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10:44 12.10.2024 •
Nearly four years into the Biden presidency, declared Blinken in an article entitled “America’s Strategy of Renewal,” “President Biden and Vice President Harris pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.” And he adds: “As secretary of state, I don’t do politics; I do policy.”
Blinken’s enthusiastic embrace of the results, claiming the U.S. to be “in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago,” is less excusable, a desperate attempt to preserve what little remains of his reputation, writes Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
Unfortunately, the world wasn’t looking so good in January 2021 when Blinken took office. By almost every measure the world is a lot worse today.
Led by the United States, NATO is engaged in a proxy war against Russia, a nuclear-armed power, over Ukraine, which matters much more to Moscow than to the West. The conflict was tragically unnecessary, the result of Russian aggression, but only after three decades of Washington’s arrogant determination to treat Moscow like a defeated power and expand the transatlantic alliance up to Russia’s borders. Despite multiple warnings from Moscow, successive administrations challenged its security interests in ways the U.S. would never accept on its border. The Biden administration’s refusal to negotiate over NATO expansion in early 2022 was the final trigger for war.
Cynical American policymakers defend the war as degrading Moscow’s military capabilities for just a few score billion dollars — while ignoring the tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian deaths. Alas, there is no guarantee that the U.S. and its allies won’t be drawn into the struggle, especially if the Putin government decides to strike nations supplying Ukraine with arms or employ nuclear weapons against Kiev’s forces. Moscow also has embraced China, North Korea, and Iran, and such cooperation could grow even closer. Russia once promoted nonproliferation. Now Washington policymakers speculate on Moscow’s willingness to aid North Korean missile and nuclear development, which would put the American homeland at risk.
The Middle East is perhaps even more incendiary. The region’s multiple hostilities, conflicts, and crises, reflecting decades of counterproductive U.S. intervention in the region, are merging. Biden continues a long line of presidents putting foreign governments before the American people. The next iteration of today’s combat could involve full-scale war between Israel and Iran, with neighboring Arab states dragged in.
Worse, the biggest potential conflict of all, between the U.S. and China, looms larger on Biden’s watch. Most importantly, the potential crisis over Taiwan has grown more acute, with the administration doing nothing to calm Chinese concerns over what it believes to be Taipei’s move, with American support, toward independence. With that a likely red line for Beijing to act militarily, Washington should press all sides to stand down. Worse is increasingly treating the People’s Republic of China as an enemy.
Blinken’s policy undermined the very purpose of NATO. President Dwight Eisenhower insisted that the US military presence be temporary, a shield behind which the devastated continent could rebuild. He believed that if U.S. forces remained a decade later the policy would have failed. In contrast, Biden increased American force levels after the Russian invasion and devoted more money to Ukraine than any European nation. He continues those policies, despite growing opposition by Americans more concerned about the many challenges facing the U.S.
Particularly misguided is Blinken’s enthusiasm for “the most consequential shift” not “within regions but across them,” thereby “bringing about unprecedented convergence between Asia and Europe, which increasingly see their security as indivisible.” While the idea of allies promoting US objectives beyond their own areas sounds good in theory, it fails in practice.
First, security is not indivisible. Moscow is many things, but it poses no threat in Asia. Unlike China, Russia has never been at war with India, Vietnam, or Korea, and has no ongoing or prospective conflicts with Japan. The PRC has no territorial or other security issues with European governments.
Second, it is more important for friendly states in Europe and Asia to fulfill their most direct responsibilities. Europeans still fail miserably in creating effective militaries and integrating their forces with those of their neighbors. Japan continues to lag well behind deploying sufficient capabilities to restrain China. What would best aid the U.S. would be European allies taking over responsibility for their continent’s security, and Japan taking the lead in preserving peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Instead, having allies playacting — wasting valuable resources and effort far abroad better deployed close to home — ultimately increases the burden on Americans.
Whatever his intentions, Blinken has been a failure as secretary of state. U.S. policy consists of constant demands and threats, endless sanctions and penalties, and promiscuous intervention and war. In many areas, such as reflexive support for Israel, the administration’s foreign policy hasn’t been much different from Trump’s approach. In other ways Blinken & Co. have done worse.
Overall, Americans are at greater risk today than in January 2021, when Blinken took over in Foggy Bottom. The administration's policies, particularly its counterproductive intervention around the world, have put more distance between today’s reality and the ideal he says he sought to promote, “a world where countries are free to choose their own paths and partners, and… where international law, including the core principles of the UN Charter, is upheld, and universal human rights are respected.”
As Blinken observed, Americans benefit from “a free, open, secure, and prosperous world.” However, Washington’s ability to remake the world, at least at reasonable cost and risk, remains limited. And the interests of the American people should always come first. They are doing the paying and, more importantly, the dying, when it comes to Washington’s grandiose misadventures abroad. Something too often forgotten by Blinken, and so many other members of the foreign policy establishment.
Photo: Reuters
It is said that Henry Kissinger asserted that little can be won at the negotiating table that isn’t earned on the battlefield. In 2021 the Washington administration said it would pursue ‘relentless diplomacy.’ They call it something else today in Ukraine, ‘The Responsible Statecraft’ stresses.
During the Biden administration, the iteration of Kissinger’s doctrine has gone well beyond the generals supporting the diplomats. The diplomats are now outpacing and pushing the generals. In the Biden administration, despite the promise to open “a new era of relentless diplomacy,” the State Department has metamorphosized into the hawkish arm of the Pentagon.
In the debate within the Biden administration over whether permission should be granted for Ukraine to fire Western supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory, it is the diplomats who have pushed for escalation, and the Pentagon and intelligence community who have argued for caution.
Blinken has promised that “from day one… as what Russia is doing has changed, as the battlefield has changed, we’ve adapted… And I can tell you that as we go forward, we will do exactly what we have already done, which is we will adjust, we’ll adapt as necessary, including with regard to the means that are at Ukraine’s disposal to effectively defend against the Russian aggression.”
It is the Pentagon that has counseled restraint. They have argued that the uncertain benefits of longer range strikes do not outweigh the risk of escalation. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has maintained that “long-range strikes into Russia would not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor,” and agrees with the intelligence community that Russia is capable of quickly moving most of its assets out of range.
This is not the first time the debate on escalation has featured unexpected sides. While, soon after Russia started the SMO in Ukraine, the State Department argued that “real diplomacy” does not take place at times of aggression, it was General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who advocated for diplomacy and said that the goal of a sovereign Ukraine with its territory intact would require “a long, very difficult, high casualty-producing war.”
Milley further argued that “You can achieve those objectives through military means… but you can also achieve those objectives maybe possibly, through some sort of diplomatic means.” Once again, it was the top general who advocated for diplomacy while the top diplomat argued for more war.
The State Department has from the start abdicated diplomacy. We know that on December 17, 2021, Putin proposed security guarantees to the United States with a key demand of no NATO expansion to Ukraine. But rather than negotiate, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary Blinken, later revealed that the U.S. at the time did not consider NATO expansion to be on the bargaining table.
At the end of a full term in office, the Blinken State Department does not have a single diplomatic victory to boast about. At the start of his term, Biden promised to "offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy." He promised he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” He promised a different foreign policy than Trump’s "abject failure” in Venezuela. And he promised a new approach to North Korea that "is open to and will explore diplomacy."
The Blinken State Department has delivered on none of these promises and has failed to attain a ceasefire in Gaza or in Ukraine. Instead, it has availed itself of a one tool tool box of coercion, be it sanctions or military force. It has fallen to the Pentagon to suggest diplomacy and to question unrestricted use of force.
Diplomacy has often in the past partnered with military force. But in the Biden administration, the State Department has abdicated diplomacy and reduced itself to the hawkish arm of the Pentagon which has, paradoxically, been the louder voice for diplomacy.
Photo: AP
Antony Blinken’s (photo) recent publication in ‘Foreign Affairs’ is one of the most exceptional pieces of fiction. Its account of the past four years is so detached from reality that it seems to be plucked straight out of a bad direct-to-video Hollywood movie, notes UnHerd.
The plot goes more or less as follows: years of poor leadership have left the US weakened and divided, which emboldens the Bad Guys — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — to team up and launch an unprecedented threat on the “free, open, secure, and prosperous world that the United States and most countries seek”, sowing chaos and violence in the hope of plunging the world into a New Dark Age.
But their evil plans are thwarted when the countries of the Free World, led by the US and its valiant newly-elected president Joe Biden, succeed in putting aside their differences to jointly fight back and re-establish peace and stability in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere. The story ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. The US-led Free World has succeeded for now in foiling the Bad Guys’ plans for world domination — “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago”, our narrator tells us — but they haven’t been defeated yet…
It makes for an entertaining read. But equally, is Blinken really unaware of the fact that the Biden administration’s foreign policy stands out as the most hawkish and reckless since the George W. Bush era? The world is certainly more geopolitically volatile than it was four years ago.
On Ukraine, regardless of whether or not one thinks America made poor decisions which provoked Russia, the Biden administration arguably dashed all opportunities for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. It has instead opted to use Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, in what is rapidly escalating into a direct, potentially nuclear Nato-Russia war. It is also alleged to have been directly involved in, or at least allowed, the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, the worst act of industrial terrorism in recent European history.
In the Middle East, the White House cast away the promised renewal of the nuclear agreement with Iran by setting rigorous conditions that Washington knew Tehran could never accept. Over the past year, it has offered Israel near-unconditional political, economic and military support even in the face of the fierce assault on Gaza, thus contributing directly to the dramatic regional escalation that we are now witnessing. Meanwhile, in the Asia-Pacific, the Biden administration diluted the US’s historic commitments made in the “One China” accord with Beijing regarding Taiwan and pursued an unprecedented military build-up in the region in preparation for all-out war with China, while waging “a full-blown economic war” against the country.
The Biden administration has acted clumsily in what looks like a desperate attempt to stem the decline of US hegemony and slow down, or ideally reverse, the ongoing transition towards a multipolar system. This a rather different story from the plot of Blinken’s movie. That’s not to say that everything he writes is fictional: in some respects it is true that “the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago”.
Although this is not true in global terms — the US is arguably more internationally loathed and isolated than it’s ever been — it is certainly true relative to its Western protectorates in Europe and elsewhere, over which America has reasserted its full control, militarily and economically.
Even Hollywood blockbusters contain a kernel of truth.
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