QUESTION: No easy stroll to the exit for Antony Blinken. With exactly eight days left as Secretary of State, he's only just concluded what is likely his last trip, back and forth across the globe with meetings in Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and finally Rome. Blinken has traveled more than a million miles on the job.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Every minute, every hour, every day of the time that we have left we're focused on getting results.
QUESTION: We flew with him in early December, three trips ago, from Washington to Brussels for the most recent NATO foreign ministers meeting.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: We have a new NATO Strategic Concept. It recognized Russia as the most direct threat to the Alliance.
QUESTION: The main topic of discussion was Russian aggression in Ukraine, but there was a lot of well-wishing going on. There's Blinken right in the middle of the so-called family photo. And now watch this: He photobombs the picture of all the women foreign ministers.
SECRETARY GENERAL RUTTE: You have been a staunch ally and people like you very much.
Mark Rutte of the Netherlands is secretary general of NATO. All this ceremonial show-and-tell might be seen as subtle messaging to the incoming Trump administration about the value of nurturing alliances, the stronger together argument.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: The instruction I got from President Biden on day one was get in there, rejuvenate, re-energize, and even reimagine our alliances and partnerships.
QUESTION: Here was one more chance for Blinken to hold up the Biden administration foreign policy report card and his own.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: If the United States is not engaged, if we're not leading, then probably either someone else is, and probably not in a way that reflects our interests and our values; or maybe just as bad, no one is. What we've done over the last four years is we've re-engaged.
QUESTION: As for Ukraine.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: All told, the United States has provided $102 billion in assistance to Ukraine, our allies and partners $158 billion. This may be the best example of burden sharing that I've seen in the 32 years that I've been doing this.
QUESTION: President-elect Donald Trump wants to end Russia's war with Ukraine, critics fear not to Ukraine's advantage. Ever the diplomat, Blinken won't say he's trying to Trump-proof the potential outcome.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: For any of us to really speculate at this point I don't think makes a lot of sense. What does make sense is to make sure that we give the next administration, we give the incoming Trump administration, the strongest possible hand for it to play around the world, whether it's on Ukraine or anything else.
QUESTION: Sixty-two years old, Antony Blinken was practically born to be Secretary of State. His father, financier and philanthropist Donald Blinken, served as ambassador to Hungary. His stepfather, international lawyer and humanitarian Samuel Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor from Poland.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: He was on a death march out of the camps, and they - he and some friends managed to escape the death march itself, hid out in the Bavarian woods. They saw a tank with a five-pointed white star. And the hatch opened up and a very large African American GI looked down at him. And he got down on his knees and said the only words that he knew in English, that his mother had taught him before the war: "God bless America." And the GI lifted him into the tank, into freedom, into the United States. Those are the stories that I grew up hearing, and it made me feel that there was something special about our country.
QUESTION: Blinken grew up in Paris. He went to Harvard, Columbia Law School, and in 1993 during Bill Clinton's first term began his diplomatic career at the State Department. During one administration after another, Antony Blinken was always in the room where it happens. There he is in the famous picture when President Obama took out Osama bin Laden. Blinken was national security advisor to then Vice President Joe Biden. They are exceptionally close. Here he is with his family clowning with Biden at the White House last fall.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: One of the things that's been an immense privilege is to have the kind of relationship where he would seek my counsel, and I always felt with him the ability to speak my mind.
QUESTION: It was reported in Bob Woodward's recent book, War, that after Biden's shaky debate performance last July Blinken met with the President and asked him to consider whether he wanted to be doing this another four years, adding, "I don't want to see your legacy jeopardized." Blinken and Biden, their legacies are inevitably linked. For better or worse, Blinken has defended the chaotic U.S. pullout from Afghanistan on their watch, reminding the world the first Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban forcing the withdrawal.
On their rocky relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the devastation of Gaza in response to the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Blinken said this:
QUESTION: It appears that at least to some people on the outside that Netanyahu's government is not particularly respecting the role that the United States is trying to play and has helped to finance in its support of Israel that calls for protecting people, feeding people, have been ignored.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: The quickest way, the most effective way to get people what they need is actually through what we've been trying to achieve for many months now, and that's a ceasefire with the hostages coming home, massive assistance going in.
We're very close to a ceasefire and hostage agreement.
QUESTION: Even this late in the game, Blinken is hoping a deal can be reached before Inauguration Day. But if not —
SECRETARY BLINKEN: When that agreement is reached, it will be on the basis of what President Biden put forward.
QUESTION: Who will get the credit?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Ultimately, it doesn't matter. What really matters is whether the United States can bring real change, real change to people's lives.
QUESTION: He still sounds idealistic. There's something a bit square about Antony Blinken. After all, he's the guy who promoted music diplomacy by performing the Muddy Waters blues standard Hoochie Coochie Man in a suit and tie.
What will he do now? He's vague on that. And there's what he said to me in Brussels as he left NATO headquarters for the last time as Secretary of State:
QUESTION: You can't not have strong feelings knowing that you're leaving this building.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Sure, you get - look, there'll always be a moment, someone says something to you, there's some generous recognition, and for about 30 seconds you feel that and you take it to heart, but then it's back to work. That's really - that really is my focus. Now, talk to me on January 21st.
