4 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy in an Hour: Blinken's Diplomatic Legacy – Part 2: Russia, Ukraine, and Afghanistan
Welcome to Part 2 of my breakdown of outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s interview (you can find part 1 here). In this part, we will look at how he presented his approaches to the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Throughout we will look at what he said, and what he didn’t say, while comparing the narrative framing he tries to spin with the outcomes and realities on the ground.
Let’s dive right into it.
Russia and Ukraine: A War of Narratives
Blinken asserted that the Biden administration carefully calibrated its approach to avoid direct conflict with Russia, despite rising tensions. He also stated that the U.S. saw the conflict coming, and prepared Ukraine accordingly, through channeling weapons and equipment to Ukraine since September 2021, framing the U.S. position as being purely focused on the defense of Ukraine against what he termed as Putin’s plan to erase it from the map.
Following that, he praised his own diplomatic legwork in rallying 50 countries in support of Ukraine, as well as his engagement with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov prior to the war to see if he could prevent the outbreak of the war. During that meeting, Blinken claims, he sought to assess whether Russia was actually concerned about its security and ultimately determined that in fact it was about Putin’s imperial ambitions.
In that description he may have sold the extent of U.S. diplomatic maneuvering short. In the last quarter of 2021, the U.S. leveraged its considerable diplomatic clout in Europe to rally support for the U.S. position toward Russia. Through an intensive European campaign that faced some resistance initially, the U.S. eventually managed to shift the collective European direction to its point of view. In a masterstroke of timing, it managed to shift the course of Germany’s position just as the newly elected government took office. The previous German government led by the indomitable Angela Merkel had adopted a more nuanced approach toward great powers, balancing U.S. and Russian interests while achieving extensive benefits from both sides.
The newly elected German government, led by Olaf Scholz with the largely ineffective and inexperienced Annalena Baerbock as his foreign minister presented less of a challenge to the U.S., and was swayed over to the U.S. position in less than two months. With the shift in position of the European heavyweight, it was smooth sailing from that point forward for the U.S. to mobilize the rest of Europe toward a common position on Russia.
Blinken also undersold the strategic gains that the U.S. obtained from this maneuver. In successfully shifting the European position to an uncompromising one toward Russia, the U.S. wedged a rift between continental Europe and Russia, which is a very important goal for long term U.S. European grand strategy. A connected and consolidated Euro-Russian relationship based on common interests over the medium to long terms would have spelled trouble for U.S. global positioning.
Had that materialized, NATO would have gradually waned in relevance; with no direct Russian threat to counter, and with aligned security interests, European security directives could have gradually shifted to be more continentally focused. That in turn would have reduced U.S. strategic influence over Europe due to reduced need for its security and defense support for the continent. On the long term, a quasi-symbiotic relationship between Russia and Europe could have emerged, one that if consolidated could have been the seed for an emerging power to rival the U.S. and China.
It was therefore in the interests of the U.S. to sever that connection early and ensure that projects like the Nord Stream Pipelines did not emerge as key connectors of interests between Russia and continental Europe. This strategy employed by Blinken and Biden could therefore be hailed as a resounding success. Russia and Europe remain at odds, NATO has retained increased strategic significance for Europe, and to top it off, the U.S. substituted Russian natural gas for its own liquified natural gas exports to Europe.
Another goal that Blinken omitted when discussing Russia, as he explained how it was possible to provide security to Ukraine through integration with western institutions -even possibly NATO- was reining in potential adversaries. As the dominant global superpower, the U.S. naturally seeks to suppress any potential challengers to its hegemony, and one of the ways it can accomplish this is to bog down emerging rivals in conflicts that drain their resources. By having Russia embroiled in a conflict in the Ukraine, it achieves several related goals in parallel.
One of them is the draining of resources that could otherwise have been allocated to development of Russia’s global position, forcing the reallocation of these resources to the conflict that at best will achieve no more that maintaining the status quo for Russia.
The conflict also provided the U.S. an opportunity to observe and assess Russian military strategies and tactics in real time, allowing for the development of countermeasures. Over the course of the war, it has had ample opportunity to study Russia’s capabilities, armaments and weaponry in real time. This allows it to accordingly develop strategies to address any potential conflict scenarios in the future. Through progressive escalation of the weapon systems the Ukraine is allowed to deploy, the U.S. can study the stages of Russian military capacities in response to different weapons systems and develop the necessary strategic and tactical measures.
Even if Russia were to maintain its territorial gains, which Blinken admitted was a possibility, he stated that the main goal was to ensure enduring peace through deterrence. This may be true but at the end it would not matter much to the U.S. in terms of strategic interests one way or the other; in fact, existing discord between Russia and Ukraine that could be reignited may prove a useful tool for the U.S. in the future.
