Good Riddance, Antony Blinken

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 state, 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.