The Fender Stratocaster loses a left-hander, the United States gains a secretary of state. A guitarist in his spare time, Antony Blinken will doubtless have little time to enrich the short repertoire available on the Spotify music distribution platform in the future. For the moment it is limited to two rock-billed titles, including Patience. A doubtless involuntary nod to certain constraints of a course in the service of the State.
As rich as it is atypical, the latter can be read today as a trajectory at the instant of hitting the target. In 2014, Antony Blinken appeared in a series of this daily devoted to “Those who will make the world”. A bet that turned out to be as low risk as an investment in treasury bills.
Born in 1962 in a wealthy family of New York Jews democrats, Parisian crossbreeding after the remarriage of his mother with Samuel Pisar, survivor of Auschwitz, Franco-American international lawyer and confidant of presidents: the childhood of Tony Blinken added without to subtract. Brightness and gravity, ease and duty, just like English and French and incidentally baseball and soccer.
After impeccable studies (Harvard and Columbia law school), he joined the National Security Council during the presidency of Bill Clinton, in 1995, first as a “pen”, then as an expert in transatlantic relations to which he is viscerally attached. After the election of Republican George W. Bush, in 2002 he joined a senator from Delaware on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Joe Biden. It is the beginning of a fruitful companionship which first reopens the doors of the White House to him, after the election of the senator to the post of vice-president, then today those of the State Department.
Field of ruins
This son and nephew of ambassadors in Hungary and Belgium (during the Clinton administration) will not be disoriented after working there for two years, until 2017, as deputy to John Kerry, the second secretary of state of Barack Obama. But a tough task awaits him. In the first place to pull out of the doldrums an institution openly despised by Donald Trump and which is emerging from two deadly trials. First of all the incomprehension witnessed by Rex Tillerson, corseted in his experience as boss of the oil giant ExxonMobil, then the politicization imposed by Mike Pompeo, militant evangelical Christian and docile transmission belt of presidential desiderata.
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