From Secretary of State to Secretary of Forever Wars: Antony Blinken’s Bloody Legacy

Blinken was one of the main architects of the Ukraine conflict – which could have been stopped in the spring of 2022, or averted entirely if the Biden administration didn’t pigheadedly insist on NATO membership for Ukraine, which Russia warned was its red line.

In late 2021, as Kiev amassed troops near the Donbass, prompting mirror moves from Moscow, Blinken spoke to Ukraine’s foreign minister to assure him of NATO’s “unwavering commitment.”

Months later, after fighting began, Blinken’s State Department joined with other Biden administration agencies and the Pentagon in supporting the Ukrainian crisis’s escalation into a full-blown NATO proxy war against Russia, complete with hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Kiev, CIA and military advisors and foreign mercenaries engaged in the conflict zone and operating advanced Western NATO weapons systems, and intelligence support.

The Kiev regime “threw [the peace deal] into the dustbin of history,” President Putin said in mid-2023, confirming then long-running reports that Moscow and Kiev were on the verge of a deal after talks in Belarus and Istanbul, Turkiye weeks into the conflict before NATO’s intervention to kill it.

The table at which the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations took place at the Dolmabahce Palace, in Istanbul, Turkiye, in 2022. - Sputnik International, 1920, 15.06.2024

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In October 2023, in response to a surprise Hamas-led incursion into Gaza, Israel launched its deadliest-ever attack on Palestinians in Gaza.

“We will always be there by your side,” Blinken vowed, standing in Tel Aviv alongside Prime Minister Netanyahu just days after the war began.

He was true to his word. From late 2023 and mid-2024 alone, the US sent Israel 14,000+ MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, and an array of other munitions.

The same month, a rights monitor calculated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs on the 365 km2 Strip, more than the combined tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London in all of WWII.

Blinken could have pressured his boss to turn off the taps on arms for Israel, which would have ended fighting in weeks. Instead, the State Department spent fifteen months talking about peace talks (which were actually spearheaded by other countries) as Gaza burned.

People stand outside a mosque destroyed in an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Sunday, Oct.8, 2023. - Sputnik International, 1920, 06.10.2024

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Besides Ukraine and Gaza, whose combined death toll is now in the hundreds of thousands, Blinken has led or signed off on an array of other escalatory and aggressive US foreign policy decisions.

Wrecking Trump’s face-to-face diplomacy-based efforts to improve ties between the US and North Korea within weeks after Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Blinken’s State Department negotiated a new tripartite security pact with South Korea and Japan aimed squarely against Pyongyang.

Fueling tensions in the East and South China Sea against China, Blinken escalated US bilateral alliance-based efforts to hem China into its home shores using the classic ‘island chain strategy’, vowed to ramp up support for Taiwan, and negotiated the anti-Beijing AUKUS security pact between the US, the UK and Australia.

Ramping up the confrontation against Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies, the US provided support to Tel Aviv during the back-to-back Iran-Israel missile and airstrikes, launched an air and naval campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, and facilitated the continuation of the long-running dirty war in Syria, culminating in the toppling of the Assad government in late 2024.

Blinken’s State Department was instrumental in US involvement in burning conflicts across Africa, from Ethiopia and Libya to the Sahel, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It also continued the tradition of low-key US efforts to institute regime change in countries perceived as disloyal to US interests, from Nicaragua and Bangladesh to Serbia and Georgia.

Blinken’s record, while ruthless, isn’t surprising, given his active support as he rose through the ranks in his diplomatic career for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO aerial assault on Libya, which turned that country into a failed state, and the start of the war against Syria in 2011.