TEXT JOIN TO 77022

Lying About History: Efforts to Whitewash Biden’s Foreign Policy Failures

History matters. Truthful history matters more. It is essential for democratic government and good statesmanship. Thomas Hobbes captured this when he wrote: “The principal and proper work of history being to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently in the future.” But accurate history is difficult to separate from power, as Orwell famously identified when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Those who control the present jealously guard that power and are never reluctant to manipulate and contort historical facts to serve it. The Biden administration is doing precisely this. Over the past week and a half, Biden has unveiled an unprecedented effort of disinformation combined with the dispatch overseas of senior administration officials in a last-ditch effort to rewrite the history of their foreign policy decisions. This effort at deception is intended to reinforce the assertion that Biden’s foreign policy agenda was one of success and accomplishment. Unfortunately, Biden and his team have left a wake of global death and destruction—a failed agenda that has left America vulnerable.

The program of disinformation began with the genesis of Biden’s candidacy in 2019 and 2020 and continued during the four tumultuous years of his presidency. However, it is now at the end of his presidency that this destruction is clearly visible to the world. Most tellingly, it was on the last day of the year in 2024 when the Washington Post national security bon vivant David Ignatius wrote the following hagiographical revisionism of National Security Advisor (NSA) Jake Sullivan’s time in office entitled, “The Strategist in the Hurricane.”

Examples of Ignatius’ sycophancy toward Sullivan include the absurd assertion of a “once-in-a-generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world” with a “dazzling résumé.” The 74-year-old Ignatius continues his adoration, noting that Sullivan possesses “a rare ability to conduct back-channel diplomacy and think outside the box” and is “one of the most influential national security advisers in our history.”

Ignatius’s toadyism is seemingly without limits as he declares Sullivan’s “superelite” pedigree represents someone who came to the White House with a “big idea” that “the American middle class is a national security asset.” Thus, despite Biden’s repeated condemnation of populism in general, Ignatius wants readers to believe that Sullivan’s greatest achievement is not in foreign policy but in the economic realm for his “intellectual firepower” for the Chips and Science Act.

Finally, Ignatius sheepishly reminds us that Sullivan “loyally” worked to execute Biden’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan, while not mentioning the death of the thirteen American servicemembers killed in action or the other disastrous consequences of the withdrawal. Ignatius praises Sullivan as being the ideal partner for other Biden “heavyweights” like CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines regarding their alleged intelligence successes in Iran and Russia. This level of gaslighting is normally reserved for a press briefing by Karine Jean-Pierre, not the nation’s national security leaders.

Perhaps the American people need a new award for sycophancy in journalism—the Pravda Award. But even so, it is not clear that Ignatius would win it, as he has strong competition.

As if on cue, in the January 3 Financial Times,’ Demetri Sevastopulo provides a similar obsequious portrayal of Anthony Blinken’s time as Secretary of State in an article entitled “Antony Blinken: ‘China has been trying to have it both ways.’

After telling us what kind of wine Blinken is drinking, the interview is framed in the context of excuse-making. From the outset, Blinken lowers the bar of expectations by asserting the Biden team “faced the worst economic crisis arguably since the Great Depression” and “the worst public health crisis in at least 100 years,” with “strong divisions at home, a challenge to our democracy,” and “fraught relations with our closest allies and partners.” That Sevastopulo frames Blinken’s tenure as a success compels one to wonder about the journalist’s and his editor’s standards and their biases.

Unsurprisingly, and without any self-awareness of the facts, throughout the interview, Blinken defends his record. Yet it is over the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that Blinken’s defense is most vociferous—and misleading. He admits that the PRC is providing “critical material” to help Russia rebuild its defense industrial base, yet he boasts of his own success because “China is hearing a chorus of concern from many countries” along with sanctions from several countries, including America. For Blinken, success is not measured in real terms; for example, the fact that either less material support is being sent from the PRC to Russia or is not. Rather, Blinken measures himself by the lectures the PRC’s foreign ministry gives him regarding supposed efforts of the Biden regime to encircle the PRC—efforts that have objectively not occurred.

Without a shred of introspection, Blinken proudly asserts that he, and other U.S. cabinet secretaries, had stepped up “engagement with China”—specifically in the two years since a PRC intelligence collection balloon flew over America. Blinken justifies his neo-engagement policies with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with a quasi-religious belief that the U.S. has a “responsibility” to talk to Beijing or risk the relationship “veering out of control.” Likewise, Blinken’s hubris extends to the issue of conflict over Taiwan, where he emphatically asserts that “engagement” will reduce the odds of war—this despite daily evidence to the contrary.

To these articles, we must include a January 6 interview in the South China Morning Post with Obama-era State Department East Asia official Danny Russell, which are all part of a concerted effort to rewrite and embellish the history of Biden’s and Obama’s foreign policy “successes,” especially towards the PRC. The result is that these articles are intended to rewrite the historical record and to deceive the American people about their failure to defend this nation.

By any objective measure, the Biden administration’s foreign policy decisions, led by Sullivan and Blinken, have resulted in profound death and destruction and have damaged American interests. Their failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine has resulted in well over a million dead. Additionally, the nation of Ukraine has been destroyed—all because of a fundamental failure to deter Putin. Likewise in the Middle East, thousands of people have died as a result of Biden’s lack of leadership.

The catastrophe of the Biden administration’s neo-engagement with the CCP has resulted in great damage to U.S. national security. There has been a dramatic increase in the PLA’s military threats to Taiwan, to our treaty allies in Japan and the Republic of the Philippines, and to the U.S. itself. This ideological obsession with engagement has also led to an unraveling of stability on the Korean Peninsula. Not only has Kim Jong Un resumed his ballistic missile and nuclear testing with a vengeance, but today there are North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia against Ukraine, and the world witnesses what amounts to a coup d’état in South Korea by pro-CCP politicians.

These articles were not released by happenstance or without other faux efforts of benign motivation. Rather, the articles should be seen for what they are—disinformation made in advance of Sullivan’s trip to India and Blinken’s trip to South Korea, Japan, and France. They are an effort to deceive history and prevent the American people and future leaders from understanding the true record of the Biden presidency. The appropriate, necessary, and noble objectives that Hobbes described will be defeated. Their effort is to sustain their power, as Orwell saw.

Thus, in truth, these trips were not about strengthening America’s national security but are what is called in Navy parlance—a boondoggle—that is, a good deal that is fortuitous or on someone else’s dime. Yet there is a huge difference between being a sailor getting a lucky trip for the good of the nation versus a trip like Blinken’s, where he is seen eating sushi in an elite restaurant with no Japanese allies present.

The Biden administration must be remembered for their actions. These include their abject failure in the foreign policy arena from its first month in office, when Blinken and Sullivan sat there on American soil and took an outrageous and discourteous lecture by the PRC’s foreign minister, to their failures in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel, and Syria, and, most importantly, their subservient attitude towards the CCP that has resulted in over one million, and likely closer to two million, dead.

The amount of human death and suffering is the direct result of an ideological worldview that they, the elites like Sullivan and Blinken, know best on how to manage America’s decline and how to avoid the so-called “Thucydides Trap” that they fear will result in a thermonuclear war. These elites have convinced themselves that such an outcome is inevitable given the Trump team’s return to the White House and their undertaking of an America First approach to American national security by confronting the CCP.

These articles and hurried boondoggle trips also have another sinister motivation. They are part of a very concerted blitz by the Obama/Biden foreign policy team to not only deceive the historical record but also to shackle the incoming Trump administration to follow the path of threat deflation and unconstrained and unaccountable engagement with the PRC. In essence, Sullivan and Blinken’s trips and hagiographic articles are intended to fetter the incoming Trump administration.

Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan have weakened, not strengthened, our alliance structure in Asia and around the world. Consequently, they have put America’s national security in peril. In their discussion, they no doubt are attempting to convey a message to U.S. allies not to be concerned about Trump, as they quietly assure them that the Democrats will return in 2028.

Fortunately, the incoming Trump administration has made it clear that they reject the Sullivan/Blinken worldview and will instead pursue an “America First” agenda that will strengthen our national security domestically and internationally.

Marie Antoinette is remembered for her elitist “let them eat cake” statement and it is not an exaggeration to say that the lasting image of the Biden/Obama foreign policy team will be Tony Blinken sipping wine and giving interviews in D.C. and eating rare sushi in expensive restaurants in Tokyo with his American cronies. That image is far better than the truth of the costs of the Biden presidency, which include dead bodies in burned-out cities in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. These images are far more accurate portrayals of this regime’s failed foreign policies.

On January 20, America’s yearning for the return of a man of the people will be realized and the great effort to repair the prodigious damage of the Biden presidency may begin in earnest.

***

James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer are authors of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure. The views expressed are their own.

Get the news corporate media won't tell you.

Get caught up on today's must read stores!

By submitting your information, you agree to receive exclusive AG+ content, including special promotions, and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. By providing your phone number and checking the box to opt in, you are consenting to receive recurring SMS/MMS messages, including automated texts, to that number from my short code. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, STOP to end. SMS opt-in will not be sold, rented, or shared.

About James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

James Fanell is a government fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy and a former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Bradley A. Thayer is a Founding Member of the Committee on Present Danger China and the coauthor with Lianchao Han of Understanding the China Threat.

Photo: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (C) tastes sushi next to US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel during a visit to Daiwa Sushi restaurant at Toyosu Market in Tokyo on January 7, 2025. (Photo by Issei Kato / POOL / AFP)

Start the discussion at community.amgreatness.com