Teaching Diplomacy to Antony Blinken

Since being sworn in as secretary of state in January 2021, he has not visited Russia at all!

How often has Blinken as secretary of state flown to Beijing to confer with the leaders of China to prevent a catastrophic war in the Pacific? I will tell you.

Once. During all of his three years in office.

A simple question: Why has the Congress not impeached Blinken for his laziness, stupidity and criminal incompetence in so disrespecting and ignoring the other two dominant superpowers on the planet?

The late Henry Kissinger – at age 100 – shortly before he died, flew all the way to Beijing at Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin’s request (Why didn’t the lazy, passive worthless old fool go herself?) Blinken, aged only 61 and apparently in good health, unlike the national interests of the United States he is charged with defending, did not.

In just two years of intense focus and shuttle diplomacy from 1973 to 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger really did bring lasting peace between Israel and its most dangerous enemies Egypt and Syria.

Yet in the endless reams of commentary and mindless punditry on the current Middle East crisis and the need to put Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis, Russia, China, Venezuela and the Andromeda Galaxy in their place and teach them Who’s Boss, not a single one of these geen-ius-es has ever once referred to what Henry Kissinger achieved half a century ago, or how he did it, or the lessons our current Masters (and Mistresses) of the Universe might possibly learn from his example.

First, Kissinger prioritized, and then he focused. The stupid old farts of his day were quick to opine that a secretary of state should not ignore The Rest of the World and only focus on a couple of narrow areas like peace with the Soviet Union and China or avoiding war in the Middle East.

How could Kissinger possibly neglect Diversity Hiring at the State Department, concern over the lack of respect for human rights issues in Gambia or the less than perfect democratic practices of Upper Volta? How Dare He! 

Today Kissinger would certainly be pilloried – and even impeached – for not holding huge global, meaningless universal summits of hot air to immediately solve all the problems of Global Climate Change and nuclear proliferation. Those exercises in imbecility were of course President Barack Obama’s pride and joy, and he happily fed his ludicrously monstrous and narcissistic ego with all the fawning praise he was given for them.

None of these universally praised efforts achieved anything at all. Anything. But all of Obama’s pathetic childish posturing went down the memory hole at once. The 100 million or so American imbeciles who worshipped him then still do.

But Henry Kissinger realized that solving every little problem in the world would be a waste of time and a sick joke if it meant the big problems of war and peace were ignored and allowed to descend into the Inferno.

The League of Nations after all created an admirable International Labor Union and global postal services cooperation organization. It passed endless legalistic agreements guaranteed to create paradise across the earth – if only of course anybody took them seriously. 

But today, no one remembers any of those millions of diplomatic man hours toiling at Geneva which were the pride and joy of such ludicrous fools as then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson, or the fatuous Anthony Eden – the model for Ronald Colman’s hero in the witless 1937 movie “Lost Horizon.”

No. All the League of Nations is remembered for today is its total failure to deter German, Italian and Japanese fascist aggression around the world that led to the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history – at least so far.

Henry Kissinger in his four short years as secretary of state understood all this. He had already been an outstanding historian and director of the Harvard International Seminar for almost 20 years, flourishing there in those golden days when James Conant and not the Genius Claudine Gay was its president.

Kissinger had been a US Army combat soldier who had personally been involved in liberating a concentration camp, rescuing its survivors and hunting down Nazi underground rings in Germany at the end of the war. Today of course any of those activities would automatically bar him from tenure at Harvard, Yale or Columbia.

Instead, Henry Kissinger focused on what mattered. And unlike President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan or the ever-invisible Blinken today, he believed that for diplomacy to work you actually had to travel to the capitals of the other diplomats and leaders you were dealing with and engage them personally: not once. But over many months and years.

As far as I know, Kissinger never engaged in the delightful hobbies of hunting or fly fishing. But he understood the importance of waiting, the importance of patience, and of process, to land the catch, hit the target or bag the prize.

Kissinger well remembered that Otto von Bismarck, along with Konrad Adenauer greatest of all German leaders and diplomats, had served for years as Prussia’s Minister in St. Petersburg, Russia where he forged a crucial, lasting personal friendship with the great Tsar Alexander II – the Liberator of the Serfs.

For Kissinger, his personal meetings with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and Chinese Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Cho Enlai were equally important. 

Only one US president has ever tried – and even he ineptly – to treat Vladimir Putin, director of the most formidable thermonuclear arsenal on earth – with personal respect and dignity. That was the always reviled Donald Trump. And he was endlessly accused of treason for doing so. 

Kissinger also always showed sustained moral and political courage. The whining, whispering voices of the Washington Wise Men were always whispering in his ear that he was gambling too much on success in his Middle East shuttle missions. That America’s prestige would crash if or when (as they were convinced) he failed. 

Kissinger ignored them, He treated them with contempt. Other people politely showed them the door out of the State Department. Henry was never so courteous.

There were no victory parades, no Roman triumphs for a prince of peace when Henry Kissinger left office in January 1977. Under the next president Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, all went to hell and high water in the region with the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement with a ferocious Islamist fundamentalist movement.

Brzezinski was actually so stupid that he welcomed this development. He could see no further than that Russia was Evil. And he saw no danger to America and the wider world in the rise of a murderous religious movement that targeted innocent Muslims even more than it sought to kill Christians and Jews. In this, Brzezinski, rather than Kissinger, was far more in step with the conventional witlessness of both Harvard and Washington – and remains so to this day.

The West prospered thanks to Kissinger’s extraordinary, subtle and brilliant global realignments from 1969, when he became national security adviser, to when he left office in 1977.  But the lessons of how he operated and how he achieved so much so quickly vanished down many Orwellian memory holes.

As Kissinger’s excellent biographer, British historian Niall Ferguson rightly points out, the leadership of the United States continues to run an enormous history deficit. The lessons and memories of the past are never remembered and never learned.

Kissinger, a 19th century classical European scholar in spirit and intellect alone among 20th century American diplomats and statesmen, understood this well too. You could not teach that lesson to Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan or Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland if you drilled it into their skulls.

And that is why the United States – and the world – now face a catastrophic explosion that is chain-reacting across the Middle East.

Even now aggressive shuttle diplomacy and a relentless focus on the key issues in the right ways that Henry Kissinger taught us could save America – and the world.

But none of these lazy, complacent, arrogant, ignorant, stupid and worthless buffoons will ever dream of trying it.