Antony Blinken and the Triumph of Zombie Liberalism

The new US Secretary of State does not seem inclined to question Washington's conventional foreign policy "wisdom."

Liberal American policymakers are at a crossroads. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, a wide swath of American intellectuals, analysts, and decision-makers became convinced that the fall of communism revealed beyond the shadow of a doubt that American liberalism was the most just and effective ideology in modern history. As Francis Fukuyama put it in his famous 1989 essay for The National Interest, “The End Of History?”, “the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an ‘end of ideology’ or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”

Though Fukuyama himself had some anxieties about liberalism’s triumph—in particular, he worried that “the end of history will be a very sad time” because it will be defined by an anti-romanticism and concomitant obsession with “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands”—most American elites were quite happy, even self-satisfied, with their nation’s victory.

Liberalism’s triumph was quickly followed by a resurgence of liberal imperialism. History, it seemed to many Americans, had proven that it was the United States’ duty to spread and defend liberalism abroad—and sometimes with violence. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright affirmed in a 1998 interview on The Today Show, “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”

Liberal imperialism reached its apotheosis when the September 11, 2001 attacks provided Americans on both sides of the political aisle with the excuse needed to use US troops as the means to enact their world-transforming fantasies. Things, of course, didn’t turn out as expected. Under George W. Bush, neoconservatives (the Wilsonians of the right) failed to bring about liberal revolutions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, under Barack Obama, liberal internationalists (the Wilsonians of the left) failed to do so in Libya.

These three failures seemed to demonstrate that, contrary to the dreams of liberals since World War I, the United States, despite its overwhelming power, could not socially engineer democracy abroad. Previous examples of successful democratic transitions under the barrel of a gun, such as those that occurred in post-World War II Germany and Japan, were revealed to be unrepeatable—or at least, they were revealed to require the type of years-long expansive occupation impossible under the domestic political constraints of twenty-first century America.

The calamitous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, combined with myriad other failures in the post-Soviet world, took the wind out of the sails of both right- and left-wing liberal internationalism. The latter’s fortunes were further sunk when Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly lambasted the US foreign policy establishment during his campaign for the presidency, won the 2016 election. Today, it’s clear to many professional observers that most Americans have little interest in asserting the type of “global leadership” upon which liberal internationalism is premised.

One might have expected that Trump’s election would have encouraged prominent liberal internationalists to reexamine, or at the very least question, their fundamental assumptions about the world. But this is precisely what didn’t happen. In manifold quickie books with titles like The Empty Throne, American establishmentarians argued that in the post-Trump era the United States needed to do little more than reaffirm its commitment to global leadership.

Liberal internationalism is thus a zombie ideology, shorn of any connection to real-world events and intellectually exhausted. Nowhere is this clearer than in a recent conversation that took place at the Hudson Institute last summer between the writer Walter Russell Mead and Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s longtime foreign policy aide and the recently confirmed secretary of state. In it, Blinken says nothing especially novel, persuasive, or interesting about the future of US foreign policy. It thus looks like we’re going to be in for a long four years in which little will be done by the United States to address the multiple crises—of imperialism, inequality, and climate—facing the world over the next decade and beyond.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivering remarks upon his arrival at the State Department on January 27, 2021 (State Department photo via Flickr)

The conversation between Mead and Blinken is an exercise in mundanity. Blinken repeats the generic talking points that have in the last few years come to permeate the US foreign policy establishment: “we’re living in a time of shifting power and alignments among nations”; “people are increasingly confused”; there is “a huge diffusion of power away from states”; etc. And the solution to all these problems? You guessed it: American leadership. In Blinken’s telling, “whether we like it or not, the world tends not to organize itself,” and therefore “American engagement” is required to “shap[e] the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another.” If we don’t “engage” the world, Blinken (unsurprisingly and boringly) claims, “either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things before so by good things.”

There’s nothing new here; I, and any casual observer of US foreign affairs, could have scripted Blinken’s responses.

A short tour through the new secretary of state’s various positions reveals their utter asepticism. Like most people in Washington, DC, Blinken agrees with the “growing consensus across parties that China poses a series of new challenges and that the status quo was really not sustainable particularly when it comes to China’s commercial and economic practices, the lack of reciprocity in the relationships or something that couldn’t be sustained and needed to be and continue to need to be dealt with.” To confront China, the United States must: “invest in our own competitiveness,” which will enable the nation to provide a model of liberal democratic capitalism that attracts nations increasingly pulled toward the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism; collaborate with allies; begin “standing up for our values [presumably, human rights] and put them back at the center of our foreign policy”; and “be in a place to effectively deter aggression.” Of course, Blinken says nothing about the future of general US strategy in East Asia. He doesn’t ask, for example, whether it is desirable—or, frankly, realistic—for the United States to remain forever dominant in that region. This question, probably the central question of US-Chinese relations, is not even raised in the discussion.

The biggest potential transformation that Blinken reveals the Biden Administration might pursue is a general disengagement from the Middle East. Nonetheless, Blinken simultaneously emphasizes that “certain fundamentals” of US policy in the region—basically, the United States’ unswerving support for Israel—will remain unchanged. Indeed, it’s pretty clear from Blinken’s remarks that he doesn’t believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will end in peace; the only thing he says is that if Israel continues expanding into the West Bank, it will be difficult to enact a two-state solution. One imagines that Blinken, like most experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, understands that the idea of two independent states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, is basically a dead letter. Under Biden, then, we can probably expect the conditions of the Palestinians to worsen as Israel continues to expand its settlements with little or no pushback from Washington.

With regards to Russia, Blinken happily endorses the xenophobic and chauvinistic 1946 assertion by State Department official George Kennan that “at [the] bottom of [the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [the] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” that inevitably makes Russian foreign policy aggressive. This is, without exaggeration, absurd. In essence, Blinken embraces the argument that there is an eternal, transhistorical, and paranoid Russian “character,” of which Vladimir Putin is the latest embodiment. It’s hard to imagine a more ahistorical way to understand Russian actions. If Blinken genuinely accepts Kennan’s preposterous claim, it’s unlikely that he (or Biden) will do much to attenuate the tensions that presently divide the United States from Russia. This might be good for American liberals who need a bogeyman to justify their empire, but it will be bad for the world.

When it comes to other regions, Blinken offers the usual pablum: the United States must “work together [with European nations] to tackle … hard problems”; the nation needs to use development assistance to address—to use Mead’s words—the “social breakdown” apparently bedeviling Latin America; American prosperity rests on “open markets and [ensuring] that American products, American services, [and] Americans ideas can be consumed around the world,” etc.

Despite the vaguely populist statements that Blinken makes throughout his discussion with Mead—for example, he insists that trade must be “in the interest of American workers”—his remarks indicate that the Biden administration will offer little that is new or interesting, at least when it comes to US foreign policy. Honestly, I found my eyes glazing over as I read the Mead-Blinken conversation: I had heard everything before, and usually more eloquently. It looks like an establishment president has surrounded himself with establishment officials who will do little to challenge, let alone transform, the establishment that made the world we live in today.

US foreign policy will therefore remain a disaster that not only fails to achieve the goals that liberal internationalists set for it, but also makes the globe a worse place.

But hey, at least we’ll be at brunch.

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