Secretary Swell on a Pissed-off Planet

Groomed on Park Avenue nd in the 16th Arrondissement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confronts a world that just might be post-diplomacy.

- By Gabriel Debenedetti

The Hotel Captain cook in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, commemorates the 18th-century explorer who circumnavigated the globe twice, “discovering” vast swaths of it for British imperialists before being stabbed to death while attempting to kidnap a Hawaiian chief. It is a somewhat inauspicious place to consider the state of the western-led, rules-based international order, but it’s also roughly equidistant from Beijing and Washington, D.C. And just before the first day of spring, as the temperature outside dipped below zero, the Captain Cook’s ballroom became the center of the geopolitical realm.