Letters from an American - March 1, 2025

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

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Music March 1st, 2025. John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change. Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them. A time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder. Simpson was referring to the course the United States has taken in the past month as the administration of President Donald Trump has hacked the United States away from 80 years

of alliances and partnerships with democratic nations in favor of forging ties with autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin. On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and 14 other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.

Then, on Friday, February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their shift toward Russian President Vladimir Putin as they berated Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, publicly trying to bully him into agreeing to the ceasefire conditions that Putin and Trump want to end a war Russia started by invading Ukraine. The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the US helped to create

is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends. After yesterday's Oval Office debacle, democratic nations rejected Trump and Vance's embrace of Russia and Putin, and publicly reiterated their support for Ukraine and President Zelensky. The leaders of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark,

Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Union, and others all posted their support for Ukraine and Zelensky. In London today, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer greeted Zelensky with an enthusiastic hug and in front of cameras told him, �You are very, very welcome here. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom.

We stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take.� In the last interview that former Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave before leaving office, he talked about the importance of alliances and the strong hand the Biden administration was leaving for the incoming Trump administration. Now, a little over a month later, that interview provides a striking contrast to the course the Trump administration has steered. We are learning the difference at our peril.

What follows is my January 17th, 2025 interview with Secretary of State Blinken. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for agreeing to meet another time before you, I suspect, take a nap. Maybe a long nap. Yeah, but Heather, it's great to have you back here at the State Department and really our final day. That's right. And as your final day, I would love it if you would lay out for us what the Biden administration

and the State Department under the Biden administration changed in our foreign policy and why, and why it matters. We came in, we had the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We had the worst public health crisis with COVID going back at least a hundred years. We had our own society that was very divided and around the world, which gets to my part, 100 years. We had our own society that was very divided.

And around the world, which gets to my part, we were very divided from our closest friends, our allies and partners around the world. And the president said to me and said to all of us entrusted with foreign policy, the first thing we really have to do is get back in there, roll up our sleeves, and try to reconnect with these countries. Even try to reimagine them, because the nature of the problems that we have to deal with and that are actually having an impact on the lives of Americans, that requires us to rethink some of these things, to bring together the countries that may be most adept at dealing

with a particular problem. And that's really the way he approached things. And what I remember him telling me on the, pretty much on day one is, we're going to do this and we're not going to know for sure when, where exactly how it's going to benefit us, but it will. I'm telling you it will. And I think we proved the point, or we proved his point,

because for example, when it came to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we were able to bring together more than 50 countries around the world to defend Ukraine, and not only defend Ukraine, defend what was also at stake in this case, which was these basic principles that, after two world wars, we'd work to establish in the international system at the United Nations, that said one country can't simply attack another, it can't redraw its borders by force. If we hadn't stood up for that, then it would have been an open Pandora's box, an open season where would-be aggressors around the world say, oh, Russians can get away with it, we

can too. And that's a world of conflict, a world of war. But because we had partners and allies, we didn't have to do it alone. And for all the money that we've invested in helping Ukraine defend itself, most of it actually spent in the United States as necessary to produce weapons that we've given to the Ukrainians and actually producing good jobs in the United States, for everything we did, our allies and partners did for every dollar, $1.50. And that's what we call burden sharing.

I wonder if it's fair to say that the idea of working together with other countries is almost a philosophy rather than taking different kinds of stands that America has taken in the past, in the late 19th century or the early 20th century for example. I believe it is. If you've got a coin in your hand,

first side is there really is no substitute for the United States being engaged, leading, because one we're not, either someone else is gonna get in there and do it in your place, and maybe not in a way that reflects who you are, what you want to see the world become, the interests of your citizens. Maybe just as bad, no one does it, and then you're likely to have a vacuum

and it's filled by bad things before it's filled by good things. But the other side of the coin is, I've been doing this for 32 years, and I can't think of a time when it was more important to find ways to cooperate, to coordinate, to find common cause with other countries, because the nature of most of these problems

really defies the solution by any one country acting alone, even the United States. Well, let me push back a little bit on that, or rather define perhaps what it seems to me that you have been doing. And that is that I don't think it's fair to say that the Biden administration was simply trying to resurrect the international rules-based order. It seems to me you have launched something very new,

and I think you've talked about this in the wake of the Cold War. Could you explain that a little bit? When I walked through these doors 32 years ago, we were at the end of the Cold War, and everyone thought this was a moment of extraordinary hope, possibility, the end of history, is how it was described.

And of course, it proved not to be. But right now, we're- Wait, stop. Explain to people what you mean by the end of history. The thought was that with the end of the Cold War, every country in the world now was going to come around in effect to liberal democracy and capitalism. And that as a result, conflict would go away, opportunity would be abundant, and we would no longer have a clash of civilizations, a clash of isms,

a clash of differences. Well, it didn't play out that way. But we're now at a point where something new is starting. The post-Cold War era is over with all of its challenges. And we're at a moment where I think we're starting a new era. And we can already see that there is this competition to try to shape what it's going to look like. We have powers that are standing up and saying, no, we think the world should look different than the one you designed 80 years ago. And in different ways, that might be China, it might be Russia, it might be in North Korea,

it might be in Iran. You have, because we're so much more connected than we ever were, a whole host of global problems, challenges from which no one is immune. And of course COVID was the most powerful example. We've forgotten it. It's now in the rearview mirror for most of us, but we can't forget the lessons of COVID. And then there's something else that's really new. Besides new countries emerging in a position that they were not 60, 70, 80 years ago, each of these other groups, whether it's company, whether it's an individual, whether it's some kind of organized group, they are now super empowered by technology and by information in ways they weren't before.

And that means one of two things. It means either that if you can get them all together, moving in the same direction, acting on the same problem, you're likely to get to a solution a lot more quickly and a lot more effectively. On the other hand, they can also be the disruptors, the derailers of everything you're trying to do, and something that a government president could do with a couple of phone calls 50, 60, 70 years ago, now it's so much more complicated. All of that is amplified by the other thing that's changed more than anything else, I think, over these 32 years that I've been doing this, and that's speed. It used to be that we had a little bit of distance.

If you were working in government 32 years ago when I started out, you know, everyone did the same thing. You got up in the morning, you opened the hard copy of the newspaper, the New York Times, the Post, whatever it was, the Wall Street Journal. And then if you had a TV, if you had a TV in your office, at 6.30 at night you turned it on and it was either CBS, ABC or NBC. That was the common denominator. Of course we've now had this massive democratization of information, but what goes along with that is that everyone is on an intravenous feed where every millisecond you're getting a new input or impulse.

And the pressure to react, to respond, to do something without having the distance to sit back and try to think, that's changed dramatically too. So I'm smiling because it was a truism in 19th century diplomacy that the best negotiators were the ones who stalled. The idea was you would get two people who couldn't stand each other and just sort of wait until they were so sick of sitting in the same room that you got to a solution.

But you can't stall any longer. You can't stall. The immediacy is maybe the most powerful new development that we have to deal with. Let me ask you this. One of the things that it seems to me, and this may just be coming from me because it's sort of a philosophy of democracy, but one of the things it seems to me that the Biden administration's approach to foreign affairs did was it attempted to spread the ideas of democracy around the world without coupling them with colonialism. the administration's approach to foreign affairs did, was it attempted to spread the ideas of democracy

around the world without coupling them with colonialism. Because rather than simply saying, you people need to do this, what you said is we believe in self-determination even if we are not necessarily working with another democracy. And was that deliberate? Yes, it was.

And of course, look, we start with democracies, that's our base. And we know that by definition, we're gonna have more in common, we probably have a similar outlook, not just the similar values, but probably more or less similar interests, and that's where you start.

But the nature of these problems, the countries that can, and not just countries, that can act on them effectively, or that we would need in a given coalition go beyond our pure definition of democracy and to not work with countries that we're trying, at least on one issue, to get to the right answer, that would be a mistake. And so we haven't done that. And similarly, no, we've really tried to make the case that we're not forcing you to choose. We want to give you a better choice.

And that goes with our system that we believe in, but it also goes to things that leaders in other countries, people in other countries are looking for to make progress on the things that they care about. If we can be responsive to that, it's also more likely that they're going to come along and adopt the way we would do things. In a world in which a number of people, as you said, are trying now to rethink the post-World War II era and saying that didn't serve people very well, what we really need to do is create spheres of influence, you stand firm on the idea that the opposite is true,

that we need to participate with each other, but also to do so in a way that didn't look like the post-World War II years, in which certain countries appeared to dictate to even Congress. We have to, if we're gonna have a system that people buy into that's gonna be sustained, it has to reflect the realities of today,

not of 70 or 80 years ago. It's why, for example, we've been strongly in favor of trying to promote reform of the United Nations Security Council, so that it's reflective of today's realities. The idea, for example, that India, the largest country in the world, is not on the Security Council on a permanent basis, to me at least, doesn't make any sense. This is not about clinging onto the past. It's about taking some basic principles that we thought worked pretty well and adapting them to the present.

You mentioned spheres of influence, where basically big countries divvy up the world. That's right. And they get to control what happens in their part of the world. We get to control what happens in ours. Maybe it's the Western Hemisphere. This is the idea.

The Russians in some big chunk of Europe, China in some big chunk of Asia. The problem with that is we tried that before and it didn't work out so well because inevitably what happens is this, a country dominating one sphere may have a way of doing things that inevitably it's not to progress for people in that sphere but regression, not to peace and security for people in that sphere but to violence and repression. Then inevitably there's conflict. And then conflict produces all sorts of second and third order effects, including, for example,

maybe a mass migration. The net is that you may be happy in your own sphere, but inevitably what happens in one sphere is going to have an impact well beyond it. And it's been a recipe for a world ultimately that was in conflict. And also what we find is that autocrats and authoritarians in their own spheres are never satisfied with what they have. And so it always tries to expand the sphere. History is replete with examples of how that system has actually produced

not a world of peace, not a world without war, but exactly the opposite. I jumped there because you used the word inevitably. That a strong man inevitably begins to oppress his people and begins to want to try and expand. First of all, why is that the case? I think that's right. We historians have reasons for that. Why do you, from your background, think is that the case? I think that's right. We historians have reasons for that. Why do you, from your background, think that's the case? There are a number of drivers of that, and it depends on the individuals.

So, for example, let's take— It is a pattern, though. It is a pattern, but let's take, in the case of Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin has an imperial design in mind. He thinks that the greatest tragedy of the last century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union or, if you want to look at it another way, the old Russian Empire. And he's tried to reconstitute it. That's his ambition.

And by definition, that's expansionist, because it would be to take back over countries that won their freedom with the end of the Cold War. That's Putin. I think one common denominator is that most autocrats also arrive at a point where they are not at all confident about their standing and their staying power, because inevitably they tend not to actually deliver for most of their people. They'll deliver for a small elite, and they do that deliberately

to make sure that they can stay in power, but the much larger number usually is looking at something very, very different. And that means that eventually that large number is gonna want change. And there are different ways of preventing that change from happening if you're the autocrat. One is again to try to consolidate your power and have a repressive society internally

such that people just can't stand up and strike back. The other, though, is to take people's minds off of their concerns at home by creating some kind of kowsus belli abroad and just distracting people with some kind of foreign adventure and then getting everyone to rally around the flag at home and you see that again and again with autocrats but it's a way of maintaining power. It's interesting because that's exactly what historians would say. Yeah. And I assume you know what William Henry Seward wrote to yeah to Abraham Lincoln on April 1st 1861 when he said he could get away from the Civil War if we just

started a war with some other country and the other country didn't matter. That's exactly it. And to his credit, Lincoln did not even answer that. He answered him verbally, so we don't know what he said. I can imagine what he might have said. But this illustrates very well this point that a world of series of influence is not going to be a world of peace, is not going to be a world without war, is also not going to be a world where opportunity is more widely shared. So all of these things I think are very much for us and for President Biden motivating

factors. So what is the relationship then between the people who live in a society and their ability to change the things that a leader does. And of course it depends entirely on the nature of the system of that society. One of the biggest changes is that while we've had for a long time these different non-governmental actors on the scene, what's different today is that they're all super empowered in ways they weren't before by technology, by information.

And that means in ways that they couldn't before, these actors actually can take on a national government in different ways. Individuals, groups, private sector, subnational actors, a state, a city, a town, can organize in much more effective ways. I mean, I'll give you an example. During the first Trump administration, they immediately pulled out of the Paris climate accords. Many of our states came together and said, OK, if we're not going as a country to take

the steps necessary to deal effectively with climate change, well, we have a bunch of likeminded states. We're going to do it. And we can legislate it and regulate it at a state level. And you see that again and again on issues that people really care about. So when you travel abroad, I've noticed that you make it a point

wherever you are to talk to young people in those countries, why? You know, I know people think that when we're out there traveling around, it's going from one windowless meeting room to another to meet a government bureaucrat from another country. Yeah, there's a lot of that, but it's so important that we're also connecting with other segments of society. And in particular for me, that's meant younger people and

non-governmental organizations, civil society. Every time I meet someone from a younger generation who's doing something, working on trying to solve one kind of problem or another, it's the most energizing thing. It's the thing that gives me the most hope because it's easy to get cynical about the world, but the knowledge that you've got a new generation of people who don't have that cynicism and on the contrary say, oh, here's a problem, I'm going to solve it, whether it's climate, whether it's human rights, whether it's getting more food on people's tables. That's incredibly inspiring, but it's also something else.

I'm convinced that somewhere in the world at any given time, someone has found the solution or the beginnings of a solution to some problem that we have. But if we don't find out about it, if we don't know about it, then we just have to reinvent the wheel and so on for everyone around the world. If we can put a little bit of light on the way someone is tackling a particular problem, a particular challenge, it might spark an idea halfway around the world. Oh yeah, that makes sense. We should try that here. Would it be fair to say that the ideas of the Biden administration have been designed

to create a foreign policy that is thoroughly integrated with domestic policy in the ways that President Biden talked about on February 4th, 2021, when you first took office, the idea that foreign policy and domestic policy had to be the same thing because we had to be able to protect the ability of individuals to be invested in a democratic society,

both in the United States and abroad. This is the ideal, but it's one that has an imperfect realization because we have to try to advance that proposition without the illusion that it's our place or our role to somehow transform other societies. We can try to show the benefits by walking the walk as well as talking the talk

of the way we've organized ourselves as a democracy, but trying to impose that or enforce that on anyone is also, I think, a very perilous path. Well you are describing a world though in which people must come together to solve issues like AI and the pandemics that we will have because of climate change among other things something else we have to deal with and so on and if you think about the way that many people think about foreign affairs it seems like something that's very distant you know it's something that Thomas Jefferson did, and we don't have to think about that because that's another country.

And we need to hunker down here and not be involved with other countries. And the mechanics of what it seems to me you have laid out is the idea that in order to achieve the sorts of advances that we need to achieve to survive, we need to integrate the idea of citizenry of all countries being able to pressure their leaders to do what is best for the majority of people. Is that a mechanical thing that works? Because I'm looking for the integration of foreign affairs into everyday lives.

Let's say you're here in the United States and you care about climate change, and you know that we're responsible States and you care about climate change. And you know that we're responsible for roughly 15 percent of global emissions. So even if we did everything right at home, if we're not able to convince countries representing the other 85 percent of emissions to do the right thing, we don't solve the problem. We went through COVID. We know that even if we had perfect defenses at home, you're

actually only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. And if a disease breaks out halfway around the world because that country didn't have the tools, the means to detect it, do something about it before it could spread, it's going to come and bite us. So having our people around the world helping countries build stronger public health systems, that's good for us. We've all got these smartphones in our pockets, but the rules, the understandings to make sure to the best of our ability that they're used more for good and not for bad, not to surveil people, not to repress people, not to spread misinformation or disinformation,

yes, a lot of that gets decided by individual companies, but a lot of that also gets decided by countries coming together and saying, okay, here's what the rules should be. If we're not at the table, it's going to be written in a way that we probably don't like, and it's going to simply support someone else's vision of how technology is used, something that's so pervasive in our lives. Because it feels, you know, when you and I were kids, we had reporters in foreign capitals all around the world, and now it's possible to live in the United States

and neither travel abroad nor really have much idea of what's happening. So the good news is that we actually have issued more passports than ever before, just this year. A higher percentage of our population has a passport than ever before. And so that's not where the American people really are. For so many reasons, they want to be out there.

They want to be traveling the world. They want to have the experience of maybe getting some education abroad, just getting the experience of seeing the world through someone else's eyes. And that's more powerful than it's ever been. And I think that just gets at the fact that people want to be connected. Now one of the other things we do at the department, and that I'm proudest of because I think it's the biggest bang we get for the buck, is we have these exchange programs. We bring mostly young people, but sometimes mid-career people, here for a week, a month, six months, a year, two years, for all sorts of exchanges. Maybe it's an educational exchange,

maybe it's a cultural exchange with artists or musicians or athletes, maybe it's journalists coming to spend time with one of our media organizations, maybe it's the private sector getting an internship with a company. Thousands and thousands of people every year. And here's what was so striking to me. We looked back at the young people who had taken part in our exchange programs, and we found over time, over going back to the end of the Second World War through the present, that some five or six hundred had gone on to become presidents or prime ministers of their country. And when we identified them and they came on these programs, they were just starting out.

No one could know. Sixty plus went on to win Nobel prizes in different disciplines. Thousands went on to become leaders in their communities, companies, universities, science, technology, culture. And my point is this. the power in that is that, and I talk to so many of these young people, when I travel abroad, one of the groups of people I like to meet with are people who had been

on our exchange programs in the United States. What did they take from it? What did they learn from it? What stayed with them? And nine out of 10, first of all, it created a really positive impression of our country and a long enduring relationship that would go well beyond any given administration decades.

The other thing they got out of it is they saw our communities, our people, not our government, in action. I've asked people the same question. What stood out the most from your experience in the United States? What surprised you? And here's the answer I got, and it surprised me. This comes back again and again,

a conversation I've had well over a decade, volunteerism. The level of volunteerism in the United States, which has probably dropped off a bit from where it was at certain points, but still relative to other countries, were the gold medal champion. They take that back. What else? They see civil society in action here.

They see different individual citizens coming together on something they care about in their community, in their town, in their town, in their state, and trying to figure out a way to do something about it. They see that and then they go home and they do the same thing. That's actually more than anything else how you help inculcate change, how you deal with a system where maybe a government has very different ideas. Now, if you have a repressive environment,

it's awfully hard, but even in countries, because we have people on exchanges from all over, including countries that have very repressive systems, they find fissures. And the other thing that they do is this, Heather, they network, they create connections among themselves that endure. And that's really powerful, because I've gone back and said, are you still in touch with

these other people who are in your program from other countries? And the answer is yes. I'm convinced that those investments, those seeds we're planting, they will sprout in incredible ways in the decades to come. The power of our example. I believe it is. You've talked a lot about planting seeds and that we wouldn't necessarily see grow, but that this is what we do. We try and put one foot in front of the other doing the right thing to see what

will happen. How do you feel about the seeds you have planted going forward? I'm convinced that so many of those seeds will not only sprout, but will turn into tall, powerful, strong, resilient trees, giving a lot of cover, a lot of shade to the country for a long time. Give you examples, including not in my area. And you've written about this and talked about this. The historic investments that President Biden made during his term in our future, those will pay off in the years to come. And he did these things knowing that there might not be an immediate impact.

The Infrastructure Act to make sure that the bridges, the tunnels, the ports, the rail, internet connections, that we had the best in the world. With the Chips and Science Act, making sure that we brought back to the United States the production of the best semiconductors and chips in the world, the engine of the 21st century economy, something we invented, but then we outsourced, bringing that back to America. The Inflation Reduction Act, which has this extraordinary investment in making sure we're producing the kind of technology that can deal with the climate crisis, but that's also going to be the dominant technology

for economies in the 21st century. And if we're not making it, someone else will be, and we're gonna lose that business, lose those markets. Those investments have in turn generated more than a trillion dollars in additional investment from the private sector, from around the world. We're the leading recipient of foreign direct investment in the world.

That's to me one of the most important indicators because when you've got someone making an investment in you, that means they have confidence in you. They have trust in you. They believe in your future because an investment is something that you're only going to see pay off down the road. You have to have that trust and confidence.

There are 60,000 projects with shovels in the ground now as a result of the Infrastructure Act. In the next few years, people are going to feel powerfully the benefits of those investments, those projects. And I hope that maybe we'll find a way to make them remember that that's because President Biden did it, but be it as it may. I'm about to leave this job that I've had the extraordinary privilege of holding for a brief period of time in our history, leaving public service after three decades. But I'm also saying to myself that I'm about to resume the most important role in our system

and our society, and it's that of citizen. Tocqueville, the greatest observer, the early observer of the United States, said that in America the most important job is being a citizen and finding ways to give that full expression. And that's exactly what we've been talking about. How does a citizen confronted with a challenge or a problem, maybe frustrated with what their elected leaders are doing. How do they find ways to move forward on whatever it is that's concerning them?

And we have a country, we have a system that not only allows that, it almost calls for it because of the role of the citizen in our democracy. And I think about that today, and I think also about my late stepfather, who came to this country fleeing something else. He survived the Holocaust. He grew up in a city called Bialystok in Poland, and of

the 900 kids who were in his class, he's the only one who survived. His immediate family was all wiped out, and he made it through Dachau, Majdanek,usschwitz, all of the camps, and ultimately came to the United States as an adult, worked in the Kennedy administration. He would often say to me, you know, I'm an American by choice. You're an American by accident of birth. And that's always stayed with me because it's the most fortunate accident in the world to be born

in this country, to have the extraordinary privilege of being an American citizen. But with that privilege, I think, comes a responsibility in ways big or small to hopefully be a good citizen. And whether that's in your town, in your community, in your state, in your city, nationally, it doesn't matter. But the strength, the success, the progress of our democracy depends more than anything else. Not on its governments, not on its corporations, not on its NGOs, it depends on its citizens. And finding ways to give full expression to our citizenship is maybe the most important mission we have.

When you're about to embark on. That's right. Did you ever think 50 years ago that you would be Secretary of State? No. But what's wonderful for me completing this circle is I started in this building where we're sitting and I get to finish here. I walk through some doors downstairs.

We call it the main street alongside the State Department is C Street here in Washington, D.C. We call them the C Street doors. I walk through those doors. I'll walk out those doors and walk out those doors with a sense of incredible gratitude for having had the chance to be here, to serve, and also to serve alongside just some incredible people. They're all motivated basically by the same thing. They come from very different backgrounds, very different walks of life, all 50 states, wealthy, poor.

Many of them could be doing other things. Happily, they're doing this. And I think, Heather, what I've found is that the one common denominator we have is going to work every day with the stars and stripes behind your back, either literally or figuratively. There's nothing that quite equals that. And it's the privilege of doing your small part

and representing everything that those stars and stripes stand for. That's the thing that motivates all the men and women in this department. Well, thank you. It's been a real joy to watch you work for the last four years and to learn more about the State Department. And I wish you the very best becoming at the height of

American life now as a citizen. And I just got to ask, are you going to get the band back together? Well just because of how much I care about the American people, I would not want to inflict that on them. My best to you. Thanks. So good to be with you, Heather. Thank you.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.