Anthony John Blinken – American politician, US Secretary of State. US Deputy Secretary of State in 2015–2017.
Place of Birth. Education. Anthony Blinken was born April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York, to Jewish parents Judith (Frem) and Donald M. Blinken, former US Ambassador to Hungary. His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews. Blinken’s uncle, Alan Blinken, served as the American ambassador to Belgium. Great-grandson of the Jewish writer Meyer Blinken (1879–1915), a native of Pereyaslav and a graduate of the Kiev Commercial School, published in Yiddish under the pseudonym “B. Meer”. Blinken’s grandfather was born in Kiev, when the city was part of the Russian Empire. He migrated to the United States, graduating from New York University in 1921 and law school in 1924.
Anthony Blinken attended the prestigious New York Dalton Private School until 1971. In 1970, the parents divorced, and the following year, the mother married Polish-born Holocaust lawyer and writer Samuel Pizar and moved with her son to Paris, where she headed the American Center for Students and Artists. In Paris, Blinken attended the École Jeannine Manuel.
Blinken graduated from Harvard University in 1984. where he was one of the editors of the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson. In 1985 pHe continued his education at Columbia University, enrolling in law school.
Career. Wrote reports for the New Republic. After receiving his Juris Doctor degree in 1988, he practiced law in New York and Paris.
In 1988, Blinken worked with his father Donald to raise funds for the presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis.
For two decades, Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations. From 1994 to 2001 he was a member of the staff of the National Security Council.
From 1994 to 1998, Blinken was Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Senior Director of Strategic Planning and Senior Director of Speeches at the NSC.
From 1999 to 2001 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Canadian Affairs.
From 2001 to 2002 – Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
From 2002 to 2008, he headed the apparatus of the Democratic faction of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (one of the Committee chairmen during this period was Senator Joe Biden).
In 2008, Blinken worked for the Joe Biden presidential campaign and was a member of the Obama-Biden presidential team.
In 2009–2013, during the first term of Barack Obama, Anthony Blinken served as National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. Blinken has been involved in shaping US strategy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Iran nuclear deal and Syria, advocating a military campaign against the Assad regime over the use of chemical weapons in 2013.
IN 2013–In 2015, he was Deputy National Security Adviser to the President of the United States.
On November 7, 2014, President Obama announced that he would nominate Blinken to the position of Assistant Secretary of State, replacing William Joseph Burns, who had resigned. On December 16, 2014, Blinken was confirmed by the Senate as Deputy Secretary of State by a vote of 55 to 38.
He took part in the development of the most important foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration: the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the war against the Islamic State. “I have never seen a more courageous decision taken by a leader”, – Blinken said, commenting on the operation to assassinate the head of the terrorists.
In 2018, he co-founded, with former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Political Affairs Michelle Flournoy, WestExec Advisors, a political strategy consulting firm.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, he was a foreign policy adviser to presidential candidate Joe Biden.
On November 23, 2024, Joe Biden announced the list of his candidates for key positions in his future cabinet, naming Tony Blinken as a contender for the post of Secretary of State.
January 26, 2024 confirmed by the Senate to the post of US Secretary of State.
Blinken and Ukraine. When Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, Blinken called it a strategic defeat for the Kremlin. Since then, he has consistently advocated increasing pressure on the Russian Federation. V speech at the Brookings Institution in June 2014, he stressed that extensive sanctions against the environment of the President of the Russian Federation Putin and all Russians “are of decisive importance”, to “to show the Russian people that there is a very heavy fine for supporting international criminals like Putin.” He also actively advocated the need for political isolation of Russia and Putin in the form of exclusion of the Russian Federation from the G8.
Blinken called Russia’s war against Ukraine “a flagrant violation of the most basic norms of the international order that the United States helped establish after World War II”. And if in 2015 in an interview with a newspaper Day Blinken, while in Kiev as an Obama administration politician, opposed the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine, then already in 2017 he radically changed his position, stating in a column for NYT: “Weapons for Ukraine – an idea whose time has come.
During the presidency of Donald Trump, Blinken supported his decision to bomb Syria, as well as to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons.
Personal life. He is married to Irish Catholic Evan Ryan, granddaughter of the former head of the US Secret Service, who began her career in the 1990s as an assistant to the first lady of the United States (the wedding ceremony was held jointly according to the Catholic and Jewish rites).
Hobbies. Blinken plays guitar and has three songs available on Spotify as ABlinken.
01/27/2021