Pisar’s life story is remarkable on many levels. He was one of the youngest survivors of Adolf Hitler’s death camps, whisked to freedom by U.S. troops; he went from European black marketeer to receiving doctorates in law from Harvard and the Sorbonne; he advised French and American presidents and was granted U.S. citizenship through a special act of Congress; he served as a lawyer for Hollywood stars, corporate bigwigs, UNESCO and the International Olympic Committee; he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; he wrote new text for Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 (“Kaddish”) that shared his story through a conversation with God; and to his final days he worked to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

Pisar, who died in 2015, also left a lasting imprint on the man tapped to be America’s next secretary of State: his stepson, Antony Blinken. A suave, self-assured diplomat, Blinken has often spoken of how Pisar’s Holocaust survival story instilled in him the importance of maintaining America’s status as a beacon of freedom on a planet where too many remain in shackles.

Less discussed, though just as relevant now as Blinken prepares to tangle with adversaries like China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, are Pisar’s views on ways to improve relations between rival powers—views that have to some degree influenced his stepson. The main gist of Pisar’s idea—that ramping up connections, especially economic ones, will reduce tensions between adversaries—helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the Nixon policy of detente, and it has drawn plenty of acolytes as well as critics over the years. In the 1980s, elements of Pisar’s theory got a boost as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to open up the Soviet system—exposing its citizens to ideas and goods from the West—helped lead to the fall of the communist bloc.

Today, his argument may seem like an obvious one, but as Pisar began laying it out in the 1950s, a decade dominated by the Korean War, confrontation with the Soviets and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communists inside the U.S. government, it was nothing short of groundbreaking.

While Pisar cast his theories primarily in the context of Western relations with the Soviet Union, he believed they also were relevant in other cases, including Western relations with China. But, perhaps more than any other example, China is now testing the hopes of people who, like Pisar, believe that commerce can help lead to peace. Despite years of increased trade, cultural and other ties between the United States, Europe and Beijing, tensions have spiked as the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more authoritarian and oppressive. The U.S.-China relationship has further soured under President Donald Trump, who pursued a tariff-driven trade war with Beijing while alienating U.S. allies.

Now, Democrats all the way up to President-elect Joe Biden are signaling doubts about whether China will ever be anything but a foe to be confronted. Should Blinken be confirmed by the Senate, his handling of China could define his tenure at Foggy Bottom. It also could help further shape his stepfather’s geopolitical legacy, one that made Pisar especially proud because of his ardent desire to spare others the horrors he experienced as a child.

When asked in 2005 about the validity of his thesis when it comes to China, particularly considering the ruling communists’ human rights abuses, Pisar held firm in his conviction that engaging, not isolating, an adversary is the better path. “If a totalitarian system, as Eastern Europe and Russia used to be, wants to integrate itself into the global economy and benefit from it, they have to soften up on their own people,” Pisar said in a radio interview. “You cannot have a closed grim fortress and develop economically, and I think that they [the Chinese] will go sooner or later in the same direction.”

***

If anyone could have taken his life in a vastly different direction—embracing distrust, vengeance, isolationism or even idealistic but impractical fury at a world full of oppressors—it would have been Samuel Pisar.

He was 10 years old when the Germans and Soviets invaded his native Poland in 1939. In the ensuing years, he and his family lived under Soviet occupation, then were temporarily shunted to a ghetto by the Nazis. As the conflict metastasized, Pisar’s father was tortured and executed, while his mother and younger sister perished in Hitler’s concentration camps. Before Pisar was taken away to the camps, his mother decided he should wear long pants, because it would help him look older. That, she may have reasoned, might mean he’d be used for labor instead of being quickly killed. Pisar survived roughly four years in labor and death camps—including Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau — often through sheer instinct. In one instance, after being chosen for a group marked for the gas chamber, the boy grabbed a nearby pail and brush and began scrubbing the floor as if that was why he was there. The ruse worked. He lived.

Pisar later escaped while on a death march, making a run for it when a squadron of fighter planes strafed the prisoners, apparently mistaking them for enemy soldiers. While in hiding, he came across a tank leading an armored convoy. Instead of the swastika, he saw a five-pointed white star and realized it was the Americans. “My skull seemed to burst,” he later wrote. “With a wild roar I stormed outside and darted toward the wondrous vision. I was still running, waving my arms, when suddenly the hatch of an armored vehicle opened, and a black face, shielded by helmet and goggles, emerged, swearing at me unintelligibly. … To signal that I was a friend, and in need of help, I fell at his feet, summoned the few English words my mother used to sigh while dreaming of our deliverance, and yelled: ‘God Bless America!’ With an unmistakable gesture, the tall American motioned me to get up, and lifted me through the hatch—into the womb of freedom.”

