ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュの'American Leadership Matters': Blinken Highlights Efforts To Revamp U.S. Foreign Policy

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all.

I suspect that most of you are looking forward to what will be a well-deserved break. It’s been quite a year.

When I walked into the State Department on my first day as Secretary, we had COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.

Less than 1 percent of the United States was vaccinated, compared to more than 60 percent today.

We were dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The climate crisis was accelerating.

Our relationships with our allies and partners were badly strained.

And many questioned whether America would – or even could – lead again.

A few guiding premises animated our work this year.

One is that American engagement – American leadership – matters.

The world doesn’t organize itself.

When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.

Either way, it doesn’t serve the American people.

Another premise is that finding new ways to cooperate and coordinate with other countries is more important than ever, because none of the really big challenges that we face and that affect the lives of Americans – from COVID to climate to the disruptive impact of new technologies – can be solved by any one country working alone. Not even the United States.

So much of our work this year has been about rebuilding the foundations of American foreign policy.

That started with restoring and revitalizing our network of alliances and partnerships – and reengaging the multilateral system, where so much of the day-in, day-out work of diplomacy takes place.

Since January 20th, we’ve reinvigorated our engagement with key allies, with NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the OECD, the G7, the G20, ASEAN. We created AUKUS; we elevated the Quad with two leader-level summits; we launched the Build Back Better World global infrastructure initiative.

We’re much more aligned with our allies and partners now than we were a year ago on nearly every issue, including Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and its neighbors, Iran’s nuclear program, and China’s efforts to challenge the rules-based international order.

And I can attest from my dozens of face-to-face meetings with counterparts in every region of the world that they’re glad – frankly, relieved – that the United States is once again engaged and once again leading.

At the start of the year, we said that we would lead the global effort to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, we’ve donated more than 330 million vaccine doses to more than 110 countries, on our way to 1.2 billion donated doses next year.

That’s more than the rest of the world combined.

We’ve led the world in funding COVAX, the global partnership that distributes safe vaccines equitably around the world.

And just this morning, I announced another $580 million in COVID relief funding, to provide life-saving health and humanitarian assistance to places where the suffering is acute.

That brings total U.S. assistance to nearly $20 billion.

And it’s not just the amount of our assistance but how we’ve done it – rooted in science, based on need, with international and regional institutions, and with no political strings attached.

We’ve done all this because – as we see happening right now, with the rise of the Omicron variant – none of us will be safe until all of us are safe.

We still have a long way to go to beat the pandemic.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that we’ve come very far, the world, the United States this past year – with American leadership – in building the foundation for a more effective global COVID-19 response and saving lives.

We’ll keep working toward the goal President Biden set in September at the global COVID summit that he convened: vaccinating 70 percent of the world by next fall.

And we’ll keep leading the push for greater global health security, to better prevent, detect, and respond to future pandemics.

We said we’d restore American leadership in the climate crisis.

Well, on day one, we rejoined the Paris Agreement.

We raised global ambitions to reduce emissions through major investments in climate finance – including quadrupling our own funding.

After a year of dogged diplomacy, countries accounting for 65 percent of the world’s GDP are committed to targets that will keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We led the global pledge to cut methane emissions by 30 percent and helped spearhead the effort to end and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade.

More than 100 countries have joined both of those pledges.

And we secured commitments by many of the world’s major economies to move away from financing fossil fuel projects abroad.

We said we would take on issues that affected American workers and families.

That starts with COVID and climate, but it doesn’t end there.

Thanks to American leadership, the logjams at our ports and the shortages of critical goods are easing.

We brought 136 countries together to secure a Global Minimum Tax to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates, prevent corporations from shifting jobs overseas, and generating billions of dollars to invest here at home.

We’re shaping the governance of new technologies, so that they serve democracies, instead of undermining them.

And as with everything else, we’re doing it with our allies and partners, including through the U.S.-European Union Trade and Technology Council, which we launched this year.

President Biden pledged to end America’s longest war. This summer, we made good on that promise, bringing Operation Resolute Support to a close and leading an international coalition to evacuate more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan.

We knew this would be challenging. It was. And there are lessons from the evacuation and relocation that we’re learning for the future.

But this is also the first time in 20 years that no U.S. troops are spending the holidays in Afghanistan, and we’re not sending a third generation of American soldiers to fight and die there.

The last time I was in this briefing room, I faced some appropriate questions about our ability to continue to facilitate the departure of American citizens and others to whom we have a special commitment.

In the months since, we’ve made good on that promise, including our pledge to help any U.S. citizen who wants to leave. Since September 1, we’ve helped nearly 500 Americans depart Afghanistan. That’s virtually every blue passport holder who remained in Afghanistan after August 31st who has said they wanted to depart and was ready to do so – and we’ll keep at it.

We’ll also keep working to address the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan – through our aid, as the single largest provider of assistance to the people of Afghanistan, as well as through our diplomacy.

Finally, we invested in the State Department – to make it an even stronger, more effective, more agile, more diverse institution that can deliver for the American people in what is an increasingly complex and competitive world.

We’re building our capacity to lead in areas of diplomacy that will matter more and more to our people in the years ahead, like global health, like climate, like technology, like economics.

And as we do, we’ll never take our eye off the ball when it comes to strategic competition, upholding our democratic values and human rights, working for peace.

We launched a sweeping modernization agenda, including our intent to establish a new Cybersecurity and Digital Policy Bureau and Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology, to help us make sure that the digital revolution serves our people, protects our interests, boosts our competitiveness, and upholds our values. New resources to enable the largest hiring increase in a decade and a significant increase in our IT budget; Foreign Service positions dedicated to economic and climate issues; and new initiatives to win the competition for talent and advance diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility.

This year, we also appointed the State Department’s first Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, because our diplomatic corps should reflect our nation’s full diversity, talent, and experience.

And across everything we do, our number-one priority is the safety and well-being of our people.

Later today, I’ll visit the Executive Medical Center at Johns Hopkins, where some of our colleagues who’ve suffered from anomalous health incidents are getting treatment.

All of us at the State Department and across the U.S. Government are intently focused on getting to the bottom of what and who is causing these incidents, caring for those who’ve been affected, protecting our people.

Critical to the success of our foreign policy are the investments we’re making in ourselves here at home – in education, infrastructure, research and development, and health.

Domestic renewal fuels our competitiveness and it elevates America’s standing in the world.

Put it all together, and there is no question that we’re stronger now than we were 11 months ago.

We’re stronger in the world. We’re stronger at home. We’re on stronger footing when it comes to COVID, climate, and other urgent challenges.

And we’re in a stronger geopolitical position to deal with countries like China and Russia, as they seek to undermine the international system that we’ve built and led – a system that has made the world freer, more prosperous, more secure, more connected, and has allowed our country and people to thrive.

We’ve got a profound stake in upholding that system, in standing up for the rule of law, for democratic values and human rights, a level playing field that gives everyone a fair chance to compete and to succeed.

And we’ll continue to drive that positive vision – with our allies and partners right alongside us.

Just about all the work that I’ve named here today will continue in 2022: ending this pandemic and strengthening global health security; making sure the standards, hardware, and policies for new technology secure our competitive edge and improve the lives and livelihoods of our people while keeping them safe and our democracy strong; defending and strengthening the rules-based order against those who would tear it down; building a State Department ready to lead on 21st-century challenges.

We’re much better positioned to make strong progress on those challenges than we were when we began, because we’re building on the foundation we laid this year.

And I’m proud and grateful to all the diplomats and development experts who’ve worked so hard to make that happen and who represent the very best our country has to offer.

This year, we said goodbye to two giants of American diplomacy – George Shultz and Colin Powell. They both loved the State Department. The State Department loved them.

They both believed in the power of diplomacy.

And they both knew that the State Department doesn’t exist to deal with problems elsewhere, to focus out there on the rest of the world — but rather to deliver for the American people, to solve the challenges that affect their lives, to create opportunities that will make their futures brighter.

Those are beliefs that we wholeheartedly embrace in this administration. And I know they’re shared across our political aisle. So I want to thank Congress for confirming a large slate of our nominees over the weekend. No administration in American history has had fewer confirmed ambassadors and senior officials than ours. And we need our full team on the field right away to protect our interests and our people.

It has been an honor to serve the American people this year as part of our outstanding diplomatic workforce. It’s also been an honor to travel with many of you here in this room, to take your questions up here at this podium from time to time. Thank you for your dedicated, persistent work to keep the American people and people around the world informed about what we do here and to hold us to account.

So I hope you all have a very healthy, restorative break. I wish you all a very happy New Year. I look forward to getting to work next year. But meanwhile, I’m happy to take some questions.

MR PRICE: Michele.

QUESTION: Now you’ve had a few months to reflect on what went wrong in Afghanistan, and I wonder what regrets you have about how you handled the diplomacy surrounding it and what concerns you have – whether you’ve lost credibility among your allies in the way that it ended and what you intend to do to head off a humanitarian catastrophe there given that the U.S. still has a lot of Afghanistan’s money frozen in bank accounts here.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: When it comes to regrets, to looking back, there’ll be a lot of time for that in the years ahead. Right now, we’re focused on what we’re doing, what we need to do, on action to move our foreign policy forward, to move our national security forward, to deal with the challenges that are in front of us.

Now, I also ordered a review of our Afghanistan policy and the implementation of that policy, starting in 2020 and going through the relocation and evacuation. As I think you know, one of our most respected now retired diplomats, Dan Smith, will be leading that effort, and I look forward to learning what he and his team learn in terms of the lessons to take from that experience. Others are also rightly looking at the last 20 years of our policy in Afghanistan to try to draw lessons from that – what went right, what went wrong, and how we take that going forward.

But to your point, what I am focused on right now is the situation in Afghanistan, including the humanitarian situation. We continue to be the largest single provider of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. We’ve issued multiple now general licenses to make sure that other countries, institutions, can feel free to move forward with their assistance and not be concerned about the application or implementation of sanctions against them.

We’ve participated in the release of about $280 million recently in the Afghan Trust Fund monies that are there. And we are looking intensely at ways to put more liquidity into the Afghan economy, to get more money into people’s pockets, and doing that with international institutions, with other countries and partners, trying to put in place the right mechanisms to do that in a way that doesn’t directly benefit the Taliban but does go directly to the people.

We’re very conscious of the fact that there is an incredibly difficult humanitarian situation right now, one that could get worse as winter sets in. And so that’s an area of intense focus for us working closely with allies and partners. We’re also, of course, focused on ensuring that the Taliban make good on the expectations of the international community when it comes to continuing to allow people who wish to leave Afghanistan to do so, when it comes to upholding the rights of all Afghan citizens but notably women and girls and minorities, when it comes to not engaging in reprisals, when it comes to making good on their commitments to counter terrorism coming from Afghanistan.

So all of those things are front and center on our agenda. We’re working them virtually every day with international partners around the world.