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Making his final trip as America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace before awarding him the country’s highest tribute, the Legion of Honor medal. With its red silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken called the medal “the honor of a lifetime.”
It was a very different scene back in Washington a few days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a final speech before a crowd of foreign policy experts.
A similar drama punctured Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department two days later, as a journalist, shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague, was carried from the room by security officers.
The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. Over four years and more than one million flight miles logged, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. The first, the defense of Ukraine against Russia, was a popular cause marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American porches, and Mr. Blinken basked in accolades as he invoked the highest principles of international law and human rights.
But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ignited by Palestinian terrorist attacks became a political and moral nightmare for the Biden administration as Israeli strikes with American-supplied weapons killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
While President Biden set the policy, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, presented it to the public. The diplomat was accused of gutting the very principles he had championed in Ukraine, and became the target of vitriol rarely directed at a U.S. secretary of state.
