Antony Blinken’s Tour as Secretary of State

Wired magazine has published an evaluation of Antony Blinen’s tenure as Secretary of State. It says:

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.

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 (His team is also trying to modernize the famously outdated tech used by the State Department’s 77,000 employees across some 300 embassies, consulates, and US offices.)

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.

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.

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.