Pisar, then 16, and two close friends from the camps who escaped with him—Ben and Niko—soon found themselves working as black marketeers in the American occupation zone of Germany, trafficking in such goods as cigarettes and coffee. “If I had stayed in Europe, I might have become a terrorist or a gangster,” he later said. But he did not stay there; relatives found him and eventually convinced him to move to Paris, then Australia, where he became an academic star. He would receive degrees from the University of Melbourne, Harvard and the Sorbonne, preludes to an illustrious career in law that saw him advise people ranging from actress Catherine Deneuve to business tycoon Armand Hammer.

He married twice. The second marriage was with Antony Blinken’s mother, Judith, whom Pisar met in New York in the late 1960s. Judith was married at the time to Donald Blinken, a prominent investment banker and arts promoter, but the two divorced and Judith moved with her son to Paris to begin a new life with Pisar in the early 1970s. Judith and Pisar later had a daughter, Leah. Pisaralso had two daughters, Alexandra and Helaina, with his first wife, Norma; the pair divorced at the end of 1970.

Judith—a leading promoter of arts, music and French-American ties—pressed Pisar to write about his life experiences, the result of which was his 1979 autobiography, Of Blood and Hope.

***

The Pisars’ spacious home in the swanky 16th arrondissement of Paris was filled with music, art and lively, substantive conversations, people who knew the family say.

Even at a young age—he was 9 years old when arriving in the French capital—Antony found himself discussing geopolitics with his stepfather, the family’s many prominent acquaintances and classmates at the elite school he attended. As a youth, Blinken was seen as exceptionally thoughtful, and there were early signs he possessed diplomatic chops. His stepmother, Vera, who married Donald Blinken in 1975, noted that Antony “gave me the best possible wedding present when he told me how grateful he was to me for making his father so happy.”

His stepfather certainly admired him. “He thought the world of Tony,” said John Huhs, a former law partner of Pisar’s. “The first time I met Tony, he gave him such a build up, like he walked on water.”

The two talked about Pisar’s survival story, and the impact on young Antony was profound, people who know Blinken say. Years later, when he served as a top national security official under President Barack Obama, Blinken pushed for more U.S. involvement in Syria, where dictator Bashar Assad was using chemical weapons to stamp out a rebellion. “When he has to worry today about poison gas in Syria, he almost inevitably thinks about the gas with which my entire family was eliminated,” Pisar told the Washington Post for a 2013 Blinken profile. In 2017, Blinken praised Trump’s launch of a missile strike on Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, a show of force Obama ultimately had decided to avoid.

Blinken’s friends and colleagues stress that it would be wrong to cast Pisar as the sole or even primary influence in his life. His mother showed him the importance of building societal bridges through arts and culture; he’s called his father, Donald, who in the 1990s was a U.S. ambassador to Hungary, his “role model” and “hero.” He also invokes his stepmother Vera’s story of fleeing communist Hungary and helping later generations of refugees.

But Pisar’s life story, perhaps more than anything, helped infuse in Blinken a belief in the value of American power—including its military power.

“Looking at his stepfather’s life, saved by the United States, attributing that salvation to the United States and, frankly, U.S. military intervention, has reinforced Tony’s belief that the United States and U.S. power can do big, important and moral things in the world,” said Philip Gordon, a former Obama administration colleague of Blinken’s who knew Pisar. Gordon added, however, that Blinken “fully understands the risks of U.S. power and the limits of U.S. power. He’s a thoughtful, balanced guy.”

***

For many years, Pisar tried to avoid conversations about what had led to “B-1713” being tattooed on his arm. He did not want his past to define him such that people treated him as a symbol more than a person or friend. He found himself saying “Forget it! It’s over,” to the horror-struck reaction of a fellow Harvard student, from West Germany, when he rolled up his shirt sleeves for a game of Ping Pong. An anthropologist he conversed with “seemed fascinated by my early life, as if I were some exotic, nearly extinct animal,” he wrote in Of Blood and Hope.

Still, there’s no question the experience deeply affected his view of the world, and as the post-World War II tensions between East and West rose alongside the threat of nuclear annihilation, Pisar sought to shape the debate.

