Anthony Blinken tapped as Biden's secretary of state. What does it mean for India?

US president-elect Joe Biden picked his trusted foreign policy advisor and close aide Antony Blinken as the US secretary of state, along with Jake Sullivan as the national security advisor.  

Blinken, 58, has served as the deputy secretary of state in the second term of the Obama administration and national security advisor to Biden when he was the vice president. Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over three decades. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, from 2015 to 2017. In that role, Blinken helped to lead diplomacy in the fight against ISIS, the re-balance in Asia, and the global refugee crisis.

"President-elect Joe Biden intends to nominate Antony Blinken to serve as secretary of state, turning to a trusted diplomat and foreign-policy adviser to oversee his work to rebuild US relationships around the globe, according to people familiar with the decision," The Wall Street Journal reported.

What does Blinken's appointment mean for India?

This could start the beginning of the end of isolationist Trumpian foreign policies. The Biden administration has already announced that it will re-enter the Paris Climate Accord, renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal and woo back the allies that it had estranged to a great extent in Europe. Asia will be an important part of their foreign policy maneuvers and India will be the cornerstone of the Asia-Pacific region—the great bulwark against an aggressive China. 

Building better relationships with India has bipartisan consensus in the US. And Blinken, along with Sullivan, has long championed closer ties to India. During the Biden campaign, Blinken spoke during the virtual celebration of India's Independence Day. "The vice president [Biden] has long been a champion of stronger ties with India. I saw this firsthand when I started working for him in 2002. Then, of course, the Obama-Biden administration and his years as vice president."

"But if you go back 15 years, Joe Biden had a vision for the future of US-India relations. In 2006, he said, my dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States," Blinken said. "Well, we are not quite there, but it's a terrific vision, and one that I know, he will act, to realise, as president of the United States. He was the driving force of the lifting of nuclear sanctions on India, and then the passage of this landmark India civil nuclear deal. And this is something I got to see up close and personal with him in the senate."

But, unlike Trump's pragmatic quid-pro-quo approach to foreign policies, the Biden batch of advisors can be expected to place more emphasis on "human rights" baked into their playbook.

Blinken had spoken on the Kashmir issue and Muslim minority issues in India in an interview with US Hudson Institute. He said during the interview: "We obviously have challenges now and real concerns, for example, about some of the actions that the government has taken particularly in cracking down on freedom of movement and freedom of speech in Kashmir, some of the laws on citizenship but you’re always better engaging with a partner and a vitally important one like India, when you can speak frankly and directly about areas where you have differences even as you’re working to build greater cooperation and strengthen the relationship going forward. That would be the approach and again, I think we’ve seen evidence that it works.

"We made India a so-called major defense partner. That was something that we got the congress to approve and that was unique to India. What that did is it basically ensured that when it comes to advance sensitive technology that India needs to strengthen its military, it’s treated on par with our allies and partners. We then worked hard to persuade India that it would be more prosperous and more secure if it signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement. We succeeded. It wasn’t easy. It was for the all the reasons that you cited. It was a challenging effort but Biden was one of the leaders of the effort to convince our partners in India and they did. I think that’s a reflection, again, of the fact that we cannot solve common global challenges without India as part of the deal," he said.