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
And they can say to their own people, see, they're no better than we are. All of these things lead to conflict. They lead to destruction. They lead to economic chaos. They lead to a bad place for America and for Americans.
One thing is this, and maybe it's a little bit related. I think one of the things that President Trump understands, knows, and has a tremendous instinct for is the so-called attention economy and dominating it every single day. And in a sense, it doesn't matter what you do or what you say as long as you're dominating the attention economy. which he does.
I mean, if you look at a newspaper, these 10 people still look at that, whether it's online or a hard copy, and you see 10 headlines, probably seven of them are going to have his name in them. So if that's how you gauge your success, and you know, that's not totally crazy, then it almost doesn't matter what the substance is, as long as you're in the headline.
This gets back to this basic predictability. When Biden left office, we had, and sorry again for the long speak, but it actually is meaningful to people. We had the highest level of foreign direct investment ever. That means that countries, companies were pouring money into the United States because they saw this as the best place to invest.
And part of the reason for that was predictability, whereas other countries might be chaotic and you pretty much knew what you were getting with the United States.
Things like the rule of law, things like no political retribution, things like transparency, all of these things were what attracted other countries to us and had them making massive investments here in ways that created growth, that produced more jobs, helped us produce better products to sell around the world.
When you lose that, and that's what I'm afraid we're at risk of losing, then you're heading again to a bad place.
So, Tim, I think there are a lot of things that are on the chopping block, and we'll, you know, we'll see how it 80 years, we've had allies and partners that could sort of count on us as necessary because of these alliances that we built to protect them if they got into hot water. And now they don't know.
And that means they're going to have to make their own bets for the future if they can't bet on us. So, for example... Countries like Japan, like Korea, like even Poland, we heard this the other day, that have forsworn nuclear weapons may decide that, you know what, we have to go down that road because we can't count on America. And once you go down that road, it's very hard to go in reverse.
They will get together amongst themselves and away and around from us.
Now, maybe, for example, you'll have countries coming together to figure out different kinds of supply chains to make sure that they have access to the stuff that they need and can trade with each other without making themselves reliant on the United States because then, based on the whims of whoever's in office, something could go off, go bad, and that relationship, that dependency could be used as leverage against them.
All of these kinds of things take a lot of time, a lot of investment. But once they're unleashed, they're really hard to pull back again. So, you know, now we see, look, we've seen just in the last 100 days, after Europeans and the Northeast Asians moved away from creating dependencies on China, de-risking as we urged them to do for the last four years.
Now, all of a sudden, the Europeans are talking again to China about a big free trade agreement. Japan and Korea come together and talk to their Chinese counterparts about the same thing. At the same time, the European Union and Latin America, they just finished a big free trade agreement. All of this around the United States, not with the United States.
Once you do that, hard to put back in the bottle.
I've had a number of conversations with Marco Rubio, Senator Rubio, who I've known for years, in part because of his service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And at the risk of damning him with praise that he might not want, we've had really good conversations. And Tulsi Gabbard?
I don't know her, have not talked to her, but I do know Senator Rubio, and I think he's extremely well prepared for the job by his service on the Foreign Relations Committee, on the Intelligence Committee, and he's deeply thoughtful about most of the things we have to confront.
Well, look, Tim, I'll say two things. First, those words when spoken were accurate, and I wouldn't take them back. Second, I haven't spoken to Secretary Rubio at all since he's taken on the job. So I don't really benefit from hearing directly from him how he's seeing this, how he's thinking about it. Is that unusual?
Look, I think everyone does this differently. In my case, I benefited tremendously from talking to my predecessors, many, many conversations with Henry Kissinger before he passed away, very frequently with Condi Rice, Jim Baker, and obviously Madeleine Albright when she was alive, John Kerry. So in my case, I wanted... the benefit of their extraordinary wisdom.
But again, people do this differently. And actually, I talked to Mike Pompeo a couple of times back in the day, Rex Tillerson. The challenge that anyone in an administration has is they're following the guidance of the president. or what they believe to be the guidance of the president, because in this case, it seems to shift a bit on a daily basis.
And you're always trying to divine what that might be. I had a tremendous advantage on the job because I'd worked for Senator Biden when he was Senator, Vice President Biden, President Biden for 22 years. So I always pretty much knew in advance what he was thinking. And when people around the world heard me speak,
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