THE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM OF SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY
BLINKEN
26 Jan 2021
KEVIN GOSZTOLA
https://shadowproof.com/2021/01/26/american-exceptionalism-secretary-of-state-antony-blinken/
“American
leadership still matters. The reality is the world simply does not organize
itself,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed at his confirmation
hearing. “When we are not engaged, when we are not leading, then one of two
things are likely to happen. Either some other country tries to take our place
but not in a way that is likely to advance our interests and values, or maybe,
just as bad, no one does, and then you have chaos.”
Much like
President Joe Biden, Blinken is a neoliberal Democrat who believes in the
doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He thinks if the United States does not impose
its will and shape the world then there will be no law and order. He cannot
fathom how countries could survive on their own. At least, that is how he
argues for greater American intervention in global regions.
Blinken was
confirmed as secretary of state in a vote on January 26. Not a single Democrat
in the Senate voted against Blinken.
He is a
longtime ally of Biden, and during Biden’s first term as vice president, he was
his national security adviser.
During
President Barack Obama’s second term, Blinken was deputy secretary of state. He
was also a part of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1994
to 2001.
Making Venezuela’s ‘Regime Enablers’ Finally, Feel The Pain Of Sanctions
Blinken’s predecessor Mike
Pompeo, a right-wing Christian reconstructionist, was involved in President
Donald Trump administration’s failed regime-change operation against Nicolas
Maduro’s government in Venezuela. Yet, despite its failure, Blinken told
Republican Senator Marco Rubio thought the Biden administration should keep
recognizing Juan Guaido as the one and only true “leader.”
“We need an effective
policy that can restore democracy to Venezuela, free and fair elections,”
Blinken declared. He even embraced sanctions, despite the fact that they have
hampered the country’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulted in the
deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.
“Maybe we need to look at
how we more effectively target the sanctions that we have so that regime
enablers finally feel the pain of those sanctions,” Blinken added.
However, a report [PDF] from the
Congressional Research Service (CRS) dated January 22, 2021, indicates the
sanctions by both the Obama and Trump administrations were targeted pretty well
and imposed to inflict “pain” against 113 Venezuelans and 13 entities.
…President Maduro, his wife, Cecilia Flores, and
son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra; Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez; Diosdado
Cabello (Socialist party president); eight supreme court judges; the leaders of
Venezuela’s army, national guard, and national police; governors; the director
of the central bank; and the foreign minister…
Trump imposed sanctions to
prohibit Venezuela from participating in U.S. financial markets and block the
government’s ability to issue digital currency. Treasury Department officials
prohibited corporations from purchasing Venezuelan debt. Venezuela’s state oil
company, PdVSA, was aggressively targeted for seeking to evade U.S. sanctions
and Venezuela’s central bank was sanctioned too.
Blinken Defends Being Wrong On War In Libya
Obama floated the War
Powers Act and launched a war in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime without
the approval of Congress. It created a power vacuum filled by extremist militia
groups and transformed the country into a failed state. Migrants are captured
and sold in what the United Nations has referred to as
“open slave markets.”
Despite the catastrophe
sparked by war, Blinken defended his support for a regime change war. “I think
it’s been written about. I — I was the president-elect’s national security
adviser at the time. And he did not agree with that course of action.”
Biden was opposed to the war in
Libya. “My question was, okay, tell me what happens? [Gaddafi’s] gone. What
happens? Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become
a place where it becomes a petri dish for the growth of extremism? Tell me.
Tell me what we’re gonna do.”
Rather
than concede President Biden was right and he was wrong, Blinken signaled to
Senate Republicans that he would be their hawk when Biden was too dovish.
Blinken
bafflingly blamed Gaddafi, who was summarily executed, for what happened in
Libya after his death.
“We didn’t
fully appreciate the fact that one of the things Gaddafi had done over the
years was to make sure that there was no possible rival to his power. And as a result, there was no effective bureaucracy, no effective administration in
Libya with which to work when he was gone,” Blinken argued.
