October 4, 2024 - 1:25pm

Antony Blinken’s recent op-ed in Foreign Affairs is one of the most exceptional pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long time. Its account of the past four years is so detached from reality that it seems to be plucked straight out of a bad direct-to-video Hollywood movie. The plot goes more or less as follows: years of poor leadership have left the US weakened and divided, which emboldens the Bad Guys — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — to team up and launch an unprecedented threat on the “free, open, secure, and prosperous world that the United States and most countries seek”, sowing chaos and violence in the hope of plunging the world into a New Dark Age.

But their evil plans are thwarted when the countries of the Free World, led by the US and its valiant newly-elected president Joe Biden, succeed in putting aside their differences to jointly fight back and re-establish peace and stability in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere. The story ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. The US-led Free World has succeeded for now in foiling the Bad Guys’ plans for world domination — “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago”, our narrator tells us — but they haven’t been defeated yet…

It makes for an entertaining read. But equally, is Blinken really unaware of the fact that the Biden administration’s foreign policy stands out as the most hawkish and reckless since the George W. Bush era? The world is certainly more geopolitically volatile than it was four years ago.

On Ukraine, regardless of whether or not one thinks America made poor decisions which provoked Russia, the Biden administration arguably dashed all opportunities for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. It has instead opted to use Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, in what is rapidly escalating into a direct, potentially nuclear Nato-Russia war. It is also alleged to have been directly involved in, or at least allowed, the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, the worst act of industrial terrorism in recent European history.

In the Middle East, the White House cast away the promised renewal of the nuclear agreement with Iran by setting rigorous conditions that Washington knew Tehran could never accept. Over the past year, it has offered Israel near-unconditional political, economic and military support even in the face of the fierce assault on Gaza, thus contributing directly to the dramatic regional escalation that we are now witnessing. Meanwhile, in the Asia-Pacific, the Biden administration diluted the US’s historic commitments made in the “One China” accord with Beijing regarding Taiwan and pursued an unprecedented military build-up in the region in preparation for all-out war with China, while waging “a full-blown economic war” against the country.

The Biden administration has acted clumsily in what looks like a desperate attempt to stem the decline of US hegemony and slow down, or ideally reverse, the ongoing transition towards a multipolar system. This a rather different story from the plot of Blinken’s movie. That’s not to say that everything he writes is fictional: in some respects it is true that “the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago”.

Although this is not true in global terms — the US is arguably more internationally loathed and isolated than it’s ever been — it is certainly true relative to its Western protectorates in Europe and elsewhere, over which America has reasserted its full control, militarily and economically. Even Hollywood blockbusters contain a kernel of truth.


Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

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