Commentary
Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently completed a “chief supplicant” mission to Beijing on June 19.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a supplicant as “a person who asks a god or someone who is in a position of power for something in a humble way.” Who could argue that Blinken acted otherwise? During the brief trip, he apparently made no “big asks” in representing U.S. interests and concerns vis-a-vis the Chinese communist belligerence in East Asia and elsewhere around the world and possibly gave Chinese leader Xi Jinping perhaps even more than he had hoped for.
Let us examine the topic in hindsight….