Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School this week, former U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ’84 described a complex balancing act that the Biden administration faced during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“We had to make judgments in real time about how to try to get to a better place,” Blinken said at an event organized by the Institute of Politics (IOP). “We thought that the best way to get to an end, to protect people, to help people, was to get a ceasefire with hostages coming out and with aid going in.”
Speaking with David Sanger ’82, a Harvard Kennedy School lecturer and New York Times correspondent, Blinken addressed a packed room in Harvard’s JFK Jr. Forum. He acknowledged “the horrific loss of life” among Palestinians and described daily life in Gaza since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel as “living hell.”
The Biden administration had to contend with multiple priorities in Gaza, Blinken explained: securing the release of hostages, including Americans; ensuring that a wider regional war did not break out in the Middle East; and preventing another terrorist attack against Israel. “We were trying to make sure that October 7 never happened again,” he said, “and I will stand by that as long as necessary.”
About 25 protesters gathered on 79 John F. Kennedy Street, in front of the forum’s entrance, before the event. They carried a Palestinian flag and several signs, including one calling Blinken “a war criminal.” Chants of “shame!” could be heard as event attendees made their way through multiple layers of security.
“Everyone here tonight has the right to hear from Secretary Blinken,” said IOP interim co-director Ned Price before Blinken took the stage inside, “and, likewise, Secretary Blinken has every right tonight to have his voice heard consistent with the school’s freedom of expression and dissent policies.”
During a Q&A session following Blinken and Sanger’s conversation, a Harvard Law School student asked Blinken how he reconciled the deaths of thousands of Palestinians that resulted from his decisions taken as secretary of state with his own legacy.
“There is no hierarchy of trauma,” Blinken responded. “The trauma in Israel, the trauma among Palestinians—the same. The loss of a Palestinian life, the loss of an Israeli life—the same.”
Blinken said he believes that, because of the trauma Israel experienced on October 7, “they would have continued to do what they did” in the war regardless of any actions from the U.S. government. “Cutting off arms [to Israel], sure, that was an option,” he said. “But I don’t actually believe that, at least in the near term, it would have changed things.”
He also pointed out that Hamas impeded ceasefire negotiations and raised a question about the balance of responsibility.
“I empathize with the people who felt this so deeply,” he said. “I do remain with a question in my mind about why barely a word was spoken in all those months about Hamas, which was an actor, too, and is responsible for so much of what happened.”
In addition to Gaza, Sanger and Blinken discussed topics including the ongoing U.S. war with Iran and the future of the rules-based global order.
Blinken criticized the Trump administration for failing to make a clear case for waging a war against Iran to the American people. Describing the Obama administration’s rationale for negotiating a nuclear deal with the nation back in 2015 instead of taking military action, he said, “Something you negotiate is not going to get you 100 percent of what you want, but it got us a lot. What it did was to put the [nuclear] program in a box.” However, Blinken said he regretted that the Biden administration had subsequently failed to reach a “longer and stronger agreement” with Iran.
Asked what the world might look like a decade from now, in a “post-Trump” era, Blinken described the current moment as “an inflection point,” citing the power of technology that enables a range of actors—from individuals to corporations to sub-national groups—to challenge traditional governance institutions.
“We had this neat division between democracy and autocracy,” he said of the post-World War II international system. But that vision, he believes, no longer reflects the current realities. Instead, Blinken said, we are moving toward a new order in which various stakeholders who have an interest in a particular issue—such as global health, drug trafficking, or climate change—will have to form coalitions to deal with specific problems while agreeing to play by the same set of rules.
Blinken said he was optimistic about the future because of the energy and determination of the rising generation and “the extraordinary power” of technology, including artificial intelligence.
The ultimate challenge of this moment, he said, in the Middle East and beyond, is finding a way “to re-humanize, not to dehumanize, because the greatest poison in the well that we all drink from is dehumanization. We see that in our own society.”