In his dissertation for his doctorate at Harvard, he focused on the legal aspects of trade between communist and capitalist countries. It was a relatively unexplored field, and given the political climate it “seemed devoid of any practical application for the foreseeable future,” Pisar wrote. His thesis won a major 1956 Harvard prize; the work also was published in the Harvard Law Review. In the coming years, Pisar’s expertise on the topic drew the attention of U.S. politicians and policymakers, including John F. Kennedy, whom Pisar had met when Kennedy was a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard. In discussions with lawmakers, he proposed a “charter of ground rules for expanded East-West trade.” Pisar, a young man on the rise, would go on to serve in various advisory roles for Kennedy, U.S. lawmakers and U.S. government bodies.

Kennedy’s presidency felt like a breath of fresh air, and Washington was awash in new ideas. “It was a little unreal, but it made me feel very good to be alive,” Pisar wrote. His push for more connections with communist countries “must have appeared rather heretical in the political context of that time,” he wrote, but Pisar believed that the Soviet communist system was vulnerable economically and ideologically, despite its bellicosity. He also saw little chance that either side—free enterprise or state enterprise—would voluntarily give up its institutions or ideologies. Pisar was driven nonetheless by a fervent desire to prevent an atomic holocaust, and for that he saw no other option but to push the two sides to engage and get along. He felt his background gave him a special window into Soviet thinking, having temporarily lived under its occupation in Poland. At the same time, he felt he owed an emotional debt to the Soviets. “The Americans liberated me,” he wrote, “but if it had not been for the Russian effort that hastened Germany’s defeat, I would not have survived long enough to be liberated by the Americans.”

It seemed “absurd” and “dangerous” to Pisar for the United States to try to exclude Russia, Eastern Europe and China from the increasingly globalized economy. Rather, Pisar proposed drawing “the East into a web of agreements that would create an irreversible commitment to peace; and to accept the bet that human freedom would progressively benefit from this process.” Pisar expounded on his ideas in a widely read 1961 U.S. government report titled “A New Look at Trade Policy Toward the Communist Bloc—The Elements of a Common Strategy for the West.” In such policy writings, always cautiously worded, he suggested that Washington limit the list of goods it refused to sell to the Soviets and allow in some Soviet goods, such as Kamchatka crabmeat, that had earlier been barred on grounds such as suspicion that slave labor was involved. The goal, in part, was to encourage post-Stalinist reforms, Pisar wrote in his autobiography.

Pisar’s ideas were indeed heretical to many Cold Warriors; some on the American political right attacked him. A general he liked and respected told him, “You can’t coexist with the Russians and the Chinese. You can only fight them with their own methods,” Pisar wrote. As the 1960s went on, he left Washington for Paris to launch an international law firm whose clientele included Hollywood royalty and international corporations. He helped advise on some significant business deals, such as the building of Pan American Airways InterContinental hotels in Eastern Europe. On the whole, however, East-West trade did not develop to the extent he’d hoped. He understood the hesitation on both sides—especially Western concerns that engaging with the Soviets could strengthen a regime that was ghastly toward its citizens. He wrote, however, “I could not overcome my belief that to run the risk of permanent nuclear confrontation would be a policy of madness and would accomplish nothing in the field of human rights.”

So he went about pulling his ideas together into Coexistence & Commerce: Guidelines for Transactions between East and West, which was published in 1970. To his gratification, the book was well-timed and well-received across the political spectrum; even Soviet officialdom seemed more receptive than a decade earlier. It sparked international debate, and he was told that the National Security Council prepared a special report on his ideas for President Richard Nixon. (Pisar had encountered Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, while at Harvard.)

The tome, which runs to more than 500 pages, is not exactly beach reading. An often technical survey of the state of East-West trade and its possibilities (“Communist Recognition of Western Copyrights” is a typical section heading), it is as much a practical handbook as it is a treatise. Under a chapter on U.S. views on commerce with the East, Pisar has a section titled “The Emotional Issue.” He notes in various parts of the book that Americans appear less inclined to pursue the possibility of trade with the East than even their allies in Western Europe. The highly politicized U.S. debate made it harder for businesses to pursue what they felt were worthy commercial transactions with the Soviet bloc, Pisar argues. The debate described in the book has echoes today as the United States uses sanctions to try to kill a gas pipeline project between Germany and the post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Coexistence & Commerce was “groundbreaking” work for its time, said Anthony Gardner, a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union and decades-old friend of Blinken’s who often sought advice from Pisar. “This was a bold piece of work, and he was completely open-eyed, clearly, about the Soviet Union,” Gardner said. “This was not a work to turn a blind eye to that regime, but saying that we could deal with the Soviet Union and influence them through commerce, particularly, and also through raising issues of human rights and also through other means of soft power.” The soft power idea, in particular, likely affected Blinken, who has spoken often of the influence America has on the world simply through its example, Gardner said.

