Biden and Blinken bow out as embodiments of a genocidal status quo

In May last year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken took to the stage at a bar in Kyiv to play guitar on a rendition of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, a song about an alienated Vietnam War veteran that was misinterpreted as a "message of hope" by Ronald Reagan during his 1984 presidential campaign, the rousing chorus of Young’s hit belies its political critique.
In the capital of Ukraine, Blinken seemed to think, like Reagan, that he was playing a song unironically celebrating the western world.
In fact, Neil Young could have been offering an assessment of Blinken and President Joe Biden’s four years guiding US foreign policy - years in which Washington claimed to be doing much good in the world while at the same time handing Israel tens of billions of dollars in military aid to prosecute its ongoing war on Gaza.
"There’s a warning sign on the road ahead," Young sings. "There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead / Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them / So I try to forget it any way I can."
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While in Ukraine, despite the deep war fatigue that exists there, trumpeting the “free world” might make sense in the context of a brutal Russian invasion the US has countered with vast amounts of military assistance, Blinken was singing away while American bombs fell on Gaza.
The US secretary of state has been exposed as a weak man with the most powerful array of weapons the world has ever known at his disposal
On Tuesday, Blinken was once again a picture of tone deafness as he spoke to the Atlantic Council about the situation in the Middle East. On more than one occasion, he was interrupted by members of the audience accusing him of having blood on his hands, of enabling genocide.
Barely responding, save to say at one point that he “respected” their viewpoint, Blinken simply waited for the protesting journalists to be removed, then got back to writing his legacy as if it were some great success - often with some laughter from the audience.
This desire to rewrite their foreign policy legacy has defined Biden and Blinken since Donald Trump’s victory in November’s US election. It has accelerated this week, as Trump has embarrassed them before they have even left office by forcing the Israelis to the brink of a ceasefire deal - something Biden and Blinken never had the strength nor the desire to do.
Whatever they try and tell us, the president and his top diplomat are sauntering off the world stage as embodiments and architects of a genocidal status quo.
Carte blanche for Israel and the UAE
This fatal failure does not just apply to Israel, to which the staunch Zionist Biden has been a partner in crime, even as veteran American journalist Bob Woodward reported in his book War that an exasperated president railed in private about that “fucking liar” Benjamin Netanyahu.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key US ally, has also been given carte blanche to do as it pleases. This has been most evident in Sudan, where the UAE is arming and supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, which has - like Israel - been widely and credibly accused of committing genocide.
While Biden came into office promising to reset Washington’s relations with Africa, he did not set foot on the continent until December and has not engaged personally with the war in Sudan, despite it being the world’s widest humanitarian crisis.
As with Israel, there have been desperate, last-minute attempts by the Biden administration to salvage some sort of legacy from the wreckage of US policy in Sudan.
On 18 December, Brett McGurk, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, wrote - in an assessment that would usually come from the US intelligence community - to Senator Chris Van Hollen with news that the UAE had told the US government it was no longer “transferring any weapons” to the RSF.
Raging since April 2023, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF has been defined by the UAE’s support for the paramilitary - a support it has always denied, however half-heartedly.
It has also been defined by an attendant US failure to do anything about this Emirati support, with Sudan sacrificed on the altar of Washington’s interests in the Middle East, to which Israel and the UAE are key.
And so, the UAE - like Israel - has repeatedly told the US whatever it wants to hear before going ahead and doing whatever it wants to do, be that destroying Gaza or laying waste to Sudan.
Now, with a promise of good behaviour came an admission. In saying it would no longer arm the RSF, the UAE admitted that it has been arming them all along.
Since then, the US has determined that the RSF is committing genocide, and the Sudanese army has discovered stashes of Emirati weaponry in Wad Madani, the city it captured from the paramilitary.
Arms to Israel
The gaping chasm between how they see themselves and how the world at large views them was on display again on Monday when Biden and Blinken appeared at the State Department to give a valedictory address on foreign policy.
Blinken began clapping as the two men approached the lectern, setting the tone for his and Biden’s speeches, which were defined by self-congratulation divorced from reality, though his beloved autocue spared the audience a slew of trademark gaffes from the geriatric president.
Just a week after the US announced a new $8bn arms deal for Israel – to follow the $22.76bn and counting that Washington spent on Israel’s military and related US operations in the region between 7 October 2023 and the end of September 2024 - Blinken told his State Department employees that “bad things” happen if the US “doesn’t lead”.
He lauded his team for “working 24/7 to… hammer out agreements” just as it became clear that Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, had brought a ceasefire deal into sight by taking a firm line with the Israelis - something Biden and Blinken have consistently failed to do.
It is this approach from Trump that may end up being most damning for the outgoing Democrats. The incoming president is no friend of the Palestinians, but he loves a deal and he loves embarrassing his political enemies.
In Woodward’s War, which is heavily informed by interviews with a host of officials close to Biden - most likely including Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan - the Biden administration is presented as a good faith actor that just cannot get those tricky Israelis to do the right thing.
A deadly status quo
In fact, Biden and Blinken simply never put any real pressure on Netanyahu and his government.
The US secretary of state has been exposed as a weak man with the most powerful array of weapons the world has ever known at his disposal. His faux humility has been exposed as a lack of imagination, an adherence to a broken and deadly status quo.
He and his boss, Biden, have given American weapons to Israel, and Israel has used them to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. They set red lines, and Israel crossed them without consequence.
Whatever they try and tell us, the president and his top diplomat are sauntering off the world stage as embodiments and architects of a genocidal status quo
Behind closed doors, Blinken - or at least so Woodward reports - suggested that Netanyahu and his allies might consider letting some aid into Gaza, might want to think about not killing as many children, might perhaps just for a moment consider what all this looks like to the rest of the world.
Israel has simply turned around and got on with the business of killing Palestinians.
In the end, Blinken, who told the Atlantic Council that the US is in a much better position now than it was when he and Biden came into office, seems to see this as the price of doing business.
During a recent lunch with the Financial Times, he was asked to compare his views on Xinjiang, where the Chinese government cracked down severely on its native Uyghur population, detaining up to a million of them in camps, with Gaza.
In 2021, Blinken said China was committing genocide against its Uyghur population. Asked if the same conclusion could be drawn in Gaza, he echoed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s terse response to the same question and simply said “no”.
Shattered status quo
No one expects the US to be an impassioned champion of the Palestinian cause. Rashid Khalidi wrote in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine that his experience as a Palestinian negotiator in Oslo taught him that the US needed to be seen as being on Israel’s side. However, the extraordinary support Biden and Blinken have provided Israel means they now cannot be seen as anything other than the embodiment of a genocidal status quo.
It is also a shattered status quo, both at home and abroad. Trump’s election showed once again that the Democrats cannot simply campaign on keeping things as they are when things are on fire.
This is literally the case in Los Angeles, where Biden - with fires fuelled by climate change still burning - told a press briefing the “good news” that he had become a great-grandfather.
During his State Department address, the outgoing president took a moment to say that the Palestinians have “suffered terribly during the war that Hamas started. They’ve been through hell. So many innocent people have been killed”. His framing of the war was instructive.
What is more instructive is the constant support the US has given Israel, the provision of arms, the sanctioning of ICC officials, the assaults on international law and the global order Washington claims to defend.
Biden and Blinken are not the first US leaders to justify and participate in genocide, to create a desert and call it peace, but they have done it in front of the eyes of the world and they have done it at a time when everything else is coming apart.
Their legacy will be genocidal hypocrisy. There is no lunch or speech in the world that can change that.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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