The Bothsidesism Of Blinken’s View Toward War In Yemen
Sarah Lazare recalled for In
These Times the horrors unleashed on the people of Yemen, as a result
of the Obama administration’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war against the
Houthis.
“The coalition bombed
a center
for the blind, a funeral, a wedding, a factory and
countless homes and residential areas, and blockaded Yemen’s ports, cutting off
vital food and medical shipments — all while the Obama-Biden administration was
in power,” Lazare wrote.
“Indeed, the Obama White
House was so complicit in war crimes in Yemen in that its own State Department
internally warned key U.S. military personnel could be subject to war crimes
prosecution, according to a Reuters investigation published
in October 2016. By July 2015, a United Nations official was already warning that
Yemen was on the verge of a famine, a premonition that horrifically came true.”
One of Pompeo’s final
actions was to sanction Houthis, which caused a disruption to aid groups
delivering humanitarian assistance. Biden froze the sanctions for one month the
same day the Senate confirmed Blinken.
Asked about the intense
humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Blinken drew a false equivalency between the
actions of the Houthis and the Saudis.
“We need to be clear-eyed
about the Houthis. They overthrew a government in Yemen. They engaged in a path
of aggression through the country. They directed aggression toward Saudi
Arabia,” Blinken contended. “They’ve committed atrocities and human rights
abuses and that is a fact. What’s also a fact though is that the Saudi-led
campaign in Yemen to push back against
the Houthi aggression has
contributed to what is, by most accounts, the worst humanitarian situation that
we face anywhere in the world.”
The Houthis were part of
the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen against the corrupt government of Ali
Abdullah Saleh. State Department officials generally backed these
rebellions against autocratic rulers.
According to a 2017 post
from Bruce Riedel of the Brookings
Institution, “American intelligence officials said
that Iran was actually trying to discourage the Houthis from seizing Sanaa
and openly toppling Hadi. Iran preferred a less radical course, but the Houthi
leadership was drunk with success. Moreover, Undersecretary of Defense Michael
Vickers said on the
record in January that Washington had a productive informal intelligence
relationship with the Houthis against al-Qaida. He suggested that the
cooperation could continue.”
The Obama administration, which included Blinken, did
not want to jeopardize a 70-year-plus alliance with Saudi Arabia and backed the
monarchy’s intervention.
Very Much’ Supporting U.S. Arms Shipments To Ukraine
Blinken expressed his
support for arming Ukrainian groups a total of three times. He even reminded
Republican Senator Ron Johnson had the opportunity in 2018 to write an op-ed
for the New York Times promoting what senators euphemistically describe as
“lethal defensive assistance.”
He told Republican Senator
Rob Portman, “I very much support the continued provision to Ukraine of lethal
defensive assistance and, and indeed, of the training program as well.”
“To the extent that across
a couple of administrations, we’ve been able to effectively train and as well
as assist in different ways the Ukrainians, that has made a material difference
in their ability to withstand the aggression they’ve been on the receiving end
of from Russia,” Blinken asserted.
It is difficult to gauge
whether the policy has been effective or helped Ukrainians withstand battles
with pro-Russian separatist groups. There is not a whole lot of reporting.
But Lieutenant General Ben
Hodges, who was the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, stated in
2015, “If the U.S. policy changed to provide, say, Javelins, for example, that
would probably lead to increased lethality on the battlefield for the
Ukrainians. It would not change the situation strategically in a positive way,
because the Russians would double down. They would dramatically increase more
violence, more death, more destruction.”
“The conflict in Ukraine’s
mostly Russian-speaking industrial east, called Donbas, erupted in April 2014,
weeks after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula,” according to the
Associated Press. “More than 14,000 people have been killed in fighting between
Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists.”