Pisar’s promotion of East-West ties troubled one of his closest friends, Ben, who had survived the death camps alongside him and who, years later, asked him, “What are the limits?”

“In Germany, for example, when you were advising those bankers in Frankfurt, all the hands you shook. … How do you know that some of them were not former Nazis, or even SS guards from the camps …?” Ben asked, according to Pisar’s autobiography. When Pisar responded by asking if they always had to live in the past, his friend shot back: “We may not have to live in the past, but the past lives in us.”

The late 1960s to late 1970s were a period of “détente” between the United States and its enemies. In May 1972, Nixon took a historic trip to Moscow for meetings with Soviet leaders that included productive discussions on topics ranging from the environment to arms control. A few months earlier, Nixon had made a historic visit to China, opening a new chapter in that relationship as well. Washington hardliners fought the détente policy and considered their skepticism vindicated after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter a year later in part by promising to be tougher on the Soviet Union, which he came to dub the “evil empire.”

Pisar remained undeterred. Whether at international conferences, dinners with diplomats, sessions with business leaders or on widely read op-ed pages, he tried to strike a balance between championing greater economic ties and the realities of political attitudes across the oceans. In one episode, annoyed by anti-Semitic undertones of Soviet officials at a conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Pisar delivered an impromptu speech that led the Soviet and American dignitaries to visit nearby Babi Yar, the site of the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews. He once found himself pointing out to Western businessmen that while selling photocopy technology to the Soviets would make it easier for them to spread their propaganda, it also would ease the spread of dissident literature—samizdat. He was frustrated by the fallout from a 1974 U.S. law that tied the trade issue to demands that the Soviet Union make it easier for Jews to emigrate from its soil. Pisar, of course, sympathized with Soviet Jews who wished to move to Israel or elsewhere. He argued, however, that the noise surrounding the statute, known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, actually undermined what had been steady progress on the emigration issue. It also imperiled other aspects of Soviet-U.S. ties by angering the Soviet leadership, Pisar wrote in a 1977 op-ed. In part due to the amendment, the Soviets walked away from a much-ballyhooed 1972 agreement they had signed with America to expand anemic levels of trade.

In that same column, titled “Let’s Put Détente Back on the Rails,” Pisar chided Carter, saying that the president’s decision to make human rights “the centerpiece of his foreign policy” was actually counterproductive when it came to the Soviet Union. “Personally, I believe that to link the normalization of relations to fundamental changes in the Soviets’ internal system, and to do so openly and aggressively, is to undermine the remnants of détente—and, at the same time, to bury the prospect of expanded human rights in the Soviet Union,” Pisar wrote. “The only challenge that promises to liberalize that regime is a commitment to engage its less fanatical elements in a constructive dialogue of cooperation, with expanded commercial, technological and scientific intercourse as the central theme.”

Huhs, the former Pisar law partner, credited this “rational” streak in Pisar to “his laser-like focus on survival dating from his days in the camps” and his keen awareness of the need to balance competing priorities. Gardner, meanwhile, said Pisar had no illusions about what dramatic change can come to a closed system like the Soviet Union, or at least not about how quickly that change could come.

“He was a realist,” Gardner said. “He didn’t believe in regime change in the sense that people talk about it today, because it’s just not going to happen. Other countries, as it’s obvious, have many different trajectories and some of those trajectories are long and not linear.”

The end of the Soviet Union, in late 1991, came sooner than Pisar likely imagined it would, and just a few years after he stood up for the Soviet Jews in that country’s courtrooms. The reasons for its collapse are still hotly debated. Reagan’s acolytes argue that the 1980s defense buildup, along with his forceful articulation of American values, brought the Soviets to ruin; economists say the communist system’s inefficiencies made that outcome a foregone conclusion. But greater exposure of Soviet citizens to outside goods and information as Gorbachev sought to reform the system through the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) undoubtedly played a role. It’s difficult to measure the influence of a single voice like Pisar’s, and the reality is that Soviet-U.S. trade never reached levels beyond paltry. But Pisar noted that it took clear-eyed leaders on both sides to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. He was keenly aware, too, that the world faced a slew of other problems, including religious radicalization.

