It is hard to fully comprehend how utterly disastrous these two incompetents have been for the position of the United States in the world, one the National Security Advisor and the other the Secretary of State (akin to the Foreign Minister in many other nations). There is a British saying “too clever by half” which means being annoyingly proud of one’s intelligence whilst overreaching oneself; so descriptive of not just these two incompetents but also of so much of the current US courtier class.
Jake was born in 1976 in Vermont to Irish-American parents, one a professor of journalism at the Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Jake grew up in Minneapolis) and the other a high school guidance counsellor. He was what we would call a “clever” child, a Coca-Cola Scholar, student council president, debate champion and voted by his class as the most likely to succeed. He attended Yale University from 1994 and gained a BA in international studies and political science in 1998 and won the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize. All of the five Sullivan children attended either Yale or Cornell; both elite US universities. Then awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at Oxford, where he graduated in 2000 with a Master of Philosophy and was the managing editor of the Oxford International Review. Then off to Yale Law School where he graduated with a law degree in 2003, and while once again at Yale he was editor of the Law Journal, the Law & Policy Review, and the Daily News while being a member of the Debate Association, and also interning at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and working at the Brookings Institution for its president Strobe Talbot. A near perfect training/indoctrination for a courtier of the US liberal oligarchy!
He then clerked for two senior US judges before practising law back in Minnesota, and then becoming chief counsel to Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar. The latter introduced him to Hillary Clinton, for whom he became deputy policy director during her losing 2008 presidential primary campaign. After which he became part of Obama’s successful presidential campaign, and having prepared Clinton for primary debates now prepared Obama for presidential election debates - gaining direct access to the future president. When Clinton was appointed Secretary of State in the Obama administration, he became her deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning, travelling extensively with Hillary Clinton. She treated him as her confidante and go-between, and was at the least intellectually besotted with him:
When Jake Sullivan first came to work for me, I told my husband about this incredibly bright rising star – Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School – and my husband said, “Well, if he ever learns to play the saxophone, watch out.” Now we travel all over the world together and people say how excited they are to meet a potential future president of the United States, and of course they mean Jake.
He later became deputy assistant to the president and then as Joe Biden’s top security aid after Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State in February, 2013. Sullivan then left the Obama administration in August of 2014 to teach at Yale Law School and also became a non-resident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; a liberal oligarch funded propagandist think tank. In 2015, Sullivan married ten years his junior Maggie Goodlander, daughter of a rich and politically well connected family in New Hampshire. She was a former intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve and served as advisor to the Independent Democrat senator Joe Lieberman and the Republican senator John McCain. She is also a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, and clerked for senior US judges. She is the Democratic nominee for New Hampshire’s 2nd congressional district. Like two identical peas in a pod.
In 2016, Sullivan was Clinton’s chief foreign policy advisor during her failed election campaign against Donald Trump. After which he joined Macro Advisory Partners a risk advisory company for major corporations such as Uber, Mastercard, Bank of America, Aviva and Standard Chartered; connecting him with many corporate leaders and wealthy individuals. He also joined the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire as a senior fellow and faculty member. He also served on the advisory board of Microsoft.
He was appointed as National Security Advisor at the beginning of the Joe Biden presidency. A clever man, fully indoctrinated within the liberal oligarch establishment institutions and milieu, during the height of the US Empire; but always having been an advisor and never the senior. Cleverness + Rising Rapidly on the Coattails of Others + Lack of Real World Exposure easily leads to intellectual blindness and actions that can only be described as dumber than many of his highly experienced foreign counterparts. He has displayed an absolute fealty to the self-defeating Ukraine War and the denigration of the Russian leadership, the Zionist regime genocide and illegal foreign aggression, the denigration of and aggression toward Iran, the aggressive policies toward China, and the arrogant attitude of the US toward other nations; all resulting in the diminution of US power and influence within the international order.
He has been trained well though to be an excellent liar and propagandist for the US Empire, as here where he blatantly lies about the US position of attempting to provoke China into an aggressive misstep with respect to Taiwan:
And here where he plays disgusting word games to not define the Zionist regime’s genocide as what it is, a genocide. After being nailed by journalists for this behaviour he literally fled the press briefing.
Clever people can sound extremely logical and competent while spewing absolute lies, bullshit and delusional points of view. In this transcript of a CBS interview the inside the beltway blinkers and orientation, together with a lack of real political-economic understanding and openness to other viewpoints is very obvious; he exists within an utterly self-referential and self-reinforcing intellectual space. A classic case is Sullivan’s interview at the liberal oligarch Aspen Institute a couple of months ago. All about managing the message whilst failing at the reality.
He is only 47 and therefore has the possibility of rising to even greater heights, especially with his own vast connections and those of his wife and her family. For the good of America and the world, one would hope that he does not. In the North East of England where I grew up, the term “too clever by half” is not a compliment.
Anthony Blinken was born into wealth and connections in 1962 in Yonkers, New York to Jewish parents. His father was the co-founder of the private equity firm Warburg-Pincus and later served as US ambassador to Hungary. His uncle served as US Ambassador to Belgium. His grandfather was an early backer of the Zionist regime. After studying at the prestigious Dalton School he moved to Paris with his mother and Samuel Pisar who became his step-father, after his parents were divorced. Pisar was the long time friend, lawyer and confidante of the businessman Robert Maxwell who had extensive links to the Israel intelligence services and died in very questionable circumstances after embezzling his employees’ pension funds. A a child, Anthony was a friend of Giselle Maxwell who was at the centre of the Epstein child sex ring (much rumoured to be a front for Israeli intelligence). In Paris, Blinken attended the École Jeannine Manuel; an oligarch financially supported school with an international student body and judged to be the best high school in France.