Professor Stephen
Cohen called attention
to the role of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine. The overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych
was a “violent coup” led by fascist conspirators opposed to Russia. They
conducted exterminations of ethnic Russians. The Azov Battalion, part of Kyiv’s
armed forces, is pro-Nazi and was banned from receiving U.S. military aid, but
it almost certainly obtained weapons shipped by the Trump administration from
the black market.
“We are left then not with
Putin’s responsibility for the resurgence of fascism in a major European
country but with America’s shame, and possible indelible stain, on its
historical reputation for tolerating it, even if only through silence,” Cohen
concluded.
US Return To Iran Nuclear Deal Not Happening Soon
It was the United States
under Trump that ditched the Iran nuclear deal, not Iran. Still, it is the
Biden’s administration position that Iran should first “comply” with the U.S.
demands before the U.S. rejoins the deal.
“If Iran returns to
compliance with the JCPOA [nuclear deal], we would do the same thing and then
use that as a platform working with our allies and partners to build longer and
stronger agreements — also capture some of the other issues that need to be
dealt with, with regard to missiles, with regard to Iran’s activities and
destabilizing activities in the region,” Blinken said.
“There is a lot that Iran
will need to do to come back into compliance. We would then have to evaluate
whether it actually [did] so. So, I don’t think that’s anything that’s
happening tomorrow or the next day.”
Meanwhile, as CBS
News described in
November, Iran has endured a “harrowing, sanctions-fueled coronavirus
catastrophe.”
Doctors experience
shortages of every supply necessary for fighting the pandemic. “U.S.-led
sanctions have choked off Iran’s access to foreign-made chemicals and
equipment.”
Iran has begged Biden
to lift sanctions that prevent Iran from accessing COVID-19 vaccines.
***
Melodramatically, Senator
Marco Rubio feverishly asked Blinken has any doubt that the Chinese Communist
Party’s goal is to be the “world’s predominant political, geopolitical,
military, and economic power and for the United States to decline in relation.”
“I do not,” Blinken
replied.
“You have no doubt?” Rubio
chimed.
“I have no doubt,” Blinken
restated.
From Obama to Trump, U.S.
empire has prepared its forces for what it calls “great power competition”
between China and Russia. It fears China will take the place of the U.S.,
leading to one of Blinken’s nightmare futures.
Much of the public is wary
of military interventions in the Middle East. The threat of terrorism is no
longer enough to justify expenditures toward an ever-gargantuan
military-industrial complex. Countering China, however, is an easier sell.
“Forcing men, women, and
children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, reeducate them to be
adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to
an effort to commit genocide,” Blinken remarked.
Human rights abuses under
Biden will increasingly be weaponized to defend policies and operations that
ramp up tensions with China. Whether descriptions of China’s acts are accurate
or not, the point will be to silence anyone who questions whether the
violations are enough to warrant increased conflict. (Of course, how dare
anyone raise the matter of U.S. deportation camps and their horrors or America’s
mass incarceration of 1–2 million people to point out any sort of hypocrisy.)
After the House of
Representatives voted to arm so-called rebel groups in Syria in 2014, MSNBC’s
Joe Scarborough asked Blinken about concerns that arms “could end up in the wrong
hands.” Blinken brushed aside concerns and maintained the U.S. would vet and
give arms to “the right people.”
In March 2016, the Los
Angeles Times reported “CIA-armed
units and Pentagon-armed [militias had] repeatedly shot at each other while
maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo” in
Syria.
Blinken may not be rapture
ready like his predecessor, Mike Pompeo. He may be more willing to wave the
LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag when arming proxy forces or backing regime change
operations. However, they are both devout believers in American exceptionalism.
He views Biden
as a president who will put the “globe back on its axis” after Trump. He will
spend his time at the State Department working to “restore democracy” and
“renew” America’s “leadership” in the world. This means Blinken will continue
the many callous, cold, and calculating traditions of U.S. imperialism, promote
hubris over humility and commit himself to cloak ignoble acts in the
rhetoric of human rights.
