Blinken's sad attempt to whitewash Biden's record

The Honorable Antony J. Blinken’s recent essay in Foreign Affairs contains a wonderful joke that almost makes up for the rest of the piece: “As Secretary of State, I don’t do politics; I do policy.” This would be a good joke at any time and under any administration. It is hilarious in an essay devoted to defending the record of a U.S. administration one month before a presidential election.

Given the date and real purpose of the essay, it might be considered pointless to spend much time analyzing it. However, the joke is followed by a statement that goes to the very heart of the failure of U.S. strategy (under both Democratic and Republican administrations) since the end of the Cold War:

“And policy is about choices. From day one, President Biden and Vice President Harris made a foundational choice that in a more competitive and combustible world, the United States cannot go it alone.”

This is of course a dig at the Trump administration’s “America First” rhetoric; and as far as the rhetoric is concerned, it is to a degree warranted, since some of that rhetoric caused considerable anxiety among U.S. allies. In practice, however, the Trump administration did not really seek to “go it alone.” It created the “Abraham Accords” between Israel and various Arab countries, on which Blinken and the Biden administration have — misguidedly — based most of their own Middle East policy. In Asia, the Trump administration devoted considerable effort to trying to tie India and other countries into a system of U.S. security partnerships. In Europe, it adopted bullying language to try to get European NATO members to increase their spending on defense — and the Biden administration pursued the same policy, though more diplomatically.

Above all, a decision to foster U.S. alliances and partnerships, while it can be called a fundamental strategic, or perhaps philosophical, approach, cannot really be called a “choice.” In foreign policy, to make a choice means choosing between alternative and rival policies. Very often, this means identifying not the best alternative, but the least bad one. As the great international relations thinker Hans Morgenthau wrote, "To act successfully, that is according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nonetheless is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment.”

In the case of U.S. administrations, and the elites that advise them, moral and political courage is a particular requirement because choosing between different foreign policy goals inevitably means infuriating one or more powerful domestic lobbies.

The failure of the Biden administration — and all the U.S. establishments of the past 30 years — to pass this test means that the U.S. has found itself committed to a whole set of mutually contradictory goals: To maintain peaceful relations with Russia and destroy Russian influence among its immediate neighbors; to support complete Ukrainian victory and to avoid the risk of nuclear war with Russia; to combat ISIS and al-Qaida Sunni Islamist extremism and to overthrow the Libyan and Syrian states with the help of those same extremists; to advocate (however feebly) a two state solution for Palestine and give unconditional support to Israel; to base America’s moral claim to global primacy on the defense of democracy and human rights, and to support Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians; to address climate change as an existential threat and to pursue policies that require spending sums on the military vastly greater than those devoted to alternative energy or climate mitigation; to cooperate with China on climate change and to cripple China’s economic growth.

Above all, this inability to choose has made the U.S. unable to follow the oldest of all Realist principles: Divide et impera; “Divide and rule.” The greater part of Blinken’s essay is devoted to the need to combat the threat from a combination of what he calls “revisionist powers” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — and the Biden administration’s supposed success in this regard. Blinken himself acknowledges that,

“China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have complicated histories and divergent interests, and their partnerships with one another do not come close to the United States’ long-standing alliance architecture. Underneath their grand claims of friendship and support, these countries’ relationships are largely transactional, and their cooperation entails tradeoffs and risks that each may find more distasteful over time.”

This does not however lead Blinken to ask the obvious question: Why then have these countries drawn together against the U.S., when 20 years ago there were no signs of this? Is this not above all because U.S. administrations have insisted on threatening all of them simultaneously, instead of seeking compromise with at least one of these countries to prevent it working with the others against the U.S.?

And this total failure of basic common sense is not just the fault of the Biden administration: it has characterized the greater part of the U.S. foreign and security establishment for the past generation. Moreover, since U.S. politicians, officials and analysts are incapable of understanding (or when they do understand it, of expressing this in public for fear of damage to their careers), they are more or less forced to adopt the position that the behavior of these states, rather than dictated by rational threat assessment, stems from innate hostility to the U.S. and the existing international system — or even from innate evil.

One more unstated — and possibly unconscious — assumption underlies Blinken’s position and that of most of the U.S. establishment: that the U.S. is so powerful that it does not have to choose between different priorities and can always in the end get its own way. Yet the fear and hysteria that have reentered U.S. thinking in recent years are precisely due to the fact that the U.S. is not in fact nearly as powerful compared to other states as it was a generation ago.

Thus Blinken’s claims of U.S. success in rallying “the international community” against Russia over the war in Ukraine and in orchestrating successful sanctions are only possible because he completely ignores the actual behavior and views of India, South Africa, Brazil and the large majority of countries around the world that have refused to join in sanctions and have called for an early peace — a call that has been repeatedly snubbed by Washington.

It goes without saying that Blinken also completely ignores the wishes of the vast majority of the United Nations when it comes to U.S. support for Israel’s wars in Palestine and Lebanon; wishes that are rooted not only in concern for the international rules and order that the U.S. claims to defend against the “revisionists,” but in wholly pragmatic concerns about the effects of a wider war on international energy prices.

Instead, the Honorable Blinken writes that, “The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza.”

This is worse than a lie. It is an insult to the intelligence of humanity, which no government in the world (except those of U.S. client states) can be expected to listen to with a straight face. Insulting most of humanity hardly seems a good basis for U.S. diplomacy — but then, a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” has long since ceased to play any part in U.S. establishment thinking.