By A. J. Caschetta
Sunday, January 19, 2025
In the last days of the Biden presidency, with the
media focused on Senate hearings for Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet, now is
a good time to recall just how historically inept Joe Biden’s cabinet members
have been. Secretary of the Treasury Janet “the inflation is only transitory” Yellen, Secretary of
Homeland Security Alejandro “the border
is secure” Mayorkas, Secretary of Transportation Pete “what me worry?” Buttigieg, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd “missing in action” Austin are among the standouts in a
crowded field. A piece in National Review named Miguel Cardona “the worst secretary in the 45-year
history of the U.S. Department of Education.” Cardona is so “unburdened by what
has been” that he once quoted Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “I’m from the
government, and I’m here to help,” as an affirmation of big-government
efficiency, unaware that Reagan called these “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.”
But surely the worst of Biden’s picks was Antony Blinken
as secretary of state. His feckless foreign policy initiatives have diminished
respect for, and fear of, the U.S. throughout the world. His peace-processing
has brought no peace, and his diplomacy has led nowhere. Blinken’s lone
achievement came in 2023 when he launched something called the Global Music
Diplomacy Initiative, creating yet another opportunity for him to play guitar
and sing in public. This “guitar diplomacy,” as the media term it, is not
always appreciated, though. When he showed up at a bar in Ukraine last May and
played Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” many found both the musical
and diplomatic performances tone-deaf. As New York magazine put it, “Antony Blinken Sucks at the Guitar and Should Stop
Playing.” He’s bad at diplomacy too, and, fortunately, he’ll soon stop doing
that.
Blinken’s Life in Government
Like his boss, “the Big Guy,” Antony Blinken has been in
government practically his entire career, beginning during the Clinton
administration, when he held various positions at the State Department and the
National Security Council from 1994 to 2001. During the Bush administration, he
was staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to
2008. During the Obama administration he was national security adviser to Vice
President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2013, then deputy national security adviser
from 2013 to 2015, and finally deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017.
When Joe Biden announced Blinken as his nominee for secretary of state,
left-wing sites such as The Conversation breathlessly praised Blinken’s “lifetime of experience” without
assessing what he has actually achieved (aside from a purported net worth of
$10 million) during all those years of “public service.”
His brief period out of government began during the Trump
administration, when, from 2017 to 2019, he was the managing director of the
Penn Biden Center — the very site where classified documents were discovered in 2022. During
Blinken’s years helming the Biden Center, contributions from China tripled from
$24 million to $77 million. Given the Bidens’ propensity for enriching
themselves through the generosity of the Chinese Communist Party, it’s fair to
wonder if that’s where some of Blinken’s $10 million net worth came from.
In 2020, Blinken was the foreign policy adviser for the
Biden campaign when he solicited the letter that characterized Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”
as “Russian disinformation” and enlisted 51 “former” spies (at least one, and likely more, was active) to sign it.
Blinken has been at Biden’s side for many years. He
helped Senator Biden formulate the harebrained scheme to divide Iraq into three
separate countries, and he worked on Biden’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.
He also helped Barack Obama devise and negotiate the ill-fated Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal). These are hardly
achievements to brag about.
Blinken’s Follies
Former defense secretary Robert Gates once said that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major
foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Perhaps
that same disposition in Blinken drew him to Biden. It’s hard to find anything
Antony Blinken has been right about, or any useful advice he has dispensed,
during his four years as secretary of state.
He repeatedly blamed Russia for putting “bounties on American troops” in Afghanistan, but he ignored
or downplayed Iran’s actual killing of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, lest
it interfere with his courtship of the ayatollah and mullahs of Iran in another
foolish attempt to revive a “nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic. In fact,
he claimed that when Trump killed Qasem Soleimani, the
architect of many U.S. deaths, “it left us less safe.”
Blinken has lectured Xi Jinping that it is not in China’s interest to
support Russia’s war against Ukraine, as though that would do any good. He also
lectured Israel that “Hamas cannot be eliminated” and has
advised Israel on how to “de-escalate” the war with Hamas — bad advice all
around.
Blinken’s Final Policy Article
Rather than leave public life quietly, the ultra-partisan
Blinken bizarrely decided to cap off his diplomatic career with a 25-page
article in the November/December issue of the formerly respectable Foreign
Affairs, boasting about the job he did during the last four years. But his
achievements are purely process achievements — no product. He is a master at
the process of talking, conferring, negotiating, meeting other diplomats, and
making himself look busy. Actually getting something done is another matter
entirely. Nevertheless, he announces haughtily, “As secretary of state, I don’t
do politics; I do policy.”
It’s fitting that the Iran-coddling, Israel-criticizing, Qatar-loving
Blinken ends his bumbling tenure on a note of tone-deaf triumphalism and
ignorant bravado, singing his own praises. In a series of exaggerations,
distortions, and outright lies, his swan song glosses over the calamitous
foreign policy decisions of the Biden administration. As secretary of state,
these failures are on him.
There are some gratuitous distortions, such as his claim
that “inflation has fallen to some of the lowest levels,” that have nothing to
do with foreign policy, but most of the outrageous claims have to do with his
contention that the Biden administration rescued America from the bad foreign
policy decisions of the Trump administration.
This makes for some real howlers, such as: “The Biden
administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger
geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. . . . It has also
earned the United States greater trust among its friends — and, along with it,
stronger partnerships.” This is delusional. Which nations today respect, much
less fear, the U.S. more today than they did during the Trump administration?
