Biden's Secretary of State Pick Slammed Trump's 'America First' Foreign Policy as Nationalistic 'Xenophobia'

(U.S. State Department via AP)

As reported by RedState’s Bonchie earlier today, Joe Biden on Monday named longtime advisor Antony Blinken as his pick for secretary of state, assuming of course that Biden is eventually certified as the winner of the presidential election.

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Like clockwork, the liberal media did what they have done for 10 months and will do for the next four years. Again, “assuming.” They glowingly embraced Biden’s decision.

Bianna Golodryga, one among a multitude of CNN Trump-haters, snagged the following snippet from a Bloomberg article about Biden’s selection of Blinken — with a snide comment aimed at Trump thrown in, just for grins.

“The selection of Blinken as America’s top diplomat signals Biden’s aim to place experienced people in key cabinet posts.”

This sentence would not have stood out before 2016, it likely would not have been written at all actually.

Golodryga was right…

… for the wrong reasons. I bolded “experienced people” because that is precisely what Antony Blinken is. The question is, experienced in what?

Yes, the career foreign policy “expert,” who served as Biden’s top aide in 2020 when the then-senator voted in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, and later became deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration, is indeed “experienced.” Thing is, he’s also “experienced” in referring to Donald Trump’s ‘America First” foreign policy — which was, in large part, responsible for Trump winning the 2016 election — as nationalistic, isolationist, and xenophobic. And dangerous.

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In a 2019 Washington Post op-ed Blinken co-authored, titled ‘America First’ is only making the world worse. Here’s a better approach,’ he shredded Trump’s “doctrine,” as I suggested earlier, as all kinds of bad; with a ridiculous “ominous” allusion to a not-too-distant dark time in the world.

Doubling down on “America First,” with its mix of nationalism, unilateralism and xenophobia, would only exacerbate these problems. But so would embracing the alternative offered by thinkers across the ideological spectrum who, concerned that our reach exceeds our means, advise us to pull back without considering the likely consequences, as we did in the 1930s.

‘As we did in the 1930s”? Whatever — and whoever — did Blinken have in mind?

“Successive administrations have underfunded and undervalued our diplomacy,” he wrote,” none more dangerously than the present one.”

For the record, Blinken offered not a single scintilla of evidence to even suggest that Trump’s use or lack thereof of diplomacy will leave America in a more dangerous position when he leaves office than it was when he entered it.

On the contrary, Barack “Red Line” Obama’s “foreign policy” consisted of making hollow threats to Middle Eastern dictators, referring to the deadliest terrorist group in history as a “jayvee team,” and throwing Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Israel under the bus as far as he could — all the while lauding the Palestinians and the “peaceful religion” of Islam.

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And Blinken?

He was not only a staunch proponent of U.S. involvement in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Libya during the Obama administration; he admitted during a May interview on “Face the Nation” that the Obama administration “failed” in Syria — with a plan that he helped construct.

“The last administration has to acknowledge that we failed, not for want of trying, but we failed. We failed to prevent a horrific loss of life. We failed to prevent massive displacement of people internally in Syria and, of course, externally as refugees. And it’s something that I will take with me for the rest of my days.”

Yet here Antony Blinken finds himself again. Or at least—on the precipice—of being in a position to fail again. With a “brand new” administration.

It’s beginning to feel like déjà vu all over again, isn’t it?

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