Secretary Antony J. Blinken at the Overseas Security Advisory Council Annual Briefing – United States Department of State

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Thank you.  Thank you.  Good morning, everyone.

Steve stole my best lines.  (Laughter.)  It’s going to be all downhill from here.  But in all seriousness, it’s particularly good to be here as someone who has been a longtime resident of this area, Washington, D.C., northern Virginia.  It’s so gratifying to see this extraordinary investment take life and give even more life to this community.

So I’m genuinely grateful just as a citizen of the commonwealth and someone who also feels very strongly about Washington, D.C.  So grateful to Amazon for its presence, for its investment, for its engagement.

And as Steve said, I’ve been doing this now for about 32 years.  I started at the State Department back in the early 1990s when President Clinton came in.  And as Alaina Teplitz, who is here with us today – one of my great colleagues – knows, back then I started on the sixth floor of the department in the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs in their front office.

I had a small office.  Its previous occupant had been a very large safe – (laughter) – so that gives you some idea of what the office was like.  No windows.  A very large Wang computer.  Some of you may be old enough to remember those gigantic Wang desktop computers.  Anyways, as I like to say, over the course of 32 years, I moved up one flight to the seventh floor and got some windows, so not bad.  (Laughter.)

But to all of you here today, but especially, Steve, to you, to Amazon, to our incredible team at the department, including Assistant Secretary Smith, Director Matus, the entire Diplomatic Security team for all that they do to protect the State Department community every day and for their role in this partnership.

I have to tell you, I have a deep personal affection and gratitude to all of the men and women of Diplomatic Security.  Just on a personal level, other than my family, likely the first person I see in the morning every day and the last person I see at night every evening is from DS.  And we all travel the world together.  They do so much to make sure that we can do our jobs every single day.

And this institution that we built together, OSAC, since its creation back in 1985, it has been a vital partner to the State Department.  And as Steve said, we’re operating, you’re operating in a global environment with a global brand – the American flag.  And that is almost entirely for the good, but it brings some challenges with it.

And it’s imperative that, working together, we make sure that we’re doing everything possible – whether it’s in the federal government, whether it’s in the private sector – to make sure that we’re defending our people, defending our property, and looking out for each other.  And that’s what OSAC has been all about.  Together, we have partnered to prevent, to mitigate, to manage the threats to our people, to our facilities, to our firms overseas.

Now, back when it started, OSAC had 15 members.  Today, 6,700 organizations across 150 country chapters, representing an incredibly broad spectrum of private actors from Fortune 500 companies to small NGOs.

And as you look at it, it’s not just that the coalition has grown in numbers.  It’s adapted, time and time again, to a threat landscape that is increasingly complex and increasingly volatile.  Terrorist groups, the foremost danger identified at OSAC’s founding – they’ve changed.  They’ve adapted.  In many ways, they’ve expanded their reach, and they’ve modernized their tactics.

And then around the world, we see new security challenges that weren’t even present when OSAC was founded that continue to surface and rapidly, rapidly, rapidly evolve.

Today, we have OSAC partners who are sharing best practices to safeguard against threats from emerging technologies, like AI, like malicious cyber activity, preparing for the security risks that will be exacerbated by things like climate change and more intense hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather.

OSAC has also become an essential forum for managing crises.  Because when the rubber really hits the road, having this organization, having all of these lines of connection and communication makes a big difference.  We see members using encrypted communications channels to exchange information on the impacts of conflicts, health emergencies, natural disasters, their impacts on civilians, on infrastructure, on supply chains.  We see this working in real time.

And this group increasingly plays a key coordination role for the security of major events like World Expos – or the Paris Olympics, where OSAC ran a joint operations hub.

Earlier this week, the State Department signed a series of MOUs with Elevance Health, and the Security Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society – through which, OSAC has transitioned from a federal advisory committee to a public-private partnership.  And here again, what I’ve seen over many years in government, but especially now, is the power of these public-private partnerships.  I think this is at the heart of everything we need to be doing to make sure that government and the private sector are working effectively together.

So this model is going to empower OSAC to respond even more quickly to unfolding crises or newfound threats.  It will allow members to contribute greater financial support to OSAC.  It’ll enable the State Department to solicit the expertise of all OSAC partners – as opposed to the narrower group of members we could engage under the original framework.

At its core, OSAC’s mission is to make it safer for Americans to advance our shared interests around the world.  Because a world where our fellow citizens can safely travel, safely work, safely trade, safely study, safely live is a better world – a better world for our people, a better world for our workers, for our enterprises, and I would argue a better world for people everywhere.

So I’m really, really pleased to be here today to help kick this off.  Because I think we’ve taken an important step this week to further strengthen our ability to deliver on that crucial and enduring mission – a mission that I think is getting even more essential.

We’re not going back on the fact that we’re operating in an interconnected, global world.  That’s not going to change.  And we just have to make sure that working together we can operate in the most safe, the most secure way possible.  And thanks to OSAC, we’re able to do that.

So to each and every one of you, thank you, thank you, thank you for your partnership and have a great day.  Thank you.  (Applause.)