of your question. When I’m going around the world and raising concerns that we may have about the direction of another country’s democracy, what I am able to say is that when we have problems here in our country, we don’t pretend they don’t exist. We don’t sweep them under the rug. We actually confront them. We do it transparently, we argue about it, we shout about it, but we confront it. Sometimes it’s incredibly painful, sometimes it’s incredibly ugly, but we do it. Throughout our history, when we’ve had periods of real challenge internally, precisely because we confront the challenges openly, directly, we’ve always come out better and stronger. At the very least, what I’m able to say to countries is, “OK, we’re not saying do exactly what we do or model yourselves exactly after us—we’re not about that—but at least acknowledge, confront, deal with your challenges.”

Do you think in this moment that’s true too—that we’ll come out the other side of this political moment stronger?

I have to believe—want to believe—based on my own knowledge and understanding of our history that the answer is yes. But, of course, in my job I don’t do politics—I’m focused on policies. I’m focused on how we can best advance our interests and values around the world in ways that will have a positive impact on Americans, make all of us a little bit more secure, a little bit more prosperous, a little bit healthier.

When you leave this office, whenever that is, who are the world leaders you’re going to invite on your world band tour?

It’s a great question, and one that I could probably answer when I’m out of this job, at the risk of creating a diplomatic incident while I’m still in it.

I can reel off the names of a lot of people who I have genuine friendships with that will continue after we’re out of our respective positions. But there’s something else: I get to meet people from all walks of life doing incredible things—innovating, solving problems, dealing with adversity.

It reinforces something that I believed coming into this and now I feel even more strongly: Any challenge we face, I’m convinced that somewhere in our great country—or maybe somewhere around the world—someone has probably figured out the answer, at least the beginnings of an answer.

If you can’t connect, if you can’t share that knowledge, share that information, share that experience, then everyone’s going to have to reinvent the wheel in trying to solve the same problem.

You’ve spent 30 years in Washington and have now achieved every foreign policy staffer’s terminal dream. Whenever you leave this job, what’s next for you—what’s your next ambition?

It’s really hard to think about what comes next when you’re in the midst of what we’re doing now, because it’s all-consuming. I’m also blessed with two young children at a relatively advanced age. For me, the single most important thing, like for any parent, is them and their future, and watching them grow up, participating in them growing up.

When you leave office, are we going to be seeing more posted on your Spotify, “Ablinken”?

I thought at a young age that maybe I wanted to try music as a career, and then I realized I was missing one thing: talent. I’m not sure I want to inflict any more music on the world. I actually hope—talk about what comes next—to get to attend a few concerts. That’d be great.

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