From 1980 to 1984 he majored in Social Studies at Harvard University, where he co-edited the Harvard Crimson. Then a year working at the New Republic before Columbia Law School which he graduated from in 1988, following which he was a lawyer in both New York and Paris.
Following that, he became a member of the National Security Council (NSC) in the Clinton administration in 1994 to 2001; ending as special assistant to the senior director of European and Canadian affairs. He was appointed as the staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, assisting the chair of the committee - Joe Biden until 2008; fully supporting the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. This relationship would be his career ticket to higher achievement. He was also a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a liberal oligarch funded propagandist think tank. With Biden selected as Obama’s running mate, Blinken became part for the Biden-Harris campaign and transition team.
In 2002 Blinken married Evan Ryan, who also served in the Clinton administration as well as in the electoral campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden. After that, she served in the Obama administration and was a senior advisor for the Biden-Harris transition team. She also helped launch and lead Democratic news website Axios before it was acquired by Cox Enterprizes in 2022. She has also worked with the Clinton Global Initiative and like her husband is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. Two peas in a pod.
From 2009 to 2013 Blinken served as the assistant to the National Security Advisor to the Vice President, then as Deputy National Security Advisor for a year before becoming Deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton. He was described as a key player in the illegal attempts to destroy the sovereign nation of Syria, and was influential in the anti-Russia sanction in 2014, and fully supported the wanton destruction of the middle-income African nation of Libya and the Saudi-led war against the people of Yemen. After Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections, Blinken served as the managing director of the Penn Biden Centre from 2017 to 2019 at the University of Pennsylvania in Washington D.C.; another liberal oligarch funded propagandist think tank.
He also joined the political strategy advisory firm WestExec Advisors, founded by Democratic Party insiders, working with corporations such as Google's Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, and surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI; monetizing the influence and connections he had gained in public office to the tune of nearly US$1.2 million. Foreign Policy typified the firm’s clients as including "the defense industry, private equity firms, and hedge funds". He also joined the private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners, founded by Democratic Party insiders and the ex-chairman of Merrill Lynch - John Thain; which was in partnership with WestExec. The conflicts of interest are obvious for a company advising corporate clients on their government relations partnered with a firm directly investing in companies seeking government contracts.
Then in 2019 came his big break, as Blinken was a foreign policy advisor to the Biden-Harris campaign (on which his wife also worked), and was then selected as the US Secretary of State. He stumbled into what can only be seen as an utterly disastrous meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Alaska, as he threw away diplomatic niceties and directly attacked China reading from a prepared speech; resulting in an unscripted brutal tongue lashing from his Chinese counterpart:
This was not “leading with diplomacy” but rather an attempt at bullying, by someone utterly inexperienced in diplomacy, of one of the most experienced diplomatic teams in the world. He immediately lost all credibility with the Chinese and has never regained it. He seemed to be still living in the period of US unipolarity, believing that he could arrogantly bully China; an utter mistake. He has recently utterly unironically criticized China for supporting Russia while the US pours money and weapons into Ukraine. The anti-China technology sanctions that he has helped push have focused China even more on replacing US-controlled technologies; leading to the probable diminution or even destruction of the Western industries from which China had previously been happy to buy products from. The Chinese foreign minister also recently slammed Blinken for attempting to manipulate internal Chinese affairs while disingenuously taking about the need for “cooperation”.
Reflecting the utterly misplaced arrogance of the Biden administration in its dealings with China:
Then of course there was the utter failure in Afghanistan where Blinken and his delusional colleagues believed that the utterly corrupt and incompetent Afghan puppet government could resist the Taliban. And in the first year of the administration also the refusal to negotiate in good faith a renewal of the Iran nuclear treaty. Followed in 2022 by the obvious moves to pull Russia into a conflict so that it could be destroyed by Western sanctions and foreign exchange reserve theft and Western support for the Ukrainian military. A colossal miscalculation which is now leading to the very obvious defeat of the West in Ukraine. Here is Blinken talking about his policies toward Russia, showing an utter lack of the real political-economic and geopolitical realities:
From Iran, to Africa, to Russia (Ukraine and the attempts to destroy Russia through sanctions), to China, US foreign policy has been a complete disaster, with Blinken seeming to believe that he could reimpose the unipolar moment through crushing Russia, disciplining China, and subjugating Iran; utterly delusional. He is obviously far, far out of his depth both in how to actually manage diplomatic relations and in his world view. Of course, he has lead his life in a self-referential, self-reinforcing social bubble. His disastrous tenure is now capped by the unswerving support for Zionist regime genocide and illegal attacks on, and invasions of, foreign nations. US so-called soft power is in shreds. Blinken’s statement that he came to Israel as it started its Gaza genocide, “as a Jew” as well as the US Secretary of State was both borderline treasonous and utterly tone deaf with respect to global public opinion. Showing to the world the reality of Blinken as an unquestioning and extreme Zionist, who uses his position to both fully support the genocidal regime and also to run political interference for it.
In history he will go down as one of the Secretaries of State that at the least oversaw and accelerated America’s decline and at the worst accelerated the move toward world war. As a comparison listen to this wide ranging interview given by Lula, the President of Brazil. a man who has had to work hard and long to gain his position.