Taken from this perspective, and despite his deliberate downplaying of the U.S. role in framing the European narrative in late 2021 and early 2022, the strategy achieved all its targets. It bolstered U.S. positioning in NATO and Europe, increased U.S. exports of LNG and European reliance on the U.S., severed the burgeoning Euro-Russian connection, forced Russia’s hand in Ukraine, and allowed the U.S. extensive observation opportunities of Russia’s bellicose capacities. The war in Ukraine was never ‘just about Ukraine,’ as Blinken put it in the interview.
Afghanistan: A Strategic Retreat or a Chaotic Exit?
While the U.S. approach to Russia showcased strategic gains, the withdrawal from Afghanistan posed a starkly different situation.
Blinken faced a tougher challenge in portraying the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as a strategic success. Pivoting away from the outcomes of the decision which saw the Taliban resume power, he claimed that his success was in ending the longest war in U.S. history. To drive he point home, he added that this withdrawal strengthened U.S. global standing, and beguiled its adversaries who would have preferred to see it bogged down for ten more years. His concession to the undesired results of the U.S. withdrawal was that there would have been no easy way to extricate the U.S. from the conflict, and that it was necessary to do so despite the challenges; in a nutshell the U.S. needed to cut its losses and move on.
In trying to imbue some gains from the experience, he stressed that the U.S. took on board the lessons learned from Afghanistan, including the withdrawal, and implemented them in other theatres.
Despite his claims to the contrary, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan did not resonate in international circles as bolstering the U.S. global image. The erratic and chaotic process, compounded by multiple organizational and logistical challenges described in the After Action Review issued by the Department of State, gave the opposite impression. Far from a strategic victory, the U.S. after twenty years of action in Afghanistan failed to move the needle on the governance of the country and plant roots for its influence moving forward.
Since then, and despite limited recognition of the Taliban government by members of the international community, Afghanistan has made considerable headway with China, Russia, and regional actors in Central Asia and South Asia, each of whom have vested interests in the strategic geographic position of the country and the resources it has to offer.
Afghanistan connects land locked Central Asia to South Asia, providing a potential transit corridor for trade and access to Pakistani ports for Central Asian countries, and is has extensive untapped natural resources, something that China has been exploring since 2021.
Notably absent from Blinken’s remarks was the fact that the withdrawal deal had been negotiated and signed by the Trump administration. Whether this was to claim credit for ending the war or it simply slipped his mind remains unclear, but this omission contrasts with his previous congressional testimony, where he emphasized inheriting the timeline from Trump.
The U.S withdrawal led to the near immediate collapse of the Afghan government. Shortly after the withdrawal, the Afghan government that had been propped up by the U.S. fell in mere days, with the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country. This outcome, which according to Blinken’s assessments at the time would not happen, did in fact happen, and the Taliban calmly took over the country.
The optics of the entire scenario do the U.S. no favors. The Taliban emerged as the ultimate victors, regaining control of the country despite the American government’s best efforts to stymie the outcome, the pro U.S. government dissolved like morning dew, and U.S. influence in the region was reduced, as has its access to the wealth of untapped resources in the country, chief among them lithium. It also gave ample opportunity to rivals and adversaries to impugn U.S. effectiveness, and to caution against partnering with the U.S., pointing out that they leave their partners worse off than they had been without them.
The U.S. withdrawal opened doors for regional and global rivals to reap the rewards of U.S. efforts. China for example accepted the Taliban ambassador’s credentials in February of this year, marking a shift in the state of the bilateral relationship while still falling short of full recognition. It has begun exploring opportunities in the country specifically alluding to the opportunities offered by the U.S. withdrawal.
Despite his best efforts to sidestep the issue and draw focus away from it, Blinken could not shed a positive spin on his and Biden’s policies on Afghanistan.
Framing Success Amidst Challenges
Blinken handled the questions on Russia and Ukraine more effectively that those on Afghanistan, which he was happy to get out of the way early. He persisted with his approach of framing his decisions as successes, making few if any concessions to failures.
Both these sections saw him omitting key points related to either the real motivations behind U.S. policies like in the case of Russia and Ukraine, or undesired outcomes like in the case of Afghanistan.
Comparing his answers in this interview to his previous speaking engagements also highlights a certain level of consistency, but some changed approaches, for example he did not attempt to blame the Trump administration for the Afghanistan fiasco, preferring instead to claim credit for ending the longest American war.
In the next part, Next, we’ll examine Blinken’s views on U.S.-China competition, the Middle East, and how his framing of these challenges aligns with the realities on the ground.