BLINKEN’S BATTLE HYMN

US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken speaking at Helsinki City Hall in Finland, on June 2. (Photo by EMMI KORHONEN/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images)

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a June 2 speech in Helsinki welcomed Finland as NATO’s newest member state. A career hawk when it comes to Russia, he outdid himself in the fierceness of his commitment to the Ukraine war. Once again he was dismissive of any talk of a ceasefire—something desperately needed by an increasingly besieged Ukrainian army and citizenry.

“Now, over the coming weeks and months,” Blinken explained, “some countries will call for a ceasefire. And on the surface, that sounds sensible—attractive, even. After all, who doesn’t want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn’t want the killing to stop? But a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place and enables Putin to consolidate control over the territory he’s seized, and then rest, re-arm, and re-attack—that is not a just and lasting peace. It’s a Potemkin peace. It would legitimize Russia’s land grab. It would reward the aggressor and punish the victim.”

Does America’s secretary of State not know—or want to know—the historical importance and success of international peace-keeping forces? Is he not aware of the work done by the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, controversial as he may have been? In 1995 he negotiated an end to the murderous ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Their hatred for each other was as intense as the feelings now simmering among the citizenry and military in Ukraine for their Russian adversaries.

Blinken concluded his speech: “when a free people like the Ukrainians have at their backs the support of free nations around the world—nations who recognize their fates and freedom—their rights and security are inextricably bound together, the force they possess is not merely immense. It is unstoppable.”

His real message might be put more bluntly: I hate the Russians and let the blood flow.

Blinken once again told the tale of how in February, 2022, he warned the United Nations Security Council—long an American political instrument, if one hampered by the veto power of Russia and China—that a Russian invasion was imminent and that when it took place America would move with its NATO allies to help Ukraine defend its territory.

More than fifteen months later, Blinken told the Finnish crowd that there’s a bright side to the continuing carnage: “There is no question: Russia is significantly worse off today than it was before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—militarily, economically, geopolitically.” The European Union is more united than ever, he asserted, and has supplied more than $75 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. It has also absorbed more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees. (I have written of the growing costs and anxieties of the regional refugee crisis due to the war. Many of Ukraine’s neighbors, while hostile to Russia and to Putin, have been secretly urging the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.)

Russia’s economic growth has diminished due to the cost of the war, but Russia is far from isolated. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit reported in March, one year after Russia attacked Ukraine, that “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia. . . . Many countries who saw themselves as neutral or non-aligned have since changed their stance since the start of the invasion.” The report said that “there has been a large shift in stance among countries that lean toward Russia, whose number has increased from 29 to 35. China remains the most significant country in this category, but other developing countries”—the report cited South Africa, Mali, and Burkina Faso—“also have moved into this grouping, which accounts for 33% of the world’s population. These trends highlight Russia’s growing influence in Africa.”

The report also cited a decline in nations who are actively condemning the Russian war in Ukraine, “as some emerging economies have shifted to a neutral position.” The bloc of nations now strongly supporting Ukraine only represents about 36% of the world’s population.

One would imagine that an American secretary of State, with his international influence, would have an obligation not to diminish American credibility by misrepresenting the state of the world. Another explanation is that the world that backs American power is the world only he sees.

Blinken said, for example, that Europe “made a swift and decisive turn away from Russian energy,” when Berlin “immediately canceled Nord Stream 2”—a newly completed pipeline to Germany that originated in Russia. If permitted to run, it could have doubled the capacity to flow cheap Russian gas directly to German homes and businesses. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor under pressure from the West, never tapped the flow of gas from the new pipelines. (The American intelligence operatives assigned to the Biden-authorized mission to blow up the pipeline, about whom I have reported, did not know that the 767-mile pipelines they were ordered to destroy contained Russian natural gas.)

It’s possible that the secret American mission had poor intelligence, but it’s also possible that Scholz had ordered the pipeline to be filled with gas, which would have given him more options in case the war did not go well. It would also have made the American covert mission potentially more dangerous. President Biden took away that choice—if that is what Scholz was seeking—by ordering the pipeline destroyed last September 26. Whether Scholz had any say about the pipeline’s demise is unclear. But Biden's reckless move left Scholz at a dead end. He could no longer back away from support of the Ukraine war and still have the gas needed to keep his factories humming and his people warm. The gas would be cut off whether Germany liked it or not.

Scholz and Germany survived the lack of Russian gas last winter because of adequate stockpiles, a warmer winter than usual, and billions in government subsidies for German households and corporations. In May Politico published a dreary forecast, headlined: “Germany’s slipped into recession and everybody should be worried.” The dispatch by Johanna Treeck said the most recent data showed that Germany, the Eurozone’s largest economy, battered by its high energy prices, among other costs, has been contracting. Experts are convinced, Treeck wrote: “This isn’t a blip.”

I asked Sarah Miller, an energy expert who has edited America’s most influential privately distributed energy trade journals, for her opinion about the state of the German and European economies. “My surprise,” she told me, “is that the German recession isn’t worse than it is and it didn’t show up sooner in the data. And yes, loss of Russian gas and resulting high energy prices are the major factors in the German recession. Don’t think there is much dispute about that. The German/European decision last fall [after the Nord Stream explosion] to pay whatever it took to buy higher priced LNG [liquefied natural gas] basically did in gas as a worldwide growth industry.”

Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar, just published an essay in Foreign Affairs about Washington’s strategy in Ukraine. Charap served in the Obama administration and is now at the RAND Corporation. He is no fan of Russia or what he termed America’s “nebulous” notions about an endgame to the war, or lack thereof. He has a lot of ideas about intermediate steps that could lead to serious peace talks or, as he puts it, “facilitating an endgame.” These include an armistice agreement, demilitarized zones, joint commissions for dispute resolution, and third-party guarantees—feel-good moves aimed at allowing bitter enemies to achieve peace without resolving their fundamental differences.

It’s not much but it could be a start. Too bad that the name Antony Blinken never appears in Charap’s article.