Why is the press giving Antony Blinken an easy ride?

Of course, it would be unfair to expect Blinken to blast his own record. Nonetheless, after such a defeat one might reasonably have expected something akin to the level of introspection and self-criticism shown by President Obama in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016; but Blinken acknowledges no errors at all. Given the situations now prevailing in the Middle East and Ukraine, it is hard to see how anyone can read this with a straight face.

Blinken’s incredible complacency is matched only by the softball nature of the interviews themselves. In one section of the NYT interview, for example, reporters pressed Blinken on the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but only in order to suggest that the Biden administration should somehow have prevented a Taliban victory. Surprisingly, the interviewer did not make a connection to a brilliant series of NYT articles last year on the true nature of the US-backed Afghan state and army, which also showed how throughout the Obama administration and the first year of Biden’s, the American media and people were systematically lied to on Afghanistan by US officials and generals. Why was this not mentioned?

Similarly, on Ukraine, the interviewer did not hold Blinken to account on how official Biden administration predictions of Ukrainian victory differed radically from the actual situation on the ground; and how this chimera (whether of deceit or self-deceit) helped to block a peace settlement when Ukraine might have achieved one on much better terms.

To its credit, the NYT did press Blinken quite hard on Israeli atrocities in Gaza, and the Biden administration’s refusal to take action to end them. The FT by contrast asked Blinken whether his words about a Chinese “genocide” in Sinkiang, also apply to Israel in Gaza. The interviewer let him get away with a one word reply: “No”.

Against the background of US policy towards Gaza, how should one take a statement like “Friends and critics like to say that Tony — as he is universally known in Washington — is ‘too nice’”? Another British journalist in Washington in conversation also sought to excuse the nauseating lies and staged emotional displays of White House spokesman John Kirby on the grounds of his personal “niceness”. Or to adapt the words of another Antony, “But Blinken says there is no genocide, and sure Blinken is the nicest of men; so are they all, all nice men.”

The incestuous relationship between journalists and politicians in Washington is an old one. In recent years, however, it has been intensified by partisanship, which has now spread to the British (or, in the FT‘s case, transatlantic) media as well. So deep is the liberal media establishment’s hatred and fear of Trump and his analogues on the Right in Europe that there is an increasing tendency to give their liberal opponents a free pass.

As a journalist, I was taught to go into every political interview (no matter how “nice” my subject) with Louis Heren’s maxim in the back of my mind: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” As analysts, the FT and NYT journalists should have interrogated Blinken on the fundamental basis of his entire mindset, unquestioning belief in universal US primacy, irrespective of its risks, its actual record, or how it is viewed by the greater part of humanity. But since this belief is fully shared by the US and British establishments in general, this would have required the journalists also to question themselves. That was never going to happen.

Anatol Lieven is a former war correspondent and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC.