Blinken Atrocious in a Dangerous World
It is hard to credit one of the least impressive Secretary of States, the United States has ever produced with any merit other than being a plasterwork that, from time to time, moved with caution on the world stage for fear of cracking. On the stage, Antony Blinken’s brittle performances have been nothing short of unimpressive, notably in pursuing such projects comically titled “Peace in the Middle East.” Each time he has ventured to various regions of the world, the combatants seem keener than ever to continue taking up arms or indulging in slaughter.
A sense of Blinken’s detachment from the world can be gathered from his Foreign Affairs piece published on October 1, intended as something of a report on the diplomatic achievements of the Biden administration. It starts with the sermonising treacle that is all a bit much – the naughty states on the world stage, albeit small in number (Russia, Iran, North Korea and China), “determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system.”
The Biden administration had, in response, “pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.” This served to counter those challengers wishing to “undermine the free, open, secure, and prosperous world that the United States and most countries seek.” Then comes the remark that should prompt readers to pinch themselves. “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.”
An odd assessment for various reasons. There is the continued war in Ukraine and Washington’s refusal to encourage any meaningful talks between Kiev and Moscow, preferring, instead, the continued supply of weapons to an attritive conflict of slaughter and such acts of industrial terrorism as the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.
There has been the relentless watering down of the “One China” understanding over the status of Taiwan, along with continued provocations against Beijing through the offensive pact of AUKUS with Australia and the UK. That particularly odious pact has served to turn Australia into a US military garrison without the consent of its citizens, an outcome sold to the dunces in Canberra as utterly necessary to arrest the rise of China. Along the way, an arms buildup in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific has been encouraged.
With such a view of the world, it’s little wonder how blind Blinken, and other members of the Biden administration, have been to Israel’s own rogue efforts at breaking and altering the international system, committing, along the way, a goodly number of atrocities that have seen it taken to the International Court of Justice by South Africa for committing alleged acts of genocide.
Through his various sojourns, the point was always clear. Israel was to be mildly rebuked, if at all, while Hamas was to be given the full chastising treatment as killers without a cause. When the barbarians revolt against their imperial governors, they are to be both feared and reviled. In June this year, for instance, Blinken stated on one of his countless missions for a non-existent peace that Hamas was “the only obstacle” to a ceasefire, a markedly jaundiced explanation given the broader programs and objects being pursued by the Israeli Defence Forces. Hamas has been accused of being absolutist in its goals, but one can hardly exempt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the charge. Not for Blinken: “I think it is clear to everyone around the world, that it’s on them [Hamas] and that they will have made a choice to continue a war that they started.”
On the issue of aid to Gaza’s strangled, dying population, Blinken has been, along with his equally ineffectual colleague in the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, cringingly ineffective. Their October 13 letter sent to their Israeli counterparts made mention of several demands, including the entry of some 350 aid trucks into Gaza on a daily basis, and refraining from adopting laws, now in place, banning the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). Each demand has been swatted back with a school child’s snotty petulance, and aid continues being blocked to various parts of Gaza.
On October 24, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) “urgently” called on the Secretary of State “to stop wasting his time with failed diplomatic visits and to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.” Those at AJP Action must surely have realised by now that Blinken would be utterly rudderless without those failed visits. Indeed, Osama Abu Irshaid, Executive Director of the organisation, went so far as to say that “Blinken’s diplomatic theatre is enabling Netanyahu’s war crimes.” To arm and fund Israel “while requesting a ceasefire” was a policy both “hypocritical and ineffective.” Such is the nature of that sort of theatre.
In the meantime, the tectonic plates of international relations are moving in other directions, a point that has been aided, not hindered, by the policy of this administration. Through BRICS and other satellite fora, the United States is finding itself gradually outpaced and isolated, even as it continues to hide behind the slogan of an international rules-based order it did so much to create. This is not to say that the US imperium has quite reached its terminus. If anything, the Biden administration, through the good offices of Blinken, continues to insist on its vitality. But US hegemony long left unchallenged is, most certainly, at an end.
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21 comments
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paul walter -
Herbert Rude -
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paul walter -
leefe -
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Arnd -
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John C -
Harry Lime -
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leefe -
Bert -
Arnd -
Canguro -
paul walter -
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Canguro -
Steve Davis
Return to home pageThe one good thing about Trump’s election is that the public does not have to be put through people like him and Miller.
No doubt Trump will appoint people as bad, but for the moment, feel the breeze; sniff the roses.
@Paul Walter
Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between an incompetent mediocrity and an unhinged sociopath?
‘The tyrant terrifies his subjects. spying balefully on the world from his strongly fortified palace, as sensitive to approaching prey or predators as a spider delicately balanced at the centre of a web, he dominates the life of all around him. He takes credit for the achievements of nobler men who spend their substance on civic projects like great churches and other fine buildings. Entertaining the foreign Ambassadors of foreign powers at his own table, he makes decisions that affect the well being of all of his subjects without consulting anyone except his favourites. He turns his entire state into a machine for his own profit and that of a few friends and he does not shrink from robbing wealthy men of their possessions or pure young women of their virtue. All threats to his sole authority he resists with absolute ferocity.’ (‘Treatise on the Government of Florence’ – Girolamo Savonarola, 1492).
The blood on this man’s hands reaches up to his armpits. An impotent, insipid enabler and apologist for genocide. SHAME!
Herbert Rude.
I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Miller, “an unhinged psychopath”.
Blinken, I still can’t say more. Scary.
paul waiter:
… no doubt Trump will appoint people as bad …
Have you seen his appointments so far? They aren’t “as bad”, they’re absolutely batshit fucking insane.
I am, by the way, looking forward to Dr Kampmark directing his talents towards an equal critique pof Trump and the Republicans. It’s going to happen, right?
leefe:
Whatever for? Mostly, people understand that Trump and his MAGA enthusiasts are unhinged grievance mongers with scant regard for truth or constitutional limits on the exercise of government authority. I would certainly expect that those frequenting the pages of The AIMN share a more or less detailed appreciation of these disturbing facts.
The question is not whether and how MAGA promises to aggravate existing problems and create a whole raft of new ones.
The question is, what are progressives going to do about it, and why have they so spectacularly failed to contain and preempt the MAGA problem.
Binoy, do you know any impressive US Secretaries of State? Especially in more recent times? Kissinger? Haig? Christopher, Albright, Rice, Powell? Tillerson or Pompeo?
Unless you’re fairly delusional about world politics and the role of the US within world politics, you won’t make it within coeee of that office.
The problem seems not so much that appointees to that office are incapable, but more that global politics is becoming ever more obviously intractable.
@paul walter. “..but for the moment, feel the breeze; sniff the roses.”
Why? The breeze has a distinctly garbage pig shit smell that is imbedded in everything surrounding the bloated traitor and the retrumplicunt party. Hard to smell roses when your nostrils are invaded and over powered by the stench of corruption and the stink of overwhelming greed.
Arnd,you may find an article in today’s Saturday Paper by Stan Grant interesting,I certainly did.
Thanks, Harry.
I have a lot of time for Stan Grant, and even more now that he is a bit more forward about exploring some of the spiritual aspects of our shared human condition.
Though at times he comes across as a bit judgemental – and I do not easily agree with the judgement calls he makes.
The particular article you referenced fits squarely into my “dearth of democracy” collection which I started well over a decade ago. It includes, amongst others, offerings from Mark Beeson and Barry Jones in The Conversation, and the German Basic Law, especially were, with a degree of strained hopefulness, it enshrines:
I was fascinated by the implications from the time I was first introduced to them in junior high school civics lessons.
Grant’s article, like virtually all other offerings about the shortfalls of and looming dangers to democracy, has a few very noticeable (to me, anyway) holes. Holes which I am really struggling to understand why someone as articulate as Grant doesn’t seem able to perceive.
But that last issue is one that applies to all thought leaders and decision makers within the bourgeois administrative hierarchy.
“Whatever for? Mostly, people understand that Trump and his MAGA enthusiasts are unhinged grievance mongers with scant regard for truth or constitutional limits on the exercise of government authority.”
It has just been graphically demonstrated that a very hefty chunk of people dont know, and that’s because those whose job it is to call out that sort of abuse of power and wealth don’t do it because they’re too busy pointing fingers at the far from perfect but still obviously less diabolical option.
This isnt a theoretical issue. Literally millions of lives are now at risk, worldwide and particularly in USAnia. Those people matter. Anyone who can get pregnant, all immigrants (especially those who aren’t white), all disabled people, all LGBTQIA+ people, all muslims and other non-christians, all Black people, all politcal dissenters … have a look at Project 2025 if you think what I’m saying is hyperbole. This is what they’ve promised to do and there is nothing left in the system to prevent it.
Media everywhere should be calling this out. But instead it’s the standard “this other group aren’t ideal” distraction and deflection that helped get Trump into office.
The art of negotiation is to have disparate people come to agreement.
Blinken was hamstrung by a boss who would not waver in his support for Israel and two parties who could not, would not agree that Palestinians have no rights.
His task was mission impossible.
leefe, you still didn’t get my drift. Let me repeat the salient point:
Harry Lime helpfully referred an article by Stan Grant in the Saturday Paper. Even Grant feels called upon to insist that:
Amongst ourselves on the progressive side of politics, continuing to berate the poor, benighted, and probably racist and retrograde “deplorables” for voting Trump has not proven a successful strategy. And to me, it certainly doesn’t look any more promising going forward.
Perhaps the rot began with René Descartes, and his famous axiom cogito, ergo sum. I’m not a scholar and I wouldn’t want to pick the moment, and anyway the story of the human march across time and location is far too complex to permit simplification; the emergence of rationalism as a contra to a faith-based perspective, the unquestioned reliance on thought as the final arbiter when it came to explaining the myriad phenomena that we are witness to, the plethora of competing points of view… political, social, economic, moral, spiritual and more ensured the concretisation and embedment of the human species within the literal form of the fabled Tower of Babel, in which we would seem to have remained, forever immersed, trapped by language and ideology and unable to parse the complexities of these monumental structures of thought & belief that have been clumsily translated into less than perfect action.
Stan Grant’s pieces are always interesting – a poor descriptor but it’ll do for the moment; he brings a wealth of perspective embroidered with a deeply introspective and considered analysis; it’s a shame that in this day & age he was so poorly thought of with regard to his public views that he found it necessary to seek refuge away from the public glare.
Martin Buber, the Austrian-Israeli philosopher, is perhaps best known for his seminal work, Ich und Du, with its main ideas listed below:
He wrote that we may address existence in two ways:
The attitude of the “I” towards an “It”, towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
or…
The attitude of the “I” towards “Thou”, in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.
and further…
[that] humans are defined by the two word pairs: I–It and I–Thou.
The distinctions between these dyad pairs are profound, and the failure to comprehend and incorporate these distinctions into individual personal world views lie at the heart of the spiritual, philosophical and psychosocial morass that a large section of humanity currently inhabits.
Blinken and his predecessors never had a chance given their origins and conditioning. And probably a safe bet to suggest they never read Buber.
I think Canguro is on the right track as to this…self and other and what we allow or keep from ourselves.There has been a chilly feeling that goes with dislocations from humanity and reality over the last year in particular.
Bert mentioned Blinken as tied irrevocably to Biden’s psychosis, but I wonder if there was not huge pressure from the Lobby itself on the old buffer.
Pingback: Blinken Atrocious in a Dangerous World – Equilibrion
Does Death Cult America have a death wish? Is Joe Biden a lucid & pragmatic adherent to realpolitik relations with Russia? Binary responses only, yes or no.
Joe Biden lifts ban on US missiles being used to fire into Russian territory. Russia has long warned that any development of this nature would be taken as a direct indication of American military action against that nation, and will be met with a severe response.
To plagiarise a Thatcherism, I daresay Blinken’s not for blinkin’…
Pingback: Nuclear and related news – week to 19 November – Equilibrion
The late sharp as a razor comedian and satirist Bill Hicks once riffed on how people would complain about his sketches regarding the assassination of John Kennedy, to which he’d respond with a contra regarding the obsession with the execution of Christ and how the symbol of the cross has become the go-to sign of adherence to that faith; the point he made, of course, was that the whole story about the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was so ludicrously preposterous that it was difficult to comprehend why it was taken as the final word on who dun’ it.
The 2014 documentary, JFK to 9/11: Everything Is a Rich Man’s Trick, clears away any lingering doubts as to who were behind this shocking incident; it also adds a great amount of detail in respect of how the movers and shakers in world affairs have and continue to pull the strings in all major arenas of global activity, including the construction of wars for profit. These people are, unsurprisingly, the oligarchs, of whom we’ve all become too wearily familiar; bankers, industrialists, royalty… all of them puppet masters pulling the strings of the manipulated.
The IMDB link (above) notes in the comments section that this documentary deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. 3 1/2 hours of gobsmack; and any lingering doubts about what the USA actually is are blown away, the gossamer veil with its faint patina that says ‘We’re a democracy’ evaporates and the criminal underbelly that has always been the primary engine of that country duly revealed.
Spoiler alert; Who killed Kennedy? Disgruntled businessmen, along with J Edgar Hoover & the Bush family.
C’mon now Canguro, I mean to say — “the oligarchs, of whom we’ve all become too wearily familiar; bankers, industrialists, royalty… ”
You know it’s only Russia that has oligarchs !! 🙂