One wonders what nations he refers to in the claim that
“in the Biden administration’s first year, we made significant progress on
deepening alignment with allies and partners.” Only if he means Qatar or Turkey
can this claim hold any merit, though a better case can be made that neither
country is an ally or partner. Qatar hosts Hamas and pushes Islamism throughout
the world, especially in American academia. Turkey is a rogue nation, ruled by
a thug who enjoys NATO protection. A real diplomatic feat would have been to
remove U.S. Central Command from Qatar and expel Turkey from NATO.
What about Afghanistan?
Blinken, of course, fails to shed any light on his
biggest disasters. There is but a single acknowledgment of the withdrawal from
Afghanistan, coming in a paragraph on Russia in which Blinken claims that the
administration “learned hard lessons during the necessary but difficult U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan, lessons about everything from contingency planning
to allied coordination, and we applied them.” What lessons?
Testifying before Congress on December 11, Blinken
defended his decision to keep the U.S. embassy in Kabul open, claiming that he did it “very simply, because no one
anticipated that the government and Afghan forces would collapse as quickly as
they did.” Nonsense. Anyone who didn’t anticipate the rapid fall of the Afghan
government has no place in the U.S. government, especially the State
Department.
Russia and China Too?
Amazingly, Blinken also boasts a great deal about the
Biden administration’s disastrous diplomatic failures with Russia, failing to
acknowledge, of course, that it was his boss’s daft statements (“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion . . .”) that
likely convinced Putin that his aggression would be met with half measures and
empty phrases.
Blinken also claims that great progress was made
convincing “U.S. allies in Europe and Asia” to see China more “as a systemic
rival” than “an economic partner.” His lofty language (“We infused U.S.
alliances with a new purpose,” “We knit together U.S. allies and partners in
new ways,” “Our statecraft capitalized on . . . strength to turn crisis into
opportunity”) struggles against reality to convince readers of the
Biden-Blinken success story. It’s astounding that he wants credit for
convincing the nations most imperiled by an ascendant and aggressive China to
meet and discuss China. This is hardly an accomplishment, more like demanding
points for putting his name on the exam.
Even Israel?
Blinken’s Foreign Affairs curtain bow has one
single dispassionate mention of the hostages being held in Gaza but not a hint
of righteous anger over their abduction. Nor is there any indication that he is
as dedicated to the release of those hostages as he is to forcing an Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza.
Instead, Blinken has the audacity to boast that, during
his leadership of the State Department, progress was made on “greater
integration and normalization” in the Middle East, “including between Israel
and Saudia Arabia.” This too is absurd. Amateur diplomat Jared Kushner
accomplished far more during his brief stint during the Trump administration
than professional peace-processer Antony Blinken has accomplished in his entire
career.
Under Antony Blinken’s leadership, the State Department
began in 2021 pursuing the creation of a Palestinian state and has continued
undeterred for four full years. Blinken recently insisted that the only path to normalization between Saudi
Arabia and Israel is through the creation of a Palestinian state. Time will
tell if he is as wrong as Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, was
when he said in 2016 that without a comprehensive peace deal
between Israel and the Palestinians, “There will be no separate peace between
Israel and the Arab world.” Kushner’s Abraham Accords, of course, would prove
John Kerry wrong.
In his last major speech as secretary of defense, on Wednesday, Blinken
blamed Israel for having “systematically undermined the capacity and legitimacy
of the only viable alternative to Hamas: the Palestinian Authority.”
So invested in the creation of a Palestinian state with a
“revitalized” Palestinian Authority is Blinken’s State Department that its
final Country Reports on Terrorism states that “PA President
Abbas maintained a public position against incitement of violence and terrorism
and frequently reiterated his commitment to non-violence, a two-state solution,
and other PLO commitments. This continued after October 7, although he did not
explicitly condemn the October 7 attack after it happened.”
This impressive display of rhetorical gymnastics avoids
stating the obvious facts. Abbas first denied
that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. His party not only praised the attack but participated in it. When Yahya
Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was killed, Abbas’s party mourned him as a martyr. The State Department’s claim that
he did not “explicitly condemn” it suggests that he implicitly condemned it.
Only a diplomat could wield euphemisms and evasions like that with a straight
face.
A touch of that Bureau of Counterterrorism
euphemism-speak could serve nicely to describe Blinken’s tenure as secretary of
state: He did not entirely destroy America’s reputation. He did not explicitly
surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban. He did not completely hang Israel out to
dry.
The cease-fire agreement announced on Thursday by Hamas’s
ally, the prime minister of Qatar, is scheduled to go into effect today.
Blinken called the deal “a moment of historic possibility for the
region and well beyond.” A deal may very well be signed, but the chances of the
Palestinians living up to it seem slim. On the day the cease-fire was
announced, one of Hamas’s remaining “senior officials,” Khalil al-Hayya, vowed to continue “our jihad and our resistance.” After the
deal was announced, children in Gaza gathered
to threaten more massacres, and one Palestinian mother promised
that “every year there will be another October 7th.”
Assuming the first day of the first phase of the
cease-fire goes smoothly today, and all phases are subsequently enacted, Israel
will eventually release thousands of Palestinian terrorists from prison (again)
and withdraw from Gaza (again). Hamas will survive to fight another day, and
Netanyahu’s goal of total victory will remain a pipe dream. Perhaps that will
be Blinken’s ultimate legacy.
What next for Antony Blinken? Maybe he will resurrect his
old band (named “ABlinken” — get it?) and impose more bad music on the world. A
more likely scenario is a cushy teaching gig (where, like Anthony Fauci, he will do no actual teaching), perhaps at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign
Service. There he can patiently await the next Democrat elected president and
hope for another opportunity to resume doing what he does best — strengthening
our enemies and making America weak again.
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