Tony Blinken
speaker
307 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Tony Blinken’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So to me, it was that awesome responsibility that came with the job, following the footsteps of truly great leaders that was both, as I said, humbling and usually inspiring.
You know, my friend Tom Friedman, the great columnist for the New York Times, he wrote a piece a couple of years ago that I loved.
You'll see why in a second.
Not by way of making excuses for my failures or shortcomings, but just by explaining the world as it is now.
And it wasn't so much then.
He wrote a column, Andy, that started out and said, mothers and fathers, whatever you do, do not let your sons and daughters grow up to be Secretary of State.
Anything else is fine, but not Secretary of State.
But here's what he was driving at.
When the greats were doing it, take your pick, Jim Baker, Henry Kissinger.
If there was a problem around the world, there were basically four or five people you called and you picked up the phone.
And if you could get those four or five people together and they were typically your counterparts in a handful of countries, you could figure out a way to deal with the problem or at least approach it.
Now we're living in a moment.
in a time where this extraordinary proliferation of actors who have been super empowered by technology and by information, all have a say, all have a stake, all have an ability to affect an outcome.
And if you can't somehow corral them on the takeoff, you're probably gonna have a crash landing.
And sometimes it's hard to know even where to start.
So this goes way beyond governments.
It goes to companies, it goes to NGOs, it goes to groups of one kind or another.
that, again, are empowered by technology in ways that they weren't before.
And so the advice that I guess I would have given and certainly felt very strongly was you have to think upfront in ways we never had to before about how do you bring all of these different actors, all these different stakeholders, the word that we sometimes use, together on the takeoff, not just on the landing.
Well, you know, that might have proved a better path.
Showing 201–220 of 307 · page 11 of 16
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