Secretary of State Antony Blinken 60 Minutes Interview Transcript

Norah O’Donnell: (00:02)
In his first 100 days, President Biden focused on the coronavirus pandemic. But over the course of his term, the Biden presidency will be defined by how the United States competes with China. In a few years, China’s economy is expected to surpass the US as the world’s biggest. To determine how the United States will deal with China’s growing influence, Mr. Biden has chosen one of his closest aides as secretary of state. It falls to Antony Blinken to rebuild a depleted and demoralized State Department, repair US alliances and champion what diplomats called the rules-based international order, the written and unwritten code that governs how nations deal with one another, rules that he says are now threatened by China.

Speaker 2: (00:50)
The story will continue in a moment.

Antony Blinken: (00:55)
It is the one country in the world that has the military economic diplomatic capacity to undermine or challenge the rules based order that we, we care so much about and are determined to defend. But I want to be very clear about something, and this is important. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and defend it.

I know you say the goal is not to contain China, but have you ever seen China be so assertive or aggressive militarily?

No, we haven’t. I think what we’ve witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad. That is a fact.

What’s China’s goal?

I think that over time, China believes that it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.

Chinese fighter jets are increasingly visible in the skies above the Western Pacific, where the US Navy also has a presence. This past week, China’s President Xi unveiled three new warships to patrol the South China Sea. It already has the world’s largest Navy and could use it to invade Taiwan, a democratic island and long-standing US ally. Do you think we’re heading towards some sort of military confrontation with China?

I think it’s profoundly against the interests of both China and the United States to get to that point or even to head in that direction.

Let’s talk about human rights. Describe what you see it’s happening in Xinjiang that maybe the rest of the world doesn’t.

We’ve made clear that we see a genocide having taken place against the Uighurs in Xingjiang. More than a million people have been put into choose your term concentration camps, reeducation camps, internment camps. When Beijing says, “Oh, there’s a terrorism threat,” which we don’t see, it’s not coming from a million people.

Our administration-

Six weeks ago in Alaska, Secretary Blinken confronted Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, about genocide in Xinjiang and China’s military aggression.

We feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.

Yang Jiechi: (03:26)
[foreign language 00:03:26]

The exchange became an international incident caught on camera and not lost in translation.

Speaker 5: (03:35)
The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.

If Xinjiang isn’t a red line with China, then what is?

Yang Jiechi: (03:45)
Look, we don’t have the luxury of not dealing with China. There are real complexities to the relationship, whether it’s the adversarial piece, whether it’s the competitive piece, whether it’s the cooperative piece.

Even before the meeting in Alaska, President Xi had warned about the dawn of a new cold war. During President Trump’s time in office, China found the US less predictable than past administrations.

Donald Trump: (04:12)
And I just announced another 10% tariff.

Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese products in response to what he called unfair trade practices and the theft of US intellectual property. So far, the Biden Administration has kept the tariffs in place.

President Biden: (04:31)
I also told President Xi we will maintain a strong military presence in-

China may be the only big issue of the day in Washington in which Democrats and Republicans find common cause. The Chinese have stolen hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of trade secrets and intellectual property from the United States. That sounds like the actions of an enemy.

It certainly sounds like the actions of someone who’s trying to compete unfairly and increasingly in adversarial ways, but we’re much more effective and stronger when we’re bringing like-minded and similarly aggrieved countries together to say to Beijing this can’t stand and it won’t stand.

So is that a message that President Biden has delivered to President Xi?

Certainly in in their first conversation they covered a lot of ground.

It was reportedly a two hour phone call.

It was. Yeah, I was there.

And so did President Biden tell President Xi to cut it out?

President Biden made clear that in a number of areas, we have real concerns about the actions that China’s taken, and that includes in the economic area and that includes the theft of intellectual property.

China’s gross domestic product is expected to surpass the United States as early as 2028.

Well, it’s a large country. It’s got a lot of people.

If China becomes the wealthiest country in world, doesn’t that also make it the most powerful?

A lot depends on how it uses that wealth. It has an aging population. It has significant environmental problems and so on. But here’s the way I think about it more writ large. If we’re talking about what really makes the wealth of the nation, fundamentally, it’s its human resources and the ability of any one country to maximize their potential. That’s the challenge for us. It’s the challenge for China. I think we’re in a much better place to maximize that human potential than any country on earth if we’re smart about it.

China thinks long-term strategically, decades in advance. Is America just caught up on the latest fires here and there and we’re not thinking long-term strategically, and as a result, China will surpass us?

