Tony Blinken
speaker
101 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tony Blinken’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If we're pulling out of that, if we're ending this very, in the context of our own budget, modest support to helping to feed people, to helping provide basic health security, to making sure that they can deal with some of the challenges posed by climate change, you name it, go down the list. We're going to see problems get a lot bigger and come and bite us, and we're going to lose that goodwill.
And who fills in? Who takes advantage of the vacuum? China. We see it now with China getting into the position we were in with so many of these programs. And that means that China will get the benefit of whatever successes they have and their influence is going to go up, not down. That's an America that's in retreat. Look.
We were working hard to get ambassadors to all of our embassies around the world. We had confirmation problem after confirmation problem because people would hold up our ambassadors for one unrelated reason or another. Meanwhile, China was putting in place more embassies than the United States has around the world. What does that mean?
That means that when an American company is trying to win a contract in a given country, we can't send our ambassador in to see the president, to see the prime minister, to see the finance minister, the Chinese can. And guess who wins the contract? It plays out in so many different ways to the detriment of our own people and our own interests.
I've got a lot of friends around the world that I've made over the years. Most of them now are no longer in positions of responsibility. Those are the folks I talk to. I tend not to talk to people who are in government now. The last thing I would do is to give them advice about what they should do, but I'm hearing from a lot of people I know. And again, it comes back to this question of trust.
You spend 80 years building up this trust by building strong economic partnerships, by building up military alliances, by building up political alliances. If that is then taken down in a matter of 100 days, the trust is gone. And that makes it incredibly hard to rebuild. If you look at the idea of, can we put this genie back in the bottle? Not so easy. So what does that mean?
What does that mean in terms of what they're doing? It means that countries are now looking for ways to work around us, to work more closely together, but without the United States. And that I think is the trend that we're seeing because the unpredictability, the possibility that what's said today will be reversed tomorrow and then reversed again means that they simply can't count on us.
You know, um, President Biden used to like to say it's never a good bet to bet against America. The problem we now have is that people will not be betting on America. And that will play itself out for many, many months and many, many years. All right.
Well, I think the sort of diplomatic language that I typically hear is, Tony, what the F is going on? That tends to be how the question is posed. Look, there really is confusion. Here's the thing. We were talking to him about tariffs a little while ago. But we don't even know what the administration is trying to accomplish because we keep hearing different things. Is this about raising revenues?
Maybe, except at some point that doesn't work because the tariffs go so high that trade stops and you don't get the revenues. Is this somehow about bringing manufacturing back to the United States? Maybe, except that that takes years and it takes massive investment and people are loath to make those investments in an environment of unpredictability.
Is it about dealing with the trade deficits that we have with some countries? And it seems that this is something that has motivated President Trump for a long time. Maybe that's what's going on. Except that the link between tariffs and trade deficits is not so obvious. We have 27 countries in the European Union, right? They all basically have the same tariffs.
They basically have the same trade policies. We've got surpluses with some, deficits with others. So that whole link is not clear. And by the way, trade deficits are not necessarily a bad thing. It basically means we import a lot of stuff. So people have cheaper prices. They've got greater choice.
And then our manufacturers can take the inputs for their products that they bought more cheaply and produce a product that they can sell at a better price. So there's just general confusion about what is the president trying to accomplish. And I'd say really quickly two things.
As I'm trying to decipher this myself and trying to have these conversations and at least try to explain what I see going on. One is this notion of what the economists call autarky or economic self-sufficiency. Basically, let's make everything and build everything and do everything in the United States. Sounds good, right?
Except that many, many years ago, we figured out that this thing called comparative advantage was actually a pretty good thing for us, where some countries would make some stuff, we'd make other things, and everyone would be better off. Because again, Lower prices, more variety, an ability to make our own products less expensively.
And then the countries that have tried over the years to do self-sufficiency did not work out so well. The Soviet Union tried that. It went off the cliff. North Korea's tried that. It's gone off the cliff. But that seems to be one thing. The other thing is this.
My sense is, as the president's looked at history, he's attracted, and we've heard him talk about it, so it's not a surprise, to something that was characteristic of the 19th century. And that was this notion of having a sphere of influence. And it basically means this. The big countries, the big guys, the strong guys get to carve up the world. And we get our part.
And the other big guys, and in this case, it would be Russia and China, get theirs. We get to do what we want in our sphere. They get to do what they want in theirs. The Chinese get to do what they want in theirs. And that's kind of the way the world looked in Europe in much of the 19th century, except it didn't work out so well.
Because inevitably what happens is one country that has one sphere decides it wants to get bigger. It wants more. So it tries to take some more territory. And then these circles rub against each other and you get conflict. Or within one area, one country tries to keep its people down and then the people rebel and they get pushed down again and then it eventually blows up.
And in this case now, you've got Russia and China that may have a sphere of influence. These are autocratic countries. We're a democracy. They also, in a world of instant communication, can't afford to let their people see a successful democracy. So they're going to meddle in ours to try to make sure that ours is not succeeding.
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