The Irrelevance of Anthony Blinken

Rome had to listen to Nero’s fiddle. Blinken subjected the poor denizens of a Kyiv bar to his skills with the guitar.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has become the subject of mockery again following the bizarre incident where he took the stage and played electric guitar in the Ukrainian capital. It must have been poor compensation for the soldiers who came expecting reassurance that their return to the front line would not be in vain.

Blinken’s real sin was not his music, even though it was by all accounts subpar. It was what he did not provide – namely, hard truths, and a policy.

Instead, Anthony Blinken offered empty words. Except they were words that came from a man viewed as so inconsequential that they went largely ignored by the locals and unreported by a press corps which instead covered his dive bar rendition of a 1989 Neil Young song. If you wanted to know America’s long-term strategy, or even a vision for the next six months, America’s Secretary of State had platitudes galore. Substance, not so much.

Relationships, whether between individuals or nations, are built on honesty. Little white lies are useful when dealing with strangers, but anyone who has ever been in a relationship will rapidly learn that telling a loved one what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear ensures neither longevity nor the well-being of either party. It might be embarrassing to tell a friend that their fly is unzipped. It would be a betrayal to allow them to attend an important event in public unaware.

During Secretary Blinken’s recent visit to Kyiv, he told his hosts what he thought they and their Western supporters wanted to hear. Yes, things might not be going as well as hoped, but he blamed the delay in aid, promising that not only would it not happen again, but that Ukraine could expect indefinite support. He promised tangible steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine at July’s summit.

Part of the reason for the chilly reception Blinken found is that it is unclear if these were even the words Ukrainians wanted to hear.

After more than two years of war, even they want to hear evidence of a concrete plan, not abstract words of encouragement and promises they don’t believe can be kept. Blinken may have felt that by insisting that American support was unwavering, and that Ukraine’s prospect of NATO membership was real, he was reassuring Ukrainians that they might not have to compromise on the latter to reach a settlement. Instead, he convinced too many Ukrainians that America either had no serious plan for ending the war, or had one and was lying to them in order to disguise a plot to reach a deal with Putin following the election.

Blinken in Kyiv, much like Blinken in Riyadh, Blinken in Beijing, Blinken in Jerusalem, and for that matter, Biden in America, has a credibility problem. John F Kennedy liked to discuss a missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union when he ran for president, but today the U.S. faces a credibility gap. Whether friend or foe, no one takes the words of the United States seriously, and a large part of the reason why is that no one, at home or abroad, seems to take America’s senior diplomat seriously.

Anthony Blinken, to be fair, had the deck stacked against him. The office of Secretary of State ranks first in the cabinet hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson was the inaugural holder of the office. George W. Bush gave the role to Colin Powell, who many believed could have been America’s first African American president, and Condoleezza Rice, previously Bush’s National Security Adviser and perhaps the figure closest to him in the administration.

Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State was Hillary Clinton, his defeated rival for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and her successor was John Kerry, the party’s 2004 presidential nominee.

Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had not held public office, but as CEO of Exxon Mobil, he had in effect run a medium-sized country. Mike Pompeo was a Marine, congressman, and director of the CIA.

Then there is Anthony Blinken.

Who? That was the initial reaction of large parts of the Washington press corps and the American public to his appointment. Blinken was a professional foreign policy staffer, serving on the Clinton National Security Council, and then for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under then-Chairman Joe Biden.

When Biden became vice president, Blinken served as his National Security Advisor before becoming a deputy national security adviser to Obama for two years, and then an assistant secretary of State. What stands out is at no point did he hold elected office or run any agency or staff. He was never Chief of Staff to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden’s vice presidential office, or at the State Department. Every role he held involved working for someone else, usually Joe Biden, including his tenure out-of-office, when he ran the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center from 2017 to 2019.

The office of secretary of State does, of course, contain the word “secretary,” but for a president or prime minister to appoint what amounts to their own longtime secretary to that position is an act usually associated with authoritarian regimes headed by octogenarians. That comparison likely reflects as poorly upon Biden as it does upon Blinken when the latter meets with his counterparts. That sort of appointment indicates that the leader either cannot find anyone else for the role, or cannot trust anyone else with it, or often both – all of which tends to be inauspicious for the longevity of leaders who resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel that low.

As secretary of State, Blinken has done little to alleviate suspicions that Biden has no real idea what he wants to achieve on the global stage. Yet he is also unwilling to allow anyone else to act. Blinken’s recent stop in Kyiv is typical of an itinerary which for three years has involved flying to foreign capitals in order to provide assurances that Joe Biden remains deeply committed to whatever they care about, and that they can count upon the full, yet unspecified support of the United States to achieve whatever they happen to be doing.

Blinken has been unwavering in his assurances to Israel that the United States stands 100 percent behind the Jewish state in a military campaign and suggested that it would not be in the world’s interest for the war to end before Hamas was eliminated. Until, that is, the Biden administration decided that the military campaign must be brought to a close and Blinken informed Israel that the elimination of Hamas was impossible.

A secretary of State who was a true ally to Israel would have informed Israeli politicians of growing pro-Palestinian sentiment within the Democratic Party. He would have also advised Israel to accelerate the campaign, or to settle for something short of the elimination of Hamas. A figure of stature in the role would have been able to insist to Joe Biden the importance of doing so. Blinken has evidently done neither.

Instead, Anthony Blinken insisted that the United States remained 100 percent committed to the elimination of Hamas and 100 percent confident in Israel’s ability to do so right up until the moment Joe Biden, not Anthony Blinken, let slip to CNN that the U.S. had halted weapon shipments in response to Israel acting on those guarantees. The best read was that Biden had not shared his intentions with Blinken, nor considered him worth consulting. Blinken’s duty was not to convey the position of the United States, or Anthony Blinken, but of Joe Biden – until Joe Biden happened to change his mind.

What must Israel do to appease Joe Biden? Well, to the extent that he has a vision, the president has clearly not shared it with Blinken, merely some of his grievances. Blinken insists Israel “needs a clear and concrete plan for Gaza’s future,” while making clear “We do not and will not support Israeli reoccupation of Gaza” and “ do not support Hamas governance in Gaza.”

What possible “plan” could reconcile these mutually exclusive impulses? Joe Biden has no idea, but until Israel solves Biden’s conundrum, their weapons will not arrive. Unless Biden suddenly changes his mind, in which case odds are Blinken will be among the last to know.

This has served to render Blinken’s assurances worthless to foreign interlocutors, and his presence, as in Kyiv, an interminable bore that distracts from the business of forming a policy without benefit of knowing what Joe Biden intends or desires from them.

The Ukrainians know that American support is neither indefinite nor assured. They just watched an aid package take over six months to pass. Israeli leaders can watch television and access social media. Some of them even partake in both. They know what message Democrats are sending domestically in the U.S. They can compare that message to the one brought by Anthony John Blinken and conclude which they should follow. Xi Jinping must be doubly impatient when Blinken tries to lecture him about whether it is in China’s interests to aid Russia precisely because he knows the very fact Biden sent Blinken means the U.S. president has nothing of substance to say or a policy to announce.

It might seem harsh that Blinken has become symbolic of Joe Biden’s lack of vision, of Joe Biden’s lack of reliability, and of Joe Biden’s unwillingness to devolve decision-making to genuinely independently-minded allies either at home or abroad.

If Joe Biden had a vision, he would be able to identify someone of independent standing who shared it, and could execute it on the global stage, as Nixon did with Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush did with James Baker. If Joe Biden was willing to let someone else pursue policy, he would have appointed figures of stature, not Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Merrick Garland, and Anthony Blinken.

Instead, Blinken is trapped in a purgatory of his own making. Having spent his entire career acting as a messenger for others, for the past two decades one Joseph Robinette Biden, he now finds himself traveling the world, making excuses for lacking any message to deliver.

No matter how skillful the strings, or how iconic the track, renditions of Neil Young cannot disguise the fact that Anthony Blinken played because he had nothing to say. Nor, under Joe Biden, does the United States of America on the world stage.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.