And it is on his record where Blinken falls down.
Former secretary of defense Robert Gates, a man who served under both a Republican (George W. Bush) and Democratic President (Barack Obama), while liking Joe Biden personally, summed him up in his memoirs as a man “who has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
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Of course, for the latter portion of this time, Tony Blinken was sitting in the room, serving as the president-elect’s primary foreign policy adviser.
Biden and Blinken were catastrophically wrong about the Iraq War (as were fellow Wilsonian hawks Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, for that matter). They were wrong about the US remaining endlessly in Afghanistan. They were wrong about the Obama administration’s “reset” with Russia. They were wrong about the disastrous intervention in Libya, which left it a smoldering failed state.
They were wrong about China too, following the blob groupthink over the past two decades in seeing Beijing’s rise as fundamentally benign.
The one time Blinken has strayed from his boss, advocating US involvement in the Dantean hell that is Syria, he appeared eager to increase American intervention, seemingly having learnt nothing from Iraq. As Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri put it, Blinken “backed every endless war since the Iraq invasion”.
Accountability must matter to any great power — with successful statesmen being rewarded and failing ones sent out to pasture — if it is to remain a great power for long. To put it mildly, if an analyst wanted to join my political risk firm with Blinken’s record, I would send them expeditiously to the door.
What’s primarily wrong here is not the man himself; it is the unreconstructed wrongheaded philosophy of the American foreign policy establishment, a whole misguided way of looking at the world.