We saw what Joe Biden did during his four years of Vice President, and now they'll have Blinken who, as secretary of state, will occupy one of the most powerful political positions in the world. He served in the Clinton White House as a senior director of the national security council and foreign-policy speechwriter. He then worked alongside Biden for almost two decades, pushing him to support the Iraq War, and then personally lobbying for the catastrophic intervention in Libya in 2011 and faulting the US involvement in Syria for not being forceful enough. Unsurprisingly, given his war-hawkery, he was full-square behind Saudia Arabia’s devastating war in Yemen, proudly telling reporters in 2015 that ‘Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force. As part of that effort, we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation centre.’
He eventually backtracked on his commitment to the Saudi attack on Yemen in 2018 (albeit after the UN began talking of Saudi war crimes), but there seems little doubt that his commitment to liberal interventionism remains. Last year, he co-authored a piece with Robert Kagan, in which he criticised Trump’s America First-style retreat from global leadership. Invoking the cliched spectre of the Nazis’ untrammelled rise during the 1930s to justify pre-emptive interventionism, he said America’s next president should ‘prevent crises or contain them before they spiral out of control’, using ‘active diplomacy and military deterrence’. He also specifically mentioned the US intervention in Syria , saying ‘we rightly sought to avoid another Iraq by not doing too much, but we made the opposite error of doing too little’, which is another way of saying we must do more. And just to up the ante, Blinken is said to be more hawkish on Russia than he was even in 2017, when he left office.
Biden=peace? Don't hold your breath.