Donald Trump was openly hostile to our international alliances and global systems of governance that the United States forged in the first place. He was hostile before he took office and hostile once he was finally in office. He has spent four years attacking the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) among many, many others.
They use and abuse us, Trump has always claimed without evidence, even though we wrote the rules and have the power to change them through international cooperation.
But Trump doesn't cooperate with anyone or anything. He's a one-man show who believed the United States was his show. Under him, our foreign policy priorities were whatever Trump's priorities are. He personalized his relationship to other world leaders and conducted foreign policy along those lines; meaning North Korea and their leader who wrote "love letters" to him were often more respected than our closest allies in Europe who never kissed Trump's ring.
We know Joe Biden is not Trump and that's why we voted for him, of course, but we now have the clearest indication yet of what foreign policy will look like under the Biden Administration.
Biden has reportedly chosen Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Linda Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the U.N., and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser.
From Reuters:
Blinken is a longtime Biden confidant who served as No. 2 at the State Department and as deputy national security adviser in President Barack Obama’s administration, in which Biden served as vice president.
Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman who served as the assistant secretary of state for Africa under Obama, was intended to restore morale and help fulfill Biden’s pledge to choose a diverse cabinet, Axios reported.
Sullivan served as Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration and also as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This is how The Guardian describes Blinken:
He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar (he played Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall at graduation) and football, and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles – love songs titled Lip Service and Patience – uploaded on Spotify.
Rob Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group, who was at school with Blinken in France, said: “He was an American in Paris, with a sense of what it meant to be an American with US culture and values at a time when there was a lot of anti-Americanism around. But he also saw what it was to be a French person looking at America.”
I can only imagine how pleased foreign diplomats will be to see Blinken walk through their doors rather than current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo is a smirking asshole who smiles and laughs while spitting in the faces of our allies. Pompeo rose to his position not because of his skills, experience, or charisma; he ascended because he spent 11 hours taunting and goading Hillary Clinton when she testified in front of the Select Benghazi Committee in 2015.
Pompeo has spent most of the last year waging a stealth campaign for president in 2024 while spitting enough fire at our allies to keep Trump happy. Blinken has spent the last year telling Biden how to rebuild our alliances wrecked by Pompeo.