Master Diplomats Biden and Blinken: A Case Study in Professional Class Screwups
Joe Biden gave a speech at the State Department last week touting what he claims to be his remarkable and historic foreign policy achievements. According to Biden, under his extremely competent watch, the US advanced a successful strategy to “relentlessly defend democracy” at home and abroad. This would seem a tad ironic, given that Biden and the Democrats’ collective political ineptitude contributed mightily to an election outcome that many of them just got done proclaiming would amount to democracy’s final destruction. Although in partial fairness to them, the half-hearted “fascism” talk has basically evaporated, unlike this time in 2017.
Rattling off a list of alleged accomplishments, Biden mumbled about having harnessed the strength of America “to solve problems through diplomacy wherever possible.” Apparently the places where this was deemed “possible” turned out to be rather limited, as Biden’s presidency was marked by a striking abdication of diplomacy — particularly under the leadership of one Antony Blinken, whose tenure as Secretary of State confirms that spending decades as a learned foreign policy “professional” is often the best preparation for screwing up anything diplomatic. And given Biden’s diminishing mental faculties, Blinken must have necessarily assumed outsized power in the administration.
Under Blinken’s tutelage, US relations with China foundered to their lowest point since the opening of relations in the 1970s, often due to flamboyant hectoring over China’s ancillary role in the Ukraine war. I was present at the 2023 Munich Security Conference when Blinken orchestrated a theatrical ambush of Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, using a rare face-to-face meeting to ‘confront’ the Chinese delegation over dubious new “intelligence” suggesting China was about to furnish Russia with “lethal aid.” Blinken then immediately hopped on American TV to brag about his melodramatic rebuke, which was duly followed by leaks to favored media outlets supposedly substantiating the intel. Blinken’s strategy of performatively antagonizing China was somewhat mitigated by later in 2023, but it will always be on the record that Tony B presided over a willful tanking of great-power relations during an extremely precarious geopolitical period — especially with American policymakers newly bombastic over Taiwan, and always speciously trying to connect the issue to Ukraine. Biden himself also declared on multiple occasions that the US would effectively go to war with mainland China in “defense” of Taiwan. He denounced President Xi Jinping as a “dictator,” prompting a memorable grimace from Blinken as he watched haplessly on.
Blinken angrily belittled world leaders who dared propose some formula for resolving the Ukraine war diplomatically — certainly a strange posture for America’s putative “top diplomat.” This anti-diplomacy conviction therefore put Blinken and Biden at odds with China, which has been proposing the same formula for years to broker a cessation of hostilities. According to Biden’s farewell remarks, his administration’s stalwart opposition to diplomacy “invigorated people’s faith in the United States as a true, true partner.” He seems to be principally referring to the “invigoration” of NATO; Finland and Sweden abolishing their historic policy of military neutrality by joining the bloc is supposed to have made us all much safer, and the US more respected and admired.
“Many more of our Allies are paying their fair share,” Biden said. “Before I took office, nine NATO Allies were spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Now 23 are spending 2 percent.” The accelerating re-militarization of Europe is another development that gets touted as some self-evidently awesome achievement, including by the “democracy destroyer” himself, Donald Trump, who regularly boasts about his own extraction of additional “defense” spending among NATO member-states — and is likely to pursue that objective with even more aplomb in the second term. This Biden-Trump continuity is little observed among partisans invested in exaggerating policy differences between the two parties on core issues of governance. Actually, it’s more like a Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden continuity, as all advocated, and to some degree obtained, greater “burden-sharing” among NATO member-states.
“As I saw it, when Putin launched his invasion,” Biden reminisced, “I had two jobs: one, to rally the world to defend Ukraine, and the other is to avoid war between two nuclear powers.” Setting the bar for success in Ukraine as avoidance of direct nuclear conflagration is surely the lowest of all possible bars, and Biden himself confessed (at a Manhattan fundraiser no less) that the policy he championed had brought about a situation where the world was facing a graver nuclear risk than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Spinning this as a grand civilizational achievement is something only a seasoned “foreign policy professional” could come up with.
In one foreign policy area where Biden’s legacy might be viewed in a more positive light, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden managed to turn something favored by bipartisan supermajorities — ending the longest war in US history — into a giant political liability. Around the time of the withdrawal, Biden’s approval ratings sunk, and never really recovered. His communicative inabilities enabled cynics to frame the withdrawal as among the most catastrophic events in US history, obscuring the catastrophe of the occupation itself.
Biden and Blinken apparently think that the last-minute Gaza ceasefire arrangement, obtained thanks to the merger of the Biden and Trump negotiating operations, could salvage his reputation for “relentlessly” pursuing diplomacy — but it really emphasizes how diplomacy-bereft the Administration was for 99% of the presidency, despite all the professional class soirees Blinken & Co. likely attended where everyone told them what a great job they were doing.
I have more reservations than some about the Second Trump Administration, including most immediately about the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire deal, as Benjamin Netanyahu is going around saying that he was personally told by Trump that Israel will have full authorization to resume the pulverization at a time of their choosing. Netanyahu also claims Trump has already made a “decision” to remove whatever nominal restrictions the Biden Administration had supposedly imposed in terms of weapons provisions. After all, Trump and Republicans did spend 2024 campaigning explicitly against a ceasefire, and upbraiding Biden for betraying Israel by failing to supply them with sufficient armaments.
Still, the aggressive fecklessness of Biden and Blinken in virtually all major diplomatic arenas is a feat that would be extremely difficult for the new Trump Administration to surpass.
Let’s be fair to Blinken and Biden - they’re not the only professional class screwups in the administration. Janet Yellen, Jake (Scarecrow) Sullivan, Little Peter Buttigieg, Lloyd Austin, etc definitely deserve to be mentioned. This entire crew shares credit for the colossal failure of the administration. The broader picture is that the policies pursued by Biden (and his Dem allies) such as DEI, open borders, trans surgeries for minors, boys playing girls’ sports and sharing girls’ locker rooms etc are viewed as repulsive 🤮 to normal people. That’s why red pills 💊 are flying off the shelves in stores throughout blue states. Job well done by Joe, destroying the Dem party!
As a 26-year veteran of the US Foreign Service, I can only shake my head in dismay that this clown show represented our country on the world stage for four years...