Sunday School 3/28/21

I'm going to spend our Sunday School time in just one classroom - CNN's State of the Union, where Dana Bash shared her pre-recorded exclusive interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. 

Blinken did his best to answer as broadly and as collectively as possible, compared to Rex Tillerson or the horrid, condescending liar, Mike Pompeo. 

Here's some of what we learned from Blinken.

• China doesn't really fit under one label, given that "there are clearly and increasingly adversarial aspects of the relationship ...there are certainly competitive ones...there are still some cooperative ones." He says we have to approach them from a position of strength, no matter which aspect of the relationship we're talking about. And, we have to bring our allies along - we're stronger together.

• On the pandemic, he said we need to be able to mitigate something like this much better in the future, and we need transparency from the WHO among other things. And, "China, like every other country, has real obligations that it needs to make good on."  As to punishment or repercussions for their behavior to date, Blinken says we need "both accountability for the past, but our focus needs to be on building a stronger system for the future."

• There will be consequences for Russia on the variety of aggressions they've perpetrated on us, including election interference, bounties on our troops, and the attacks on our computers, and NATO shares our concern with Russia's actions across the board. Everything "really starts with being clear-eyed about the challenge Russia poses and addressing the challenge together." 

• On Afghanistan, we're still working on the troop withdrawal timeline, and he said there are more European troops there than there are Americans. They've been with us on this from the beginning, when "the one and only time NATO's Article 5, an attack on one is an attack on all, has been evoked" was 9/11. So, we're telling them what we're thinking, but we're also listening to them. And yes, Biden will keep his promise to "end forever wars" but diplomacy is a part of that, too - and there's an upcoming conference in Turkey on that effort. 

• There was a lot of talk about MBS, the Saudi Crown Prince, and whether we should call him a murderer. In the end, Blinken said " The crown prince is likely to be the leader of Saudi Arabia far into the future" and that we have to work with them on some critical stuff, including ending the war in Yemen, which he called "probably the worse humanitarian crisis in the world." And he asked, "in terms of advancing human rights and progress in Saudi Arabia itself, are we better off recalibrating the relationship, as we did, or rupturing it?" He's confident the recalibration was necessary. 

Blinken made it clear we are not "America alone;" if the Biden foreign policy had a theme song, it would be "We Are the World."

I'll have more from the classrooms in tomorrow's Extra Credit. See you around campus.