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.

Just two months ago, in September, Biden had bowed to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose allowing long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.

Putin warned at the time in that British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine launching the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” 

That was a clear warning that British and U.S. targets could be hit. Biden thus wisely backed off. 

It was the second time that Biden had sided with the Pentagon against the neocons in his administration when it came to avoiding direct war with Russia.

The first time was in March 2022 when his neocon Secretary of State Antony Blinken stepped out of line to announce that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft.  

See: The Madness of Antony Blinken

Members of Congress and the media then piled the pressure on Biden to approve it until cooler heads at the U.S. Defense Department, the greatest purveyor of violence in history, stepped in to stop it.

Biden ultimately sided with the Pentagon, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time backed him up, saying:

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”

But now Biden has reversed himself on his sensible positions and is defying the Pentagon to roll the dice that Russia’s warnings, repeated on Monday by Putin’s spokesman, won’t lead to nuclear conflict. 

While he previously would not even authorize British long-range missile attacks into Russia in September, let alone U.S. ATACMS, on Sunday he authorized the ATACMS, risking Russia taking direct action against U.S. targets.

So what changed Biden’s addled mind? 

An Undemocratic Democratic System  

First, the undemocratic U.S. electoral system gave Biden the opportunity. His party was voted out of office on Nov. 5,  but though the demos rejected Democrats in the White House they get to hang on in power for another 11 weeks, enough time to do considerable mischief to tie up the incoming administration that the people chose. (In a parliamentary system the new prime minister takes office on the next day and names the new cabinet well in advance of the election).

After one-term president George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, Bush used those 11 weeks to invade Somalia, saddling Clinton with a foreign policy crisis that would bog him down and distract him from his agenda. 

What’s happening now is something similar. Biden wants to undermine Trump’s effort to end the Ukraine war. The incoming vice president has floated the idea of Russia holding on to territory it has won in exchange for peace.

Biden staked his legacy on Ukraine. He was involved in the 2014 coup, in allegedly shady practices there with his son and then in provoking Russia to invade in 2022. He foolishly believed he would prevail in bringing down Putin with an economic, information and proxy ground war. See: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War

All three are now decisively lost as the U.S. — still under Biden — prepares for the end game. Biden’s only face saver is for Ukraine to get back some of its lost territory by trading for it with Russian territory it seized in Kursk this summer. 

So he is authorizing U.S. soldiers to operate ATACMS missiles from Ukraine to beat back a 50,000-man Russian force seeking to take back all of that Russian territory. Part of that force, according to the Pentagon spokesman, is a contingent of at least 10,000 North Korean troops invited by Moscow, thus operating legally on pre-war Russian territory. 

Yet the presence of these North Koreans has sent the Biden administration and its allied media into paroxysms of near insanity.  The New York Times reported on Sunday:

“Officials said Mr. Biden was persuaded to make the change in part by the sheer audacity of Russia’s decision to throw North Korean troops at Ukrainian lines. He was also swayed, they said, by concerns that the Russian assault force would be able to overwhelm Ukrainian troops in Kursk if they were not allowed to defend themselves with long-range weapons.”

It is not like Biden doesn’t know the potentially grave consequences he is recklessly unleashing.  He was already warned about the no-fly zone and said “that’s called World War III, okay?” He was then warned by the Pentagon against allowing the British missiles and acted like a responsible statesman.

But now, when it comes to his precious legacy, he doesn’t appear to give a damn about anything else. He was deprived of a second term (by traitors within his own party he no doubt thinks) and he will risk a NATO-Russia war to avoid the taint of utter defeat in Ukraine. 

This is what he’s ignoring, according to the Times:

“Some of Mr. Biden’s advisers had seized on a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that warned that Mr. Putin could respond to the use of long-range ATACMS on Russian soil by directing the Russian military or its spy agencies to retaliate, potentially with lethal force, against the United States and its European allies.

The assessment warned of several possible Russian responses that included stepped-up acts of arson and sabotage targeting facilities in Europe, as well as potentially lethal attacks on U.S. and European military bases.”

Where it goes from there, nobody knows.

Thanks, Joe.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

In several wars in recent weeks, U.S. officials have echoed that approach. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller recently said that the U.S. “supports[s] a ceasefire” in Lebanon while simultaneously recognizing that “military pressure can at times enable diplomacy.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed the doctrine as doing “all that we can to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield so it has the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

But during the Biden administration, the iteration of Kissinger’s doctrine has gone well beyond the generals supporting the diplomats. The diplomats are now outpacing and pushing the generals. In the Biden administration, despite the promise to open “a new era of relentless diplomacy,” the State Department has metamorphosized into the hawkish arm of the Pentagon.

In the debate within the Biden administration over whether permission should be granted for Ukraine to fire Western supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory, it is the diplomats who have pushed for escalation, and the Pentagon and intelligence community who have argued for caution.

Blinken has promised that “from day one… as what Russia is doing has changed, as the battlefield has changed, we’ve adapted… And I can tell you that as we go forward, we will do exactly what we have already done, which is we will adjust, we’ll adapt as necessary, including with regard to the means that are at Ukraine’s disposal to effectively defend against the Russian aggression.”

It is the Pentagon that has counseled restraint. They have argued that the uncertain benefits of longer range strikes do not outweigh the risk of escalation. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has maintained that “long-range strikes into Russia would not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor,” and agrees with the intelligence community that Russia is capable of quickly moving most of its assets out of range.

This is not the first time the debate on escalation has featured unexpected sides. While, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the State Department argued that “real diplomacy” does not take place at times of aggression, it was General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who advocated for diplomacy and said that the goal of a sovereign Ukraine with its territory intact would require “a long, very difficult, high casualty-producing war.”

Milley further argued that “You can achieve those objectives through military means…. but you can also achieve those objectives maybe possibly, through some sort of diplomatic means.” Once again, it was the top general who advocated for diplomacy while the top diplomat argued for more war.

It is also not the first debate on long-range missiles. On May 15, before the U.S. had approved even limited longer-range strikes into Russia, it was the State Department that first floated giving the green light. Asked about the U.S. ban on Ukraine’s use of American equipment to strike into Russian territory, Blinken replied that, “We have not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine,” before adding, “but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war…. these are decisions that Ukraine has to make, Ukraine will make for itself.”

The State Department has from the start abdicated diplomacy. We know that on December 17, 2021, Putin proposed security guarantees to the United States with a key demand of no NATO expansion to Ukraine. But rather than negotiate, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary Blinken, later revealed that the U.S. at the time did not consider NATO expansion to be on the bargaining table.

At the end of a full term in office, the Blinken State Department does not have a single diplomatic victory to boast about. At the start of his term, Biden promised to “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy.” He promised he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” He promised a different foreign policy than Trump’s “abject failure” in Venezuela. And he promised a new approach to North Korea that “is open to and will explore diplomacy.”

The Blinken State Department has delivered on none of these promises and has failed to attain a ceasefire in Gaza or in Ukraine. Instead, it has availed itself of a one tool tool box of coercion, be it sanctions or military force. It has fallen to the Pentagon to suggest diplomacy and to question unrestricted use of force.

Meanwhile, it was General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior Pentagon officials who recently raised the question at the White House of whether over-reliance on military force has emboldened America’s partners to be increasingly aggressive and cross American red lines.

Diplomacy has often in the past partnered with military force. But in the Biden administration, the State Department has abdicated diplomacy and reduced itself to the hawkish arm of the Pentagon which has, paradoxically, been the louder voice for diplomacy.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and other outlets.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.

A no-fly zone “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. 

President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.

Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin  backed him up:

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”

(The administration plan was, and apparently still is, to bring down the Russian government through a proxy counteroffensive and an economic and information war, not a direct military one.)

Blinken, who stepped out of line to speak above the heads of the president and the Pentagon, lost that round. It’s surprising he kept his job. But he survived and now he’s come back for more. 

Relentless 

Blinken’s recklessness emerged yet again last week when he peddled a story — eagerly picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times — that Biden would approve a British request to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.

The Guardian story on Sept. 11 said: 

“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.

Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised.”

To fire British Storm Shadows, Ukraine would have to depend on British technical soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to actually launch them and on U.S. geolocation technology. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz revealed those British soldiers are already in Ukraine.

In other words, it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen. 

The next day Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that launching such missiles into Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

Nevertheless, The New York Times ran a story on the same day with the headline: “Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia.” 

The Guardian added:

“British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.”

Blinken’s words evidently raised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s hopes that he would satisfy his desire to strike Russia with his nation’s arsenal of long-range missiles, despite Putin saying that meant direct war with NATO.

Blinken and the British are trying to lead us to the brink. 

Sanity in Arlington

Except that the Pentagon, the purveyor of the most monstrous violence in world history, has pulled the world back from it. 

For at least the second time — publicly known — the Department of War secured peace from neocon recklessness fronted by Blinken. 

Starmer was sent back on his chartered British Airways flight from the White House meeting licking his wounds. He’d evidently been led by Blinken to believe that it was a done deal: the U.S. would let Britain attack Russia with its long-range missiles using U.S. technology — even if the U.S. wouldn’t allow its own long-range ATACMS to be used. 

The Times of London reported that Biden withholding approval “surprised British officials who had listened closely to hints from Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that America was edging towards authorising Storm Shadow, an Anglo-French weapon which relies on American GPS guidance systems.”

Starmer’s mania to strike Russia illustrates the British elite’s continuing pathological hatred of Russia, extending back centuries, compared to a perhaps more tempered, though determined, American geostrategic rivalry with Moscow. 

Biden’s Limits With the Neocons 

Biden has proven himself a supreme warmonger, his advocacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq and his complicity in the genocide in Gaza as the most egregious examples. 

Like the two presidents before him, Biden allowed neocons to worm themselves into positions of power in his administration. But the extent to which Biden himself is a neocon, as opposed to a traditional warmonger, is subject to question.

As a creature of Washington of more than half a century, he seems to respect the military’s judgement about military matters and, on his good days, understands that even America has limits. 

Barack Obama let Hillary Clinton, the “Queen of Warmongers,” bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his.  And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.)

Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the U.S. into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.

As a careerist, Blinken said what he had to say to get to where he is. Obama in 2015 wisely decided against arming Ukraine after the Nuland and Biden-led 2014 coup because he did not want to antagonize Russia, for whom he said Ukraine was a vital interest, while it was not for the U.S. Obama also feared U.S. arms would fall into the hands of “thugs” — meaning neo-Nazi Azov types, whom Obama was well aware of.

Blinken at the time was Obama’s deputy secretary of state.  To support the president’s position, he told a conference in Berlin:

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

But once he was freed of the restraints of Obama, he joined Biden’s aggressive Ukraine policy at the top of the State Department. From that position, and with a power vacuum in the White House because of Biden’s dementia, Blinken has been openly pushing the neocon agenda, laid out plainly in the 2000 report of the Project for a New American Century. 

And what is that agenda? In another age, before it became a dirty word, it would have been proudly proclaimed as imperialism. It contains all of the hubris and sense of invincibility and impunity of any empire in history.

PNAC plainly promulgates that no power or alliance of powers will be allowed to rise up to stand in the way of the neocons’ mad quest to harness American power to achieve world domination. An alliance of powers such as that of China, Russia and the BRICS countries, which has only accelerated in opposition to unhinged, neoconservative adventurism.

No matter the many disasters piling up, notably Iraq, Palestine and now Ukraine, the neocons are undeterred and unrestrained. It’s about power and murder but it is made palatable to themselves with flowery language about America saving the world for democracy.

Their belief in their own supremacy, cloaked in an American flag, remains fanatic, no matter the death and destruction they cause. They do not understand that American power has limits and to test that, they risk everything.

