The ‘Collective Biden’:
Blinken and the Spawn of Brzezinski

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this article]

Oct. 24—On his departure from his eleventh visit to Israel since October 7, 2023, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken again displayed the naked hypocrisy that has characterized his role as a key figure in what some analysts are calling the “Collective Biden” regime.[fn_1]

Speaking to reporters at the airport after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli security leaders, Blinken said, “Since October 7, Israel has achieved most of its strategic objectives when it comes to Gaza,” referring to allegedly destroying Hamas’s leadership, with the crowning achievement being the murder of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—whom Blinken singled out as the “main obstacle” to a peaceful resolution—and degrading its military capacity. “Now is the time to turn these successes into an enduring strategic success. And there are really two things left to do—get the hostages home, and bring the war to an end, with an understanding of what will follow.”

He neglected to mention that these are the same goals he had defined since the initial Hamas attack, which had been the supposed subject of his previous ten shuttles in a year to the region. Further, to describe as “successes” the murder of more than 42,300 Palestinians, the destruction of 55% of the buildings in Gaza, and of most of the hospitals and medical facilities there, leaves the distinct impression that he is referring to a success in committing genocide.

He added that this means that now there exists the “opportunity to end the war, to keep Hamas out, and make sure Israel does not stay.... We fully reject any reoccupation of Gaza.”

As Blinken was hyping the hoped-for success of his mission, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued a brutal campaign in northern Gaza, which has killed more than 600 Palestinians in seventeen days, while targeting hospitals near the Jabaliya refugee camp that is under assault. And while he adamantly asserted President Joe Biden’s administration’s insistence that reoccupation must be rejected, members of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his Likud party, attended a settlers’ movement rally at which Daniella Weiss, a leader of the movement, stated their goal to “settle the entire Gaza Strip, not just a part of it, not just a few settlements, the entire Gaza Strip from north to south.”

Blinken’s Lies and Provocations

Is it possible he had not been briefed on the settlers’ rally, or that he missed the headline article in the Israeli daily Haaretz of that day, “The Deadly Racism Behind Israel’s Policy Toward the Palestinians”? A quick look at his overall record in recent weeks makes it clear that Blinken is not using the waning influence of the U.S. to pursue peace, but to defend the state of permanent war which has characterized U.S. policy since Vietnam, and especially throughout the Biden administration’s tenure.

One example of his lying in defense of Israeli genocide was exposed by leaks from within his own State Department. A September 24 article on the website ProPublica, by journalist Brett Murphy, cited his testimony to Congress on May 20, when he stated that, contrary to the conclusions submitted in memos from two agencies of his own department, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” Had he reported honestly on the findings he suppressed, that Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid from reaching desperate Palestinians, U.S. law would require the suspension of military and other aid to Israel.[fn_2]

A second example of his role in shaping the Biden-Harris policy of support for wars is his ongoing effort, in conjunction with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy, to persuade Biden to agree to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that all restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles provided by them be lifted. Following a week of meetings in London, which included the U.S.-UK Strategic Dialogue, and a quick trip to Kiev to consult with Zelensky, the three met in Washington with Biden on September 13, hoping to overcome his resistance to lifting the restrictions for strikes deep inside Russia.

According to Russian analyst Gilbert Doctorow in his column on the “Collective Biden,” “We’re talking about the imminent outbreak of World War III. And that is what Mr. Blinken is doing in Kiev. He’s setting the stage ... for the outbreak of World War III before the November elections.” Under pressure from saner heads in the Pentagon, Biden ultimately rejected this demand, not just once but two more times. Yet, after his failure to overcome the Pentagon’s opposition, Blinken reiterated his, and Biden’s, commitment to a Ukrainian victory. He said, “The bottom line is this: We want Ukraine to win, and we’re fully committed to keep marshalling the support it needs.”

The Blinken Family Tree

Blinken’s emergence as a key figure in shaping U.S. foreign policy is part of a long arc, stretching back to the end of World War II, when individuals involved in corporate cartels tied to the City of London and Wall Street took over the institutions running U.S. foreign policy, identified by President Eisenhower as the “Military-Industrial Complex” (MIC). Over time, Cold War anti-communists were transformed into the neocons and liberal war hawks which control both parties today, as well as the Executive branch, including the departments of State, Defense, and Justice, and the intelligence community.[fn_3]

Blinken is a product of this transformation. His father, Donald Blinken, was co-founder in 1966 of Warburg-Pincus and Company. Formerly a bank created by the Venetian Jewish Warburg family centuries ago, it became one of the leading global private equity funds. Its chairman today is Timothy Geithner, who loyally served these networks as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and later, after the 2008 banking crisis, was instrumental as President Barak Obama’s Treasury Secretary in bailing out banks and financial institutions at the center of the mortgage-backed securities blow-out. Donald Blinken shared with his wife—Tony Blinken’s mother, Judith Frehm Blinken Pisar—a predilection for the modern art movement promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded operation established to destroy Classical forms of art while promoting disharmonic irrationalism as an early experiment in the development of hybrid warfare.[fn_4] While she began in the mid-1960s promoting contemporary composers, such as America’s John Cage and the German Karlheinz Stockhausen, known as an avant-garde promoter of electronic music—first in New York, then in Paris, where she ran a salon—Donald became the leading collector and promoter of the sociopathic “artist” Mark Rothko, as president of the Mark Rothko Foundation.

Donald, who was actively involved in Democratic Party politics, was appointed Ambassador to Hungary in 1994. In that position, he became a leading advocate of NATO expansion, and a supporter of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which was founded in Hungary by the speculator Soros in 1984, to promote “democracy” through “color revolutions,” such as in Ukraine in 2014. The Open Society Archives were renamed after Blinken and his second wife, Vera, in 2015.

Blinken and the ‘Humanitarian Hawks’

Tony Blinken’s public service career began with an appointment to the State Department’s Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs in 1993. He had a meteoric rise in the Clinton administration. In 1994, he was appointed to the State Department’s National Security Council, becoming an important part of Clinton’s national security team. He worked closely with Sandy Berger, who became Clinton’s National Security Advisor, and with Madeleine Albright, who served as UN Ambassador from 1993 to 1997, then became Secretary of State.

Berger and Albright were responsible for some of the worst decisions of the Clinton administration, including the push for NATO’s eastward expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union; extending the Bush administration’s sanctions against Iraq, identified as responsible for the deaths of 500,000 children[fn_5]; and the decision to participate with NATO in bombing Serbia, from March 24 to June 10, 1999. Blinken offered unconditional support for each of these decisions.

Following the election of G.W. Bush as President, Blinken briefly became a senior fