Tony Blinken and Joe Biden Represent Decades of Unmitigated Failure so They Make an Ideal Foreign Policy Team

Vichy Republican Robert Gates famously described Joe Biden as someone who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” I think Gates was being kind. Whenever you find a national security debacle or foreign policy disaster in the past 40 years you will find the grinning Rain Man face of Joe Biden at the epicenter. He is a man whose Midas touch for disaster is only matched by his willingness to turn his official position into hard cash in the pockets of friends and family…with a 10% cut for “the big guy,” of course.

So while the media and official Washington were all ecstatically, in the words of the poet, “amusing themselves, abusing themselves, and rubbing it in their hair” at the thought of Joe Biden’s announcement that he’d chosen gray, establishment man Anthony Blinken as his Secretary of State, should he eventually be determined to be president (see Biden Reveals His Secretary of State Pick, and the Swooning Begins), David Harsanyi, writing at National Review takes a look at Blinken’s record and it looks like Blinken would be a perfect match for a Joe Biden administration. By the way, I’m cutting Harsanyi some slack here. It is pretty obvious that most of National Review’s staff was either actively fluffing for Biden or giving him aid and comfort by the direction of their coverage.

After cataloging Blinken’s failures, Harsanyi says:

Many smart people have pointed out that Biden’s return to the Eurocentric foreign policy of Blinken is far preferable to, say, the elevation of ideologues such as Senator Chris Murphy or Ben Rhodes. Still, there are many catastrophic blunders crammed into Blinken’s long résumé. Perhaps we should be thankful that Biden isn’t elevating an autocratic former novelist like Rhodes to be his foreign-policy guru. But the institutionalists have done tremendous damage as well.

Blinken was wrong about Israel, the Palestinians, and the prospects of peace. He was wrong about Iraq. Wrong on Iran. Wrong on Syria. Wrong on Russia. Wrong on Libya. Wrong on China. If you ever failed as much at your job, you wouldn’t have one. In Washington, you get to run the place.

This record puts Blinken right in step with our foreign policy establishment when has been adrift for 50 years and, since the implosion of the USSR, has shown that it is bereft of vision…an aviator would characterize their actions as being “out of altitude, out of airspeed, and out of ideas.” They have led us from one disaster to another. From the insistence that we recognize Russia as an international power (it isn’t, it is a third world kleptocracy with a colonial economy in a demographic and economic death spiral) to the coddling of the Palestinians the kowtowing to China, Biden and Blinken have been joined at the hip.

The ineptitude and absence of vision or ideas will not matter to the left or to their loyal stenographers because Blinken epitomizes the type of person that these people believe should rule us.

He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar (he played Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall at graduation) and football, and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles – love songs titled Lip Service and Patience – uploaded on Spotify.

Lip Service, eh? I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of that in a Biden administration.

Tom Cotton gave a blistering analysis of the Biden-Blinken record yesterday. It is covered in detail by my colleague SisterToldjah Facts First: Tom Cotton Takes Aim at Joe Biden’s Prospective Cabinet Picks, No Punches Are Pulled but this is the bottom line:

One thing’s for certain: Joe Biden’s Democratic dream team has a lot of fancy titles. They’ve worked in Washington a long time.

But credentials are not the same thing as achievement. If this is the A-Team, we need walk-on tryouts immediately.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 24, 2020

Marco Rubio, though, I thought made the point better:

Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools,have strong resumes,attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline

I support American greatness

And I have no interest in returning to the “normal” that left us dependent on China

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 24, 2020

These people can’t represent America because they don’t understand America and they don’t like America and real Americans. They want to reduce us to the role of a butler for the Euros and a butt-boy for the Chinese. They are consistently wrong and in that, Blinken and Biden will be perfectly in sync. God help the reso of us.