“Confrontation has always been very dangerous, but there were cool heads in Moscow and Washington,” Pisar said in an interview published by a Russian media outlet in 2010. “Today in some regions of the world there are incandescent minds. This heat and the weapons that have spread around the world carry the potential for worldwide catastrophe.”

***

If the fall of the Soviet Union at least partly validated Pisar’s belief in the power of engagement to defeat tyranny, the rise of China has challenged that idea.

In the early 2000s, Pisar visited China, where he was treated with exceptional deference. Chinese representatives said they were aware of the impact of his work on East-West ties, especially on the Nixon administration. The Chinese also told him, according to Pisar’s recollection, that “Coexistence & Commerce is more relevant to us today than when you wrote the book 32 years ago.” (Pisar acknowledged, with humor, that it didn’t hurt that he was the general counsel of the International Olympic Committee and Beijing was counting on hosting the Games in 2008.)

Pisar had big hopes for China, as did others across the political spectrum. Many took it as a given that integrating China into the global economic system would over time lead to political liberalization. Pisar did not predict smooth sailing on that front—he warned of “sporadic spasms” of resistance to change—but he encouraged the winds.

“The Chinese approach is much smarter than that of the Soviets,” he wrote in a 2002 column for Le Monde. “Mikhail Gorbachev began his reforms with the policy of perestroika and glasnost, thus causing the instantaneous implosion of the order in place. The Chinese, they first play the card of economy and commerce. Politically, they hold the country firmly and work to avoid uncontrollable excess. Ultimately, the marginalization of the Chinese communist system also seems inevitable to me.”

Nearly two decades later, Pisar’s optimism about China is being sorely tested. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, not only has the Chinese Communist Party become more oppressive internally and more aggressive on the world stage, it’s also engaging in what Biden calls a “genocide” against its Uighur Muslim population. Blinken agrees with Biden’s assessment that a genocide is underway.

How much did Pisar’s advocacy for engagement with adversaries influence his stepson? During his undergraduate years, Blinken wrote pieces for the Harvard Crimson that indicated he agreed with Pisar’s sentiment that increasing contacts was critical to averting nuclear catastrophe between the Soviet Union and the United States, using his stepfather’s catchphrase to make the point. “Even if we view the USSR as, to quote President Reagan, ‘the world’s most evil force,’ a policy of coexistence and commerce can still be productive,” Blinken wrote in March 1983. “At worst, détente will maintain the status quo and keep tensions to an acceptable level. At best, it might even produce some changes in Soviet foreign and domestic policy.”

But that was four decades ago, and the question of China is quite different than the challenge posed by the Soviets. For one thing, Washington and Beijing are not edging toward an existential nuclear standoff. Plus, not only have China’s leaders learned from the mistakes of the Soviets, they’ve managed to adapt their nominally communist system to the realities of global trade. The United States and China have a massive trade relationship that far outstrips what America had with the Soviet Union. And, according to some projections, China will by 2028 overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy, even as the Communist Party is now tightening its grip on Chinese society.

Blinken has dismissed as “unrealistic” the idea that America should fully decouple economically from China. But he’s also not calling for an expansion of economic contacts; instead, he supports a more discerning approach toward overall U.S. engagement with Beijing. For instance, he thinks it’s crucial that the United States doesn’t become reliant on China for critical medical supplies, a lesson driven home by the coronavirus pandemic. He’s also noted that Washington must work with Beijing on transnational problems such as climate change. Blinken further argues that the United States must ramp up cooperation with allies to persuade and pressure Beijing on a range of topics. And he’s stressed the need to invest more on the domestic front, including in U.S. workers and democratic institutions, so that America can better compete with China on the global stage.

While it’s tough to know exactly what Pisar would say about China today, his past exhortations suggest he would oppose moves that increase the odds of a military clash. He’d also likely argue against a full decoupling and, like his stepson, favor cooperating when possible while competing when necessary.

In a 1988 column, amid concerns in the United States about the growing economic prowess of Asian countries such as Japan, Pisar wrote that the best way Western countries could rise to the challenge was by strengthening themselves at home—an argument that could be ripped from Biden’s talking points today.

“Learning to run faster than the competition is the only meaningful protection in the accelerating economic race,” Pisar wrote. “Rather than drugging ourselves with tariffs and quotas, we must reactivate our atrophied muscles, quicken our dull reflexes and, above all, raise the intellectual standards of our youth.”