Anthony Blinken's fantasy world
The US Secretary of State's account of the past four years reads like a bad Hollywood movie
Anthony Blinken’s recent op-ed in Foreign Affairs is one of the most exceptional pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long time. 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. 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 (sic) — 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 every corner of the planet in the hope of plunging the world into a New Dark Age.
But their evil plans are thwarted when the countries the Free World, led by the US and its valiant newly-elected president Joe Biden, succeed in putting aside their differences and join forces to fight back and re-establish peace and stability around the world — 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, agent Blinken, tells us — but they haven’t been defeated yet…
It makes for an entertaining read, especially for fans of the “alternate history” genre. But, jokes aside, one has to wonder what Blinken was thinking when he penned the article. Is he really completely unaware of the fact that, in the eyes of most people, the Biden administration’s foreign policy stands out as the most hawkish and reckless since the George W. Bush era?
Perhaps most tragically, it played a key role in provoking the war in Ukraine: it first urged Ukraine to adopt a highly confrontational stance vis-à-vis Russia and ignored the latter’s security concerns about the military build-up in Ukraine and its de facto integration into NATO structures, thus creating the conditions that led to Russia’s invasion; and it then dashed all opportunities for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, opting instead to use Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, in what is rapidly escalating into a direct, potentially nuclear NATO-Russia war. It also allowed, or was possibly directly involved, in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, the worst act of industrial terrorism in European history.
In the Middle East, it cast away the promised renewal of the nuclear agreement with Iran by setting rigorous conditions that Washington knew Iran never could accept; and, over the past year, it has offered Israel near-unconditional political, economic and military support even in the face of Israel’s 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 of an all-out war with China, while waging “a full-blown economic war” against the latter.
The Biden administration has quite literally set the world on fire, in what is clearly a desperate attempt to stem the decline of US hegemony and slow down, or ideally reverse, the ongoing transition towards a multipolar system — a rather different story from the plot of Blinken’s movie. That’s not to say that everything he writes his fictional: in some respects it is true that “the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago”: though that 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 the US has reasserted its full control, militarily and economically. Even Hollywood blockbusters contain a kernel of truth.
This is a longer version of an article that originally appeared in UnHerd.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
In the words and deeds of Anthony Blinken we are seeing how ultimately hugely self-destructive it is when our leaders come to believe their own disingenuous propaganda. It reveals the hubris of the now nearly wholly dissipated unipolar moment, when the neocons in Washington thought the US ruled the world and could shape it as they saw fit.
The U.S. on the road to ruin and with the "leadership" it has, there's no turning back.