What I’ve found looking at our own history is that when we’ve confronted a significant challenge, significant competition, significant adversity, we’ve managed to come together and actually do the long-term thinking, the long-term investment. And that is really the moment we’re in now. And that’s the test that I think we’re facing. Are we actually going to rise to it? President Biden believes we are.

Antony Blinken occupies a suite of offices on the seventh floor of the State Department, but he first worked for Joe Biden at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee nearly 20 years ago and has barely left his side since. In the Obama White House, Secretary Blinken held concurrent roles as an assistant to the president and the national security advisor for Vice President Biden.

It’s been the most consequential professional relationship, and also in many ways personal relationship, that I’ve had.

How often do you speak?

It’s pretty close to daily.

You speak to him every day?

In one way or another. We’re pretty good at meetings. So there are a few of those.

When I thought about the relationship that you have had with President Biden over the years in the Senate and then when he was vice-president, the only relationship that I could come up with, though I’m not a historian, was of course Secretary Baker and President George H. W. Bush.

I’d be flattered by any comparison to Secretary Baker. I actually, I spoke to him on the phone a few months ago, and we talked about the importance of ideally a secretary of state having a close relationship with the president. He was extraordinarily effective for all sorts of reasons but that was, I think, a source of his effectiveness.

Secretary of State James Baker helped president George H. W. Bush in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The current secretary is in the midst of winding down America’s longest war in Afghanistan.

Are you prepared for a worst case scenario in Afghanistan where the US backed government fails and the Taliban takes over?

We have to be prepared for every scenario, and there are a range of them. We’re looking at this in a very clear-eyed way, but Nora, we’ve been engaged in Afghanistan for 20 years. And we sometimes forget why we went there in the first place. And that was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9/11. And we did. Just because our troops are coming home, doesn’t mean we’re leaving. We’re not. Our embassy’s staying, the support that we’re getting to Afghanistan when it comes to economic support, development, humanitarian, that remains. And not only from us, from partners and allies.

Somewhat related, will the Biden Administration close Guantanamo Bay?

We believe that it should be. That’s certainly a goal, but it’s something that we’ll bring some focus to in the months ahead.

In this past Wednesday’s addressed to Congress, President Biden spoke about his plans for immigration reform.

President Biden: (09:47)
For more than 30 years, politicians have talked about immigration reform and we’ve done nothing about it. It’s time to fix it.

[inaudible 00:09:55] a subject, not usually central to the state department’s mission, but we asked Secretary Blinken about it because of the refugee crisis on America’s Southern border. Border crossings for undocumented immigrants have skyrocketed. In March more than 170,000 people were taken into custody. That’s the highest in 20 years. Are the policies of the Biden Administration to blame?

No. What we’re seeing is indeed a surge of people to the border. We’ve seen that in the past, but we inherited a totally broken system, broken intentionally. And it takes time to fix it. And by the way, our message is very clear. Don’t come. The border is not open. You won’t get in. But we have to understand what is motivating so many people to do this. And it is usually desperation.

But that’s not new. I want to talk about the policies of the Biden Administration, because President Biden did use his executive authority to curb deportations to allow more asylum seekers to enter the United States. So are these new policies by the administration contributing to this search?

We’re focused, when it comes to people coming in, to making sure that the children, unaccompanied minors, are treated humanely and according to the law.

Is it problematic to tell migrants, “Well, no, you can’t come here,” and then at the same time, create a different situation on the ground that does allow them to come?

But the point is they’re not. And what’s one of the challenges that we’ve had is that traffickers and others are trying to tell them that the border is open. It’s not.

But children are being allowed in, and they’re being-

Children are the one exception because it is the right thing to do. We are not going to abide the notion that children are kept in a precarious, dangerous situation. That is unacceptable.

Blinken himself is a father of two young children and hales from a family that only a few generations ago were themselves refugees. His paternal great grandfather, Meyer Blinken, immigrated to New York City from Ukraine, fleeing Russian oppression in 1904. This coming week, the Secretary of State will visit Ukraine to show support for the country currently in the throes of more recent Russian aggression.

President Putin has amassed a very large force at the border with Ukraine, more than 100,000 troops. What is Putin up to?

You’re right. There are more forces massed on the border with Ukraine that at any time since 2014, when Russia actually invaded. I can’t tell you that we know Mr. Putin’s intentions. There are any number of things that he could do or choose not to do. What we have seen in the last few days is apparently a decision to pull back some of those forces. And we’ve seen some of them, in fact, start to pull back.

That’s been verified that they are pulling back?

Starting now. We’re watching that very, very carefully.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken 60 Minutes Interview Transcript

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