Author: Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Published on: 04/01/2025 | 00:00:00

AI Summary:
The Interview Antony Blinken Insists He and Biden Made the Right Calls You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. A new Trump administration is set to retreat from those very alliances and institutions that President Biden sought to reinforce. But that whiplash has left an open question over its leadership in the changing world order. Four years ago, you inherited the world from President Trump. And now you’re about to hand it back to him. Your tenure has been an unprecedented interregnum. I think a lot about the two sides of this coin that you just alluded to. I’m not sure that I agree with the premise of the question. Most Americans want us to be engaged in the world. They want to make sure that we stay out of wars, that we avoid conflict. But they want to see the United States engaged. President Biden ended the longest war in our history, Afghanistan. I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan is an important achievement in and of itself. We had to learn lessons from Afghanistan and learn from Afghanistan itself. I ordered an after-action review to try to make sure that we understood what did we get right. And we are. We put into practice many of those recommendations in subsequent crises. Six months after Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine. That was February 2022. David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro talk to the world’s most fascinating people. You made two early strategic decisions on Ukraine. The first was to restrict Ukrainian’s use of American weapons within Russia. The second was to support Ukraine’s military offensive without a parallel diplomatic track. We’ve exerted extraordinary diplomacy in bringing and keeping together more than 50 countries, not only in Europe, but well beyond, in support of Ukraine. I worked very hard in the lead up to the war, including meetings with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva a couple of months before the war. We had to test the proposition whether this was really about Russia’s concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or if this was about what it in Do you think it’s time to end the war, though? These are decisions for Ukrainians to make. They have to decide where their future is and how they want to get there. The question is the line, as a practical matter in the foreseeable future, is unlikely to move very much. I’m hearing you say that Ukraine’s fate will no longer rest in its major supporter, the United States. You see it as resting elsewhere, Europe? Look, I don’t want to say expect, but I certainly hope very much. The United States will remain the vital supporter that it’s been for Ukraine. This is one of the conflicts that will be handed back to Trump. We were really on the decline when it came to dealing with China’s economic practices that we don’t like. We’re 20 percent of world G.D.P. When we aligned Europeans, key allies and partners in the Asia Pacific, we’re suddenly 40, 50, 60 percent. And I know it’s succeeding because every time I meet with my Chinese counterpart, he inevitably spends 30 or 40 minutes, 60 minutes complaining about everything we’ve done to align other countries to build this I want to turn to what has become the defining crisis of this era, which is the conflict in Gaza. You came in thinking you could broker a historic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And then Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 with the horrific results, which we saw. Over 90 percent of Gaza’s population is now displaced. Israel has destroyed Hamas’s military capabilities. It’s eliminated the leadership responsible for Oct. 7 while destroying the territory. There’s huge suffering and — No one needs to remind me of the suffering, because it drives me every single day. I spent with my team nine hours in the I.D.F.’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. I argued for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza. And that was an argument that took place because you had in Israel in the days after Oct. 7 a totally traumatized society. There’s a big difference between intent and result, whether it’s under the law or under any one standard. What we’ve seen in Gaza is fairly indiscriminate. Entire areas flattened. Where we are now is that the war is still being prosecuted. Quickest way, most effective way to have an enduring end to Gaza is through an agreement on a cease-fire that brings the hostages home. There have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas. One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel. A hostage agreement was what was, in our estimation, the quickest and most durable way to get an end. Hamas pulled back when they saw Israel under pressure publicly, they pulled back. Is that true? No, that’s not accurate. There have been times when actions that Israel has taken have, yes, made it more difficult. Mike Casey was the State Department’s deputy political counselor on Gaza and resigned in July. Casey said that the state Department frequently rolled over for Israel. He said that no one would read his reports on civilian casualties. Mike has inordinate respect for the people in this department. I don’t need dissent-channel cables to have the facts in front of me. I get them every single day. I look for answers on everything. Does that mean we get to the right answers every time? No. And again, my goal has been to end this conflict in Gaza in a way that makes sure that Oct. 7 doesn’t happen again, that ends the suffering of people and does it in an enduring way that brings the hostages home. Do you think there are still hostages alive? No We’ve spent months working on a post-conflict plan with many countries in the region. If we don’t have the opportunity to start to try to implement it through a hostage cease-fire agreement in the next couple of weeks, we will hand it off to the incoming Trump administration, and they can decide whether to move forward with it. We have the prospect of a totally different region with normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and many other countries. I think the answer is resoundingly yes. I have a 4-, soon to be 5-year-old daughter. My stepfather was a Holocaust survivor who was saved from the death camps by American soldiers. If you’re in public service, as I’ve had the incredible privilege of being for 32 years, a responsibility to try to use that in the best way that you can to do better by your fellow citizens, but also people around the world. Every time, every place I’ve heard, even with criticism, intense criticism of our policies, is people want the United States involved. They want us engaged, they want us leading the way. Jonathan Roumie: The actor who stars as Jesus on “The Chosen” discussed fans who conflate him with his character and how his own faith informs his work. Tilda Swinton: The Academy Award-winning actress discussed her lifelong quest for connection, humanity’s innate goodness and the point of being alive. Ellen Wiebe: The doctor, who has performed hundreds of medical aid in dying procedures, discussed what constitutes a good death.

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  • @rockSlayer
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    02 days ago

    Sentence them both at the next Nuremberg trial.