In 2019, Blinken teamed up with arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan to write a Washington Post op-ed arguing for more aggressive use of U.S. power abroad and against U.S. domestic trends towards non-interventionism.

With Kagan’s wife Nuland out of the Biden Administration and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan crucially siding with the realists, Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”

That was 30 years ago. The neocons are in the penthouse now and only the restraint of the Pentagon and Sullivan’s persuasion brought Biden back from the brink.

This time.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

While Kharkhiv, second city of Ukraine, burns and literally disintegrates under Russian artillery fire and scores of thousands of people flee, that is his reaction.

We really do not know if Nero was a great musician. We can see for ourselves the Secretary of State of the United States of America is a ludicrous one.

As that shrewd, vastly experienced old reporter Andrew Cockburn pointed out, Blinken cannot even sing properly. He was flat throughout.

The song that he sang, supposedly with so much passion, was “Keep on Rockin in the Free World,” written by Crazy Horse and Neal Young back in 1989. And I am indebted to the great theoretical physicist and philosopher of science. Professor Jean Bricmont of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium for drawing my attention to its prophetic lyrics that the woeful Blinken was obviously totally oblivious too.

This is what the Secretary of State of the United States sang to the suffering people of Ukraine whom he has deliberately propelled into needless destruction by weaponizing them as the US and NATO spearhead to try and destroy the nation of Russia and bleed the Russian people white – a disgusting, insane and frightful goal that all too many United States Senators to their Eternal Judgment and Shame openly boast about from Richard Blumenthal to Lindsay Graham.

In fact, far from “celebrating” the Free World as the demented Blinken imagines it to be, the song was written in 1989 by Neil Young as a courageous and outspoken condemnation of the confrontational policies of then-US President George Herbert Walker Bush towards Russia and Iran.

The song begins:

“There’s colors on the street

“Red, white and blue

“People shufflin’ their feet

“People sleepin’ in their shoes

“But there’s a warnin’ sign on the road ahead

“There’s a lot of people sayin’ we’d be better off dead

“Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them

“So I try to forget it anyway I can.”

It is extraordinary that the Secretary of State of the United States of America could openly sing, with no regard whatsoever to the literal meaning of his words:

“Don’t feel like Satan but I am to them.”

That alone is a thought worth pondering upon for a long time – a very, very long time.

The song goes on to expose and condemn the pathologies of drug addiction, mass poverty and homelessness, already sweeping the United States and Western Europe when Neil Young wrote it 35 years ago, but all of them infinitely worse today.

 And it ridicules Bush’s much ballyhooed and totally fraudulent and meaningless “thousand points of light.”

Finally, it again advises hundreds of millions of doomed dupes to: 

“Keep on rockin in the free world.”

And now the Secretary of State of the United States of America has repeated that same advice to the Ukrainian people who have been usurped, lied to, rounded up as doomed cannon fodder and sent to their own mass slaughter in a war that Russia for eight years openly, consistently and repeatedly sought to avoid with a peaceful resolution and implementation of the Minsk Accords signed in August 2014 and February 2015. 

The video of course is of extraordinary and unique importance for another reason.

For once, in public, the Secretary of State of the United States of America actually told the Literal Truth.

Even though, of course, he was too stupid to realize it.

After almost two and a half years of war, the speech announced a “stay the course” approach for Washington’s Ukraine policy. Rather than use the recent $60 billion aid package to lay the groundwork for a feasible plan to end the conflict, the speech promised continued U.S. support for unconditional victory and continued efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO, one of the issues that helped to trigger the war in the first place.

One irony is that Ukraine won’t be permitted to join NATO as long as the war continues. The U.S. and other NATO countries — which could bring Ukraine into the alliance today if they wanted to — won’t make a defense commitment that requires them to risk nuclear conflict by putting their own troops on the Ukrainian front lines and fighting Russia directly. President Biden began his State of the Union speech a few months ago by comparing the war in Ukraine to World War II and calling it critical to the future of freedom, but immediately afterward hastened to assure the public that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way.”

Without a massive and risky escalation by outside powers, the best case scenario for Ukraine seems to be a bloody stalemate into the foreseeable future. Ukrainian territorial control has barely budged since their initial advances against the Russian invasion almost two years ago in summer 2022, even as hundreds of thousands of casualties have been incurred by both sides. U.S. officials admit that it won’t be possible for Ukraine to even attempt offensive operations until 2025, and even then, there is no guarantee that a new offensive won’t just repeat the bloody debacle of Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive.

Blinken tried to paint the picture of a thriving and prosperous Ukraine even as the war continued. But he had to distort the tragic situation on the ground to do it. He touted a 5% growth in Ukraine’s economy in 2023, but without mentioning that the Ukrainian economy is still 25% smaller than it was before the war, when it was already one of the poorest countries in Europe. And this economic growth is only achieved by massive infusions of foreign aid — the $115 billion committed by the EU and U.S. to Ukraine so far this year is more than two thirds the size of Ukraine’s own GDP.

Blinken’s speech claimed a sustainable Ukrainian prosperity could be achieved by “the growth of Ukraine’s burgeoning defense industry.” But Russia is hardly likely to permit Ukraine to become a defense production superpower while the two countries remain at war. Whatever you think of arms sales as the foundation for national prosperity, Ukraine can hardly build a globally competitive arms production industry under the disadvantage of having to shoot down a constant rain of Russian missiles aimed at its industrial plants.

The reality is that as long as the war continues Ukraine’s future is as a heavily subsidized battleground for a proxy conflict between the U.S. and EU and Russia. The kind of economic opportunities created by that future are grim at best. In a press conference later in the day, Blinken touted his visit to a Ukrainian “company producing world-leading prosthetics.” No doubt the company is world class, since it has to supply the demand from fifty thousand Ukrainian amputees (and counting) created by the ongoing conflict.

The $60 billion in aid offered by the U.S. is expensive in an absolute sense, but Americans barely notice it against the background of a $27 trillion economy. It’s Ukraine that bears the true cost of the war. With elections in Ukraine canceled for the foreseeable future as the conflict continues there are few mechanisms for the Ukrainian public to call for an alternative path.

We now know that there were serious Russian-Ukrainian peace talks taking place two years ago, soon after the Russian invasion, when Putin realized that his attempt at regime change in Ukraine had been thwarted. Those talks failed in part because Western powers refused to support the combination of compromises and practical security guarantees that Ukraine needed to make a peace agreement work. If the U.S. truly wants to support Ukraine’s future, we need to break from our current policies and champion a practical path to peace today.

Marcus Stanley is the Director of Studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Prior to joining the Quincy Institute, he spent a decade at Americans for Financial Reform. He has a PhD in public policy from Harvard, with a focus on economics.

Anthony Blinken as the embodiment of Deep State governing the US before and after various presidents

The president of the country should be responsible for foreign policy, but in this case, Joe Biden’s strategic vision of world problems is, to put it mildly, inadequate, and therefore, in fact, some mysterious entity “deep state,” whose face on the current geopolitical chessboard is Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, runs the show.

Indeed, as former Pentagon and CIA chief Robert Gates noted back in 2014, “Biden was wrong on almost every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” If we’re talking about the subsequent 10 years to the present, we need to replace “was wrong” in that statement with “is leading the world to a nuclear disaster.”

It’s not just Donald Trump who is talking about this, but many other politicians and ordinary citizens as well. According to a recent poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that we are already in the early stages of World War III, and since the current crisis is related to Ukraine, the tracks of this crisis indeed lead to Biden. As you know, along with his position as vice president in the Obama administration, Biden was also given the Ukrainian portfolio, which allowed him and Victoria Nuland to coordinate the Maidan coup in Kiev in February 2014. Then, already as US president, Biden rejected Moscow’s proposals in December 2021 to resolve the crisis on the basis of recognizing the neutral status of Ukraine and, with the help of then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, derailed the Istanbul agreements to end the conflict in March 2022. For now, Biden continues to pump arms and money into Ukraine while rejecting calls to seek a diplomatic settlement.

However, taking into account the above information regarding his adequacy, all this is done only on behalf of Biden, when he reads the texts prepared for him in advance and signs the documents, while the main decisions are made by Blinken, who is the brain of this disastrous policy.

Blinken’s crusade against Russia

Blinken began his crusade for American hegemony in 1994, landing an important government position on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council as his foreign policy speechwriter. After Republican George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, Blinken moved to the Senate, where he served as Democratic chief of staff on the Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Joe Biden. When Democrats returned to the White House under Obama in 2009 and Biden took over as vice president, Blinken became his national security aide. In 2021, Biden, already president, appointed Blinken as Secretary of State.

In this position, Blinken managed to rally the so-called collective West against Russia and to a large extent against China, but at the same time weakened America’s influence in much of the Global South and unwillingly contributed to the rapprochement between Russia and China.

As is known, in the 1970s, his predecessor Henry Kissinger managed to restore China against the USSR, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington tried to engage Russia in a confrontation with China. However, Blinken overestimated the capabilities of the hegemon and led attacks on two fronts at once.

China is Blinken’s second front

Thus, in early 2021, having just taken office as head of the State Department, Blinken invited a delegation of the Chinese Foreign Ministry leadership to an official meeting in Anchorage, the capital of Alaska. The purpose of the meeting was to achieve an easing of tensions between the two countries that have developed during Trump’s presidency. Instead, Blinken further corroded the relations, saying in his opening remarks that China’s policies “threaten the rules-based order that sustains global stability.” In response, senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi said that “the United States is using its military power and financial hegemony to exercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries, which hinders normal trade exchange and incites some countries to attack China.”

Recently, Blinken decided to rectify the situation and traveled to China with a long list of topics to discuss: Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, use of artificial intelligence, drug trafficking, human rights, trade. However, just before the flight, at Blinken’s prompting, of course, they decided in Washington to announce sanctions on those Chinese industries, with which the USA cannot compete. This concerned new tariffs on Chinese steel imports due to the success of electric car production there and the development of the shipping industry.

But the main issue Blinken focused on was China-Russian relations. He insisted that the Chinese stop selling various manufactured goods to Russia because the USA considers them “dual-use” goods to help it in its war with Ukraine.

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry said that “it is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible of the United States to provide large-scale aid to Ukraine while making baseless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.” This was followed by China’s demand that America investigates who was behind the explosions of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Blinken’s special operation to re-elect Biden

Finally, it should be recalled that it was Blinken who brought Biden to the White House, when, on the eve of voting in the November 2020 presidential election, he managed, with the help of the 51 members of US intelligence agencies, to accuse Russia of having a huge amount of dirt on Biden in his son Hunter’s laptop.

We are 6 months away from a new US presidential election. Things are not going well for Biden, but there is no doubt that Blinken, with whom he is inextricably linked, is preparing another special operation for his victory. This time, however, it is not just about internal political struggles, but also about the fate of mankind. There’s no telling if anyone in America will be able to stop this mad slide toward World War III, but at this point, no one else but Trump has a chance of snatching the victory from Biden.

I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it told us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.

“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.

What was this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?

The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues,” said CNBC.  “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs,” the Japan Times commented.

Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press (AP), got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, was to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”

This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.

There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts.

The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel.

And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.

Nonsensical Times 10

But the premier question Blinken addressed has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state would more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.

It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.

But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:

“We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.”

A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:

“We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”

As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.

For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order.

I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.” But precisely.

Non-interference Key to Future

For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime).

“It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”

I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.

One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post-Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and non-interference into the internal affairs of others.

These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.

Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.

One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict. 

Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.

If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion last Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021.

Given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?

Blinken Has Learned Nothing

My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them.

It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.

Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made. 

Lessons of which there are several. One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China. 

Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.

Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.

Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy. 

Think carefully about this. In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th.

This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.