Blink – and You Missed Him: Blinken in the Middle East

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s latest junket to the Middle East was the usual photo-op for cosmetic purposes only (Blinken only wears slight make up).

His visit achieved no concrete results whatsoever. it did not modify or influence Israeli, Hamas or Palestinian Authority by one milligram. It brought an end to the now nearly five month long Israeli invasion of Gaza flowing the Hamas terror attacks atrocities of October last year one millisecond closer. As usual in all Blinken’s nonexistent labors – it was a waste of time. 

The secretary of state looked pained. He is good at doing that. And what so far has he to show for his far from herculean labors? Why nothing of course.

Blinken’s latest trip covered four nations – briefly – and ended on February 8. It was the fifth Blinken has made to the region since the latest horrific conflict erupted with the Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians, including hundreds of repeateldy raped and tortured women and proud Facebook postings – which Facebook wrongly erased – by Hamas of beheaded babies. 

However, as the Associated Press (AP) reluctantly admitted, “None of those visits resulted in immediate visible successes.” 

Blinken naturally could achieve no headway with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To cite the AP again, “Biden was returning to Washington after getting a virtual slap in the face from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

What a contrast to the way Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did business in the region half a century ago! But then, Kissinger had a real intellect and a forceful personality. He served a universally despised but highly intelligent and responsible president in Richard Nixon. Both men took the threat of thermonuclear war and regional upheaval seriously: And they were resolved to give it the priority it deserved.

Kissinger, as I have previously noted in these columns, did not bother visiting the crucial, “neglected” nations like Upper Volta, Haiti, the Marshall Islands or Micronesia. He never visited Albania, as Blinken did on his way home from the annual Munich Security Conference this year.

And Kissinger was most certainly not welcome in the Middle East. The one thing that the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestine Liberation Organization ever could agree on was that they all wanted rid of him.

For Kissinger gave them no peace. He was always there. In their offices. Across the table from them. Pinning them down for hours. lecturing them, threatening them, pressuring them, blackmailing them. How ungentlemanly of him!

And by being such a crass pain-in-the-neck, in doing so, America’s real secretary of state assured peace for a generation.

It was of course, a hugely flawed and imperfect peace. But it was still a vast improvement on the quarter century with five major Israel-Arab Wars (1948, 1956, 1967, the 1969-70 War of Attrition and the 1973 War of Ramadan, or Yom Kippur War) that had gone before.

Kissinger did not just briefly and lazily flit through the region every few months, like Blinken since last October 7: He stayed there for months on end.

Also, Henry was never polite, long-suffering and retiring like Blinken. He was no English gentleman who learned his table manners from watching “Masterpiece Theater.” 

As the AP acknowledged, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu routinely treats Blinken with contempt. He would show more respect to the opinions of any baby poodle. 

Kissinger by contrast drove Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – an exceptionally fragile figure behind his gruff, macho image – to a nervous breakdown and to an uncontrollable alcoholic drinking spree that Ulysses S. Grant himself would have envied. (Grant, unlike Rabin, never got drunk once on the eve of battle or as leader of the nation). 

Kissinger reduced Rabin to quivering blubber, not just once but repeatedly. Was this successful diplomatic behavior? Yes indeed. Because it delivered results. And it got the job done.

Kissinger, unlike Blinken, knew how to prioritize. He focused on superpower relations with the Soviet Union and China and on extricating hundreds of thousands of US troops from the Vietnam War.

Kissinger certainly did not end or seek to end the overall US military deployment and engagement around the world. But he vastly reduced the footprint of actual US military operations. Blinken, along with his senile supposed master, President Joe Biden and the Invisible Man himself, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin continues to recklessly, wildly relentlessly expand them.

Here lies another fundamental dichotomy between the two men that runs all too often through all other walks of life too:

Kissinger, an extrovert, but deeply read, schooled, experienced and thoughtful – appeared on the world stage like a raging bull: a vastly inflated, larger than life figure, effortlessly generating hatred and envy, terror and literally foaming at the mouth, eye-rolling, twitching madness among all those who had never met him – especially the simplistic idiots of Left and Right alike.

Yet Kissinger’s policies in his eight years of literal, direct, overt power and policymaking from 1969 to 1977 were all geared to reduce the risk of major regional, global and thermonuclear war between the nations. And the agreements he brokered were without exception realistic, incremental, cautious, constructive and humane. The world became a vastly safer place on his watch: And it remained that way for four to five decades to come.

Blinken, by contrast, who talks so much about international cooperation and bridge building, does not in reality have a clue as to what he is talking about. His rhetoric is always 100 billion miles removed from reality.

Blinken really imagines diplomacy is about rounding up endlessly numbers of postage stamp countries on his own side and expounding vague, undefined amorphous causes from the admirable to the ridiculous – whether they be human rights, women’s rights, transgender rights, the environment, saving the whales or combating global climate change by de-industrializing the Western world.

Chasing these impossible to achieve, ever receding ever shapeshifting, amorphous goals – more elusive than any Irish leprechaun’s fools’ gold, Blinken, unlike Kissinger, has no time to meet the leaders of other superpowers. He clearly has never liked or respected President Vladimir Putin of Russia or President Xi Jinping of China. He has literally never had any time for them at all.

By contrast, Kissinger endlessly shuttled to Beijing and Moscow. Amazingly, he even flew to Beijing at age 100 at Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin’s request to seek less aggressive financial policies impacting upon the United States: It was a mission that she and Blinken should have carried out themselves – not once but repeatedly.

The greatest diplomats and masters of grand strategy in modern history never wasted any time on the needless dependencies, hangers-on and ridiculous postage-stamp dukedoms that invariably grab the coattails of every major regional and global power.

Germany’s great Otto von Bismarck famously said the entire Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomerian grenadier – and being a Prussian landowner, he had a poor opinion of Pomerianian grenadiers. But Blinken and his hyperactive Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland obsess with micro-managing minutiae there.

Winston Churchill spent his years as Britain’s World War II leader endlessly shuttling to Washington and Moscow to curry the favors, appease the wrath and coordinate his policies with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin.

Stalin had killed scores of millions of people. Putin, who has always disavowed Stalin’s domestic policies, manifestly has not.

Yet the supposedly heroic Churchill – witless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s endlessly quoted touchstone and measure for heroic, principled democratic leadership – drank with Stalin and even wrote off the fates of half the nations of Eastern Europe to him on a convenient dinner napkin in October 1944. It became known as “The Naughty Document.” 

The gentlemanly, dignified Blinken of course would never stoop to such crass behavior. But then, he would never dream of cooperating with Russia or even tolerating its continued existence either, even if doing so saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of American lives.

Henry Kissinger often appeared to be outrageous. indeed, he reveled in his notoriety. Blinken and his Siamese twin in US policy making, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, relentlessly project the images of sweet, polite, retiring, anal, somehow-childlike, definitely always nervously polite mediocrity.

Are they really rampaging monsters, wolves in sheep’s clothing, shapeshifting carnivores behind those masks of meekness? Of course not. The reality is far worse. They are exactly what they appear. The very possibility of inner depth is inconceivable to them. 

For Blinken and Sullivan really are worthless nonentities. Intangible as a vanishing fart. And therefore it is not only understandable – it is inevitable and unavoidable – that Blinken should have achieved zero impact on any of the players in the ongoing, escalating regional crises currently engulfing the Middle East.

What you saw is what you got.