Making his final trip as America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace before awarding him the country’s highest tribute, the Legion of Honor medal. With its red silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken called the medal “the honor of a lifetime.”
It was a very different scene back in Washington a few days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a final speech before a crowd of foreign policy experts.
“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will be genocide! You will forever be known as ‘Bloody Blinken, Secretary of Genocide,’” shouted a protester who had infiltrated the Atlantic Council event. Security officers led her out of the room, as well as a man waving a sign that read “Blinken: War Criminal.”
A similar drama punctured Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department two days later, as a journalist, shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague, was carried from the room by security officers.
The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. Over four years and more than one million flight miles logged, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. The first, the defense of Ukraine against Russia, was a popular cause marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American porches, and it allowed Mr. Blinken to bask in accolades as he invoked the highest principles of international law and human rights.
But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ignited by Palestinian terrorist attacks became a political and moral nightmare for the Biden administration as Israeli strikes with American-supplied weapons killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
While President Biden set the policy, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, presented it to the public. The diplomat was accused of gutting the very principles he had championed in Ukraine, and became the target of vitriol rarely directed at a U.S. secretary of state.
So entwined is Mr. Blinken’s work and his reputation with conflict that he could just as easily be called by a retired cabinet title that is still on office plaques in the old State Department building — secretary of war.
Mr. Blinken reflected on the question during an interview this week in his wood-paneled office, which he had decorated with contemporary art pieces from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Blinken said, “If we want to use the term ‘war’ expansively, I think the State Department has been” — he paused — “yes, it has taken up a lot of our time and effort, and yes, as part of that, you learn a lot about weapons systems.”
War presented the Biden administration with the opportunity to forge closer international partnerships, and it is there that the president and his aides have excelled, Mr. Blinken said. “The United States is able to engage a more contested, a more complicated, a more combustible world from a position of strength,” he said. “That’s what I believe our legacy is.”
Over a long career as a Washington foreign policy hand, including as deputy secretary of state, Mr. Blinken was no stranger to war, having grappled with the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his childhood was shaped by the memory of World War II, specifically by stories of how his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived the Holocaust.
At the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken cited a lesson he learned from his stepfather: “We have to remain eternally vigilant, because humanity’s striving for the best can sometimes be overcome by its capacity for the worst.”
But the world served up an especially ugly parade of horrors as Mr. Blinken took charge of the State Department: strife and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, where the secretary declared this month that combatants were carrying out a genocide.
Bearing a flawlessly polite and self-effacing demeanor, Mr. Blinken spent countless hours trying to resolve and prevent conflict. But for better or worse, his legacy rests not on forging grand peace treaties — those traditional diplomatic prizes eluded him — but on his role in two wars that often cast him in very different lights.
Drawing the Line Against Russia
Mr. Blinken’s first test, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, was widely seen as a fiasco.
The Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul caught the State Department by surprise, forcing a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers demanded that Mr. Blinken resign.
His moment came when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Visiting Berlin a month before the assault, Mr. Blinken delivered a speech invoking the way Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had stood up to Soviet power and declared that the United States would again defend “the governing principles of international peace and security.” A day later in Geneva, he faced down his grim Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, warning that a Russian attack would draw “a swift, severe and a united response.”
It was the kind of commanding, high-stakes diplomacy you might see in the Netflix series “The Diplomat.” Mr. Blinken deployed his flawless French in Paris and Brussels, and cajoled leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The result: a coalition of about 50 nations committed to supplying weapons to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.
As the war progressed, neither side sought negotiations, so Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in details of military hardware and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.
And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the fight should go on.
Visiting Kyiv in May, Mr. Blinken, a guitar player, took the stage at a packed music club and led a local band in a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The defense of Ukraine had offered him a literal rock star moment.
Bombs and Bodies in Gaza
Five days after the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in October 2023, Mr. Blinken stood next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a military base in Tel Aviv and told the world how the killings had seared him personally.
“I come before you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but also as a Jew,” he said. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and for Jews everywhere.”
That moment, too, had a noble glow. Mr. Blinken was rushing to the rescue of an American friend who had been horribly violated in the attacks. Hamas and its partners took hostages and killed more than 1,200 Israelis — the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
But this time the narrative would grow far more complicated. In private meetings on that same trip, Mr. Blinken and his aides heard about war plans for Gaza that foretold more mass killing — including ominous reminders from Israeli officials that America had once been willing to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mr. Blinken would make a dozen wartime trips to the Middle East. They were grim affairs, in contrast to the European tours where he was hailed as a savior of Ukraine. Israeli officials complained about pressure from Washington on one day while Arab monarchs fumed on the next that Israel was out of control.
Again he immersed himself in military matters. Meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, he would study maps of Gaza and discuss details of its strategy. On one visit, they scrambled into a bunker when Tel Aviv came under rocket attack.
He beseeched the Israelis to let in more humanitarian aid and limit civilian casualties as they pummeled Gaza, turning hospitals, schools and mosques to dust. Some State Department officials argued in vain that Israel was intentionally withholding food and medicine from desperate Palestinians. For months, Mr. Blinken has said the department was “assessing” reports of Israeli war crimes.
Over time, Mr. Blinken’s visits with Mr. Netanyahu seemed to become less and less effective. Sometimes the Israeli leader would publicly undermine his American guest’s positions hours after hosting him.
Critics of the war said that only withholding military aid would change the Israeli approach. That never happened.
In keeping with Mr. Biden’s “bear hug” approach, Mr. Blinken and the State Department kept sending Israel weapons, including 2,000-pound bombs that U.S. military officials call unsuited for urban combat.
Over the 15 months of war, Mr. Biden has approved $26 billion in aid to Israel. Mr. Blinken has never expressed regrets about not using that leverage. Signs of “daylight” between the United States and Israel only encouraged Hamas, he says.
State Department officials sent Mr. Blinken dissent cables opposing the policy. A handful resigned and became public dissidents.
“We don’t have a policy,” said Michael Casey, a diplomat and Iraq war veteran who resigned last year from his State Department post in Jerusalem, where he worked on Gaza. “We support the Israeli government’s goals over our own interests.”
He said that “of everyone in the cast of characters at the top, Antony Blinken has been the most disappointing.” Despite showing flashes of empathy with Palestinians, he said, Mr. Blinken never veered from the approach to Israel.
Protesters camped outside his Virginia home and splashed fake blood on his black Suburban. The descendant of a Holocaust survivor was accused of enabling “genocide.”
Such invective “comes with the job,” Mr. Blinken said while warning that a trend of hounding public officials in private spaces like their homes could deter people from entering government.
For a time it seemed that he might have nothing to show for his many months pressing to achieve a Gaza cease-fire deal. Then came this week’s agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Even if it took pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the deal, if it holds, could be a welcome part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy. But the clock has run out on his greater ambition of brokering a historic agreement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, in theory, have included a first-ever explicit pathway to a Palestinian state.
Such a pact might have won him some forgiveness from furious Western liberals and Muslims worldwide.
He admits that public opinion toward the United States has grown “very challenging” in places where America is seen as hypocritical for denouncing Russia’s war while defending Israel’s.
He must also accept a frustrating uncertainty. Ukraine’s fate is now in peril under Mr. Trump. And as for Gaza, some doubt that a cease-fire can endure.
That is the nature of war, Mr. Blinken says: “Most of these challenges don’t have neat Hollywood endings.”
He leaves perhaps haunted by his gazing into the same abyss of humanity that his stepfather survived decades ago. “What really drives me more than anything else is the demonization we see in all directions,” he said. “The inability to acknowledge suffering on each side, the inability to see the humanity in the other.”
