What makes Joe Biden’s right-hand man Tony Blinken tick?
Having survived the war thanks to extraordinary luck and resourcefulness, Pisar rose to become a distinguished lawyer, Holocaust educator and even an intermediary between presidents (among other things, sent by Francois Mitterrand to assure Ronald Reagan that the Frenchman was not a communist).
And in 1971 he became stepfather to the nine-year-old son of Judith Blinken. This month Tony Blinken was nominated by Joe Biden as his secretary of state, subject to confirmation by the Senate. Pisar’s experiences have left a deep impression on the man who will shape the Biden administration’s international outlook.
There have been lots of comments that Blinken lived in Paris between the ages of 9 and 18. This is indeed significant, but more significant still is that he lived in Paris with Samuel Pisar. Not every Holocaust survivor or every child of a survivor shares the same political views. But I think many of us, in our different ways, are drawn to what one might call the Nuremberg view of world affairs. Tony Blinken certainly is. When he worked for Barack Obama I believe this Nuremberg view marked him out from others in the administration.
After the Second World War there was a dilemma about what to do with leading Nazis. Just allow people to lynch them as they had with Mussolini? Organise a drumhead court martial and simply shoot them all? Or let them go free and only punish the junior officers?
A more elaborate process, involving a criminal trial of the top two dozen German leaders, seemed a lot of bother. One GI, looking at all the security and organisation, exclaimed that he couldn’t see the point of involving 600 men in the killing of 24.
But what was initially a small group of visionaries, including the US war secretary Henry Stimson and the British legal academic and refugee Hersch Lauterpacht, saw the value of a criminal trial.
It would help establish the principle of leaders’ personal responsibility for mounting aggressive wars, breaking international treaties and committing war crimes. It would also make the case – through the new offence of crimes against humanity and the first mention of a new term, genocide – that human rights do not stop at national borders.
For survivors, the first exposure of Nazi crime was a great emotional release. Footage of death camps at their liberation and a forensic speech by Labour’s Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross stunned the defendants and silenced the court. More important still was that Nuremberg took the first step towards a rules-based international order, in which sovereignty was not a defence against conviction for grotesque crime and in which liberal democratic countries took responsibility for trying to prevent oppression even in places they did not govern.
This is why, near the trial’s end, the author Rebecca West, who had attended, said its judgment “may be one of the most important events in the history of civilisation”.
Tony Blinken’s career, working for Democratic presidents and for Joe Biden, has been dedicated to promoting these ideals. He was an important player in Bill Clinton’s interventions over Bosnia and Kosovo. He continued to support liberal interventionism even when, after the Iraq war, which he backed, such a position was unpopular among Democrats. And he is a strong supporter of international institutions and rules. It is not just his French childhood that leads him to support the EU, but Pisar’s lifelong fear of European collapse.
In the Obama White House he was one of a small group that urged tougher action to prevent Colonel Gaddafi from murdering his own people in Libya. He also took a relatively hawkish position on Syria, telling everyone who would listen that “superpowers don’t bluff”. He was also an early enthusiast for the Arab Spring, emphasising the human rights infringements of Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government.
The Nuremberg view is apparent in his concern at the human rights violations of Saudi Arabia, and the way he accompanies his support for Israel with pressure on it to advance a two-state solution.
Not everybody who is attracted to the Nuremberg view approaches every issue in the same way. The lawyer Philippe Sands, who lost 80 relatives in the Holocaust and is a historian of Nuremberg, became one of the most prominent opponents of the Iraq war that Blinken supported, because he thought it against the rule of law. And how to deal with Iran shows there can be a tension between establishing an international coalition for realistic action and taking a robust position centred on human rights.
Yet for all these differences there are some things that unite us (for it is my view too and for the same reason). First, a belief in international law and not just sovereignty. It is not that sovereignty does not matter, just that it cannot be the last word in any argument. The future belongs, as Blinken has argued, to those who would build bridges rather than walls.
Second, while all of us wish to apply common sense, if mistakes are unavoidable, the Nuremberg view prefers naivety over cynicism. Nuremberg was not a pure trial of the evil by the good. The Russians saw to that, even trying to convict the Nazis for the Katyn massacre that they committed themselves. But even in compromised circumstances, Nuremberg showed good can be advanced. This is the right way of viewing the necessary compromises involving realism, the national interest and strategic alliances.
And the Nuremberg view prefers sins of commission to sins of omission. That certainly was the Blinken position on Syria and Libya, where America left others to do the fighting and, in doing so, contributed to making a bad situation worse.
To this international outlook, Blinken adds a further, almost romantic view of the need for American leadership and its special destiny. How else to interpret his favourite Pisar story, which he told upon accepting Biden’s nomination for secretary of state.
In the final days of the war, Pisar was forced on a death march, when prisoners were ordered to travel to a new camp and faced being shot if they were too slow. Pisar escaped and made his way into a wood.
He ran and ran and then heard the rumble of a tank. As he got close he saw it had the US star on its side. The head of an African-American soldier appeared from inside and Pisar fell to his knees. Then he uttered the only three words of English he knew. “God bless America.”
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If you want to understand American foreign policy in the Biden era, a good place to start is with Samuel Pisar. By the time Pisar was 13-years-old, he was totally alone. His father had been caught by the Nazis while trying to smuggle children to safety from the Bialystok ghetto in Poland. He had been tortured and executed. His mother and younger sister had been sent to the gas chambers while Pisar himself had been forced into slavery.