After he took office, President Joe Biden declared, “Diplomacy is back.” Top aides Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan repeated the mantra. Their implication? The Trump era’s unilateralism and tweet-from-the-hip chaos were over.
A statesman embracing diplomacy, however, is akin to a surgeon wielding a scalpel: The tool depends upon the skill of its operator. While the Biden administration embraced the traditional trappings of diplomacy, its members approached the strategy with all the skill of a narcoleptic, epileptic monkey high on crack.
Put aside Sullivan’s curtailment of maximum pressure on Iran as its foreign reserves circled the drain, Blinken’s lifting of sanctions on Yemen’s Houthi militia, or the Biden team’s waiver of sanctions on Nord Stream 2 in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To understand just how weak American diplomacy appears both to adversaries and allies, consider Azerbaijan.
In December 2020, just a month after President Ilham Aliyev completed the first phase of Azerbaijan’s conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, Andrew Schofer, the lead US diplomat on the crisis, traveled to Yerevan and Baku. Aliyev humiliated Schofer on live television, bragging about how Azerbaijan’s military prowess achieved what American diplomacy did not and then asking, “Why are you here?”
That episode should have colored Blinken’s approach to Azerbaijan when he entered office, but, alas, a willingness to tolerate Aliyev’s disdain for America came to define the Biden era.
The list of humiliation is long. When in June 2023 Azerbaijani snipers fired on a US Agency for International Development project in Yeraskh, killing an Indian worker, Blinken and USAID Administrator Samantha Power went silent.
