Before the first day of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he already had more diplomatic achievements than Joe Biden did on the last day of his. The entrance of the Trump team into the negotiations was the difference in Gaza. Biden opened his administration with the promise of “a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But after four years of wasted opportunity, the Biden administration would struggle to name a single diplomatic accomplishment.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s inclusion in his January 2 exit interview with The New York Times of the Biden administration’s “core goal” of making “sure that the war [in Gaza] wouldn’t spread, the conflict wouldn’t spread to other fronts, to other countries” and that they have “been working” on that “every day since,” is risible because it spread to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.
Blinken was asked how he looks back on the decision “to support Ukraine’s military offensive without a parallel diplomatic track to try and end the conflict.” His answer, as America’s chief diplomat, is no less humiliating. He defined bringing fifty countries together, who waged war on Russia militarily and economically, as “extraordinary diplomacy,” while conceding that, since the war began, there was not one “opportunity to engage diplomatically in a way that could end the war on just and durable terms.”
Biden opened his presidency with the promise to “offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy,” to “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights,” to correct the course on Trump’s “abject failure” in Venezuela, and to bring in a new approach to North Korea that “is open to and will explore diplomacy.”
Biden failed on all four. Instead, he ushered in an era in which the State Department has been reduced to the hawkish arm of the Defense Department.
At the end of his term, far from reversing Trump’s policies, Biden’s Cuba policy looks more like Trump’s than like Barack Obama’s. Biden maintained, and even increased, sanctions. The United States continued to support dissident activists and to fund regime change. Most importantly, and most devastatingly, the Biden administration continued to uphold the illegal embargo of Cuba in every single vote at the United Nations. In October 2024, only one other country in the world joined the U.S. in support of its embargo with one other abstaining.
On January 14, with less than a week in his term, Biden announced that he would, at last, remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Four years ago, that would have counted as a diplomatic accomplishment. Now, it is an ineffectual gesture that will simply be erased. William LeoGrande, professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, told me that “with just days left in his presidency, [Biden] relaxed sanctions he should have relaxed four years ago—sanctions that will almost certainly be reimposed by Donald Trump.” Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, told Fox News that “anything they [the Biden Administration] are doing right now we can do back, and no one should be under any illusion in terms of a change in Cuba policy.”
LeoGrande summarized Biden’s diplomatic legacy in Cuba by telling me that “Joe Biden’s Cuba policy accomplished nothing—actually, worse than nothing, because it left both Cubans and the United States worse off. He reneged on his campaign promise to return to Obama’s policy of engagement, a policy that was enormously popular in Latin America, Europe, and in the United States—everywhere except south Florida. In a vain quest for votes in Miami, Biden left most of Donald Trump’s extreme sanctions in place, immiserating the Cuban people in the midst of the pandemic.”
Biden’s diplomatic legacy in Iran is no less disappointing. Biden promised a quick return to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. Instead, he refused to end sanctions—the flesh of the agreement—and refused to promise that the U.S. would not break the deal again even for the duration of Biden’s term—the soul of any agreement. Though it was the United States that illegally pulled out of the deal, Biden demanded additional concessions from Iran.
Instead of following Obama’s diplomacy with Iran, Biden followed Trump’s maximum pressure on Iran. In order “never to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Biden said the U.S. “is prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”
But the United States does not believe Iran is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review concludes that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” CIA Director William Burns has repeatedly said that there is no evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. Most recently, Burns reiterated in a January 10 interview, “We do not see any sign today that any such decision has been made.”
The election of Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian brought a reformist back to the presidency of Iran. Pezeshkian has emphasized the need to mend relations with the U.S. and the West. He has called for bypassing intermediaries in favor of direct negotiations. But that did not influence the Biden administration in its stubbornness not to negotiate. When asked at a July 8 press briefing if “the U.S. now ready to resume nuclear talks, other talks, or make any diplomatic moves with Iran in light of this new president,” National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby responded, “No, we’re—we’re not in a position where we’re willing to get back to the negotiating table with Iran just based on the fact that they’ve elected a new president.” Another missed diplomatic opportunity.
Lack of willingness to engage with Iran diplomatically has, instead of the strategically important goal of mending relations between Iran and the West, pushed Iran closer to China and Russia. During the Biden years, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, two China-Russia led international organizations. On January 17, 2025, Iran signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Russia. The details are not yet public, but Russian President Vladimir Putin says it includes bilateral cooperation in “politics and security” and collaboration on “the development of nuclear power plants.”
During Biden’s presidency, diplomacy with China has been set aside in favor of increased confrontation. Biden has sullied the One China policy, declared Taiwan a critical strategic location for U.S. defense, said that the U.S. would send troops to Taiwan if China attacked and weaponized and militarized the conflict.
Perhaps most dangerously of all, Biden pursued the opposite of diplomacy in the Russia-Ukraine war. When diplomacy offered a real chance to avoid the war before it began and to end the war in the weeks after it did, the U.S. refused to negotiate with Russia in the first instance and discouraged and blocked Ukraine from negotiating with Russia in the second. Since then, Biden and Blinken have abdicated diplomacy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has barely, if ever, officially spoken to Russia foreign minister Sergei Lavrov since the war began, and President Biden has not met with President Putin once. By the summer of 2024, Biden was still maintaining that “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now.”
Relations with Russia and China are more dangerous as Biden leaves office. Relations have not improved in Cuba and Iran, despite Obama setting the platter to which Biden could have easily returned. Biden’s promise of “relentless diplomacy” devolved into the abdication of diplomacy and a tragically wasted opportunity.
January 21, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Antony Blinken, Joe Biden, Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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This week’s “breakthrough” in ceasefire negotiations to end the genocidal campaign against Gaza came, according to regional sources, after a single intervention by US president-elect Trump’s designated envoy Steve Witkoff in which he ordered Netanyahu’s government to capitulate. While we might be skeptical of Trump’s habit of claiming credit for any progress, it was corroborated by the far-right members of the Netanyahu government erupting into the kind of tantrum for which they are now world-famous, framing the deal as a disaster imposed on “Israel” by the incoming administration.
While a welcome relief, the imposition of the ceasefire on “Israel” by Trump also brings into stark focus the pointlessness of the last year and a half of slaughter as well as the regionalization of the war to the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.
In the aftermath of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Biden, while parroting “Israel’s” atrocity propaganda about beheaded infants in ovens, gave Netanyahu a carte blanche to declare total war on the people of Gaza. As the unique scale of the atrocities in the Strip became clear, Biden proceeded, through his spineless UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to provide diplomatic cover for the genocide at the Security Council. Breaking even with its European surrogates, the US vetoed every resolution that called for an end to the butchery, clearly straining to invent new objections to deflect global outrage at such cold-blooded cynicism.
The free rein given by the American government only emboldened the Israeli regime to widen the scope of the war. It achieved this to great effect through its airstrike on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus. In addition to violating every rule of modern (and ancient) diplomacy, the attack killed several high-ranking Iranian officials, guaranteeing that Tehran would retaliate directly, which it did with the largest volley of drones in military history (thus far) against “Israel”.
As was clear from the warning Tehran issued as the attack unfolded, it was deliberately calibrating its response to avert further escalation. By this point, the urgent need for a ceasefire was indisputable. It was, however, to presage the most shameful chapter of the US administration’s complicity.
Shortly afterward, in June, Biden lied that a ceasefire deal had finally been reached, that it was at the initiative of the Netanyahu government, and that the Israeli leadership had accepted it. Secretary of State Antony Blinken clownishly trumpeted this falsehood, along with the claim that the only impediment to the ceasefire was Hamas’ refusal of its terms. It was well known at the time to be a lie, but the breakthrough of the last week confirms it beyond all doubt.
The Biden Administration’s refusal from that point on to impose a ceasefire cleared the path for the Israeli regime to massively escalate the war by assassinating Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital Tehran, which, along with its flagrant campaign of terrorism against Lebanon, culminating in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, compelled Tehran to forcefully retaliate with a further massive drone and ballistic missile barrage against Israeli military targets.
Seizing the opportunity, Netanyahu used the response to his own provocations to launch a cynical war of choice against Lebanon in the vain belief that Israeli infiltration had “decapitated” Hezbollah. This most destructive war in Lebanon’s recent history displaced more than a million Lebanese and obliterated civilian infrastructure in the South, Beirut, and the Beqaa Valley, killing at least 4,000 civilians and wounding nearly 17,000. Despite this blitzkrieg, Israeli ground forces found themselves unable to advance as much as one kilometer along the entire stretch of the south Lebanese border. Along with a mounting casualty rate, “Israel” was forced to accept a ceasefire, albeit one that has given it cover to continue detonating villages on the border and launching drone and air strikes against Lebanese targets.
Throughout the entirety of this catastrophic year, US voters were shamelessly gaslit by the Democratic Party. First, they were fed the laughable falsehood that Biden was being repeatedly “deceived” by the Israeli leadership and that he personally detested the Israeli Prime Minister. Clearly, it was never to the extent that he would even consider withholding the deluge of armaments without which Tel Aviv could not prosecute the genocide or its spill-over in more than half a dozen other regional theatres. Secondarily, we were admonished, even by supposed supporters of Palestine, that to not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris would be to see the genocide intensify in a second Trump presidency.
While there is more than ample cause for skepticism, the ease with which the US president-elect has forced the Israeli leadership to fall into line has torched the last fig leaf of justification that the Democrats were ever interested in doing anything but stalling for time so that Tel Aviv could ‘finish the job,’ even at the cost of losing the election to what they claimed is the “Hitler of our time.”
Even as the Palestinians may take comfort that the last year has thrown their cause to the forefront of the global agenda; it has nonetheless come at a still uncalculated cost in life and property. When the true toll is eventually calculated, as well as the fascists of Tel Aviv, every drop of blood will be on the heads of the now-former Biden administration that so willingly offered up an entire region for slaughter.
January 18, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Antony Blinken, Israel, Joe Biden, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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As the Iranian nation mourned the tragic death of President Ebrahim Raisi this week, the United States could not even muster a respectful offer of condolence.
The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, officially that country’s top diplomat, made a crass remark that the Iranian people would be “better off”. This as the Islamic Republic had declared five days of mourning for the late president whose funeral in the city of Mashhad was attended by millions of Iranians.
President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash along with the country’s much-respected Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and several other dignitaries who were also on board the aircraft. The fatal crash happened in treacherous weather over a mountainous region in northwest Iran as the president’s entourage returned from a visit to Azerbaijan.
Most of the world expressed shock and grief over the loss. The UN General Assembly held a minute’s silence and at the funeral, 68 nations were represented including officials from Russia and China.
The United States and Iran have been staunch adversaries for almost half a century following the Iranian revolution in 1979. Nevertheless, it is a basic matter of diplomacy and etiquette for countries to show a token of sympathy at such a time of national mourning.
The disgraceful and cheap comments about the death of Iran’s president show how inadequate Blinken is as the supposed U.S. primary diplomat. But the failure is not merely a personal matter, it epitomizes the general collapse of Washington’s political quality and international standing. The United States presumes to be a world leader but it evidently has no class. Biden, the president and Blinken’s boss, is a foul-mouthed crank who regularly insults other leaders with ignorant prejudice.
On Blinken’s insult over the Iranian president’s death, Russia’s presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed the disgust of many observers around the world when he said: “It is hard to believe that a diplomat — let alone a high-ranking official of a country such as the United States — would make such a clumsy remark, to say the least. In essence, it was an insult directed at an entire nation.”
Apart from the lack of human decency, there is a total lack of politics. Blinken’s offensive comment comes at a moment of extreme tension in the Middle East amid a genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime with support from the United States. The powder-keg situation could explode at any time into an international war engulfing the entire region. Israel and Iran have already exchanged military blows.
All diplomats worth their salt should be trying to calm tensions, not inflame them. Blinken’s contemptible insult to the Iranian people is a reckless provocation.
But such sensibility and respect are too much to expect from Blinken who has shown himself to be way out of his depth as a diplomat.
Last week, the “top diplomat” embarrassed his office by playing guitar on stage in a bar during an official visit to Kiev. Blinken was in the Ukrainian capital promising billions of dollars more in military aid to prolong a bloody and futile proxy war against Russia. Reliable estimates put the Ukrainian military death toll at over 500,000 in over two years of combat. Yet, here was Blinken strumming electric guitar with a local rock band. Even more cringe-making was his choice of song, Neil Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World’. Not only was Blinken tone deaf to the horror of war, but he was oblivious to the fact that the song is an explicit condemnation of American imperialist barbarity.
How could anyone be so stupid and insensitive? That is the measure of Antony Blinken right there.
Lamentably, Blinken has a lot of dubious company in Washington. Their collective arrogance and incompetence are driving the world to calamity. It is reported this week that Blinken is among those in Washington advocating for the supply of long-range U.S. weapons to strike Russian territory. Others pushing this recipe for World War Three include Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and former State Department official Victoria Nuland.
Blinken’s blunders should have seen him sacked long ago in disgrace. He was a chief cheerleader for arming the Kiev regime long before the conflict escalated in February 2022. He along with Nuland and others was instrumental in setting the course for this proxy war that runs the risk of spiraling into a nuclear war.
During his previous posts as national security advisor to President Obama and Biden when he was vice president, Blinken endorsed the NATO “human rights” war on Libya and the “pro-democracy” proxy war for regime change in Syria. The latter involved Washington arming sectarian terror gangs – until Russia and Iran put an end to that dirty operation.
This trail of disaster chartered by Blinken should have ensured his barring from ever ascending to the prominence of Secretary of State. However, that is assuming such appointments are made based on sanity and sound foreign policy.
No, Blinken is a war criminal whose ignorant narcissism knows no bounds. He is nothing but a useful tool for American imperialist warmongering. The guitar-playing, Harvard-educated Blinken is a manikin that provides a pseudo-liberal image to cover for the barbarity of US global power.
His ineptitude is leading the world to an abysmal state of confrontation in the Middle East and between nuclear powers over Ukraine.
What’s more though is the deplorable truth that Washington is full of clones like Blinken. The level of political culture in the U.S. establishment that spawns the likes of Blinken is so putrid and prevalent, that it is difficult to envisage any quality thinkers and leaders emerging.
The degeneration of politics and diplomacy in the United States has been on a long decline much like its global power. Some of Blinken’s more recent predecessors include Mike Pompeo (“we lie and cheat all the time”) and Hillary Clinton (who gloated about the murder of Muammar Gaddafi with “we came, we conquered, he died”); Condoleezza Rice (of Iraq war and rendition torture notoriety) and Colin Powell (who told barefaced lies to the UNSC over WMD). The list of degenerates goes on.
But in Blinken’s case, he’s probably the high point – or maybe that should be the low point – of polished incompetence.
Cometh the hour of U.S. failure, cometh the man who embodies abject failure.
May 25, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Antony Blinken, Hillary Clinton, Iran, United States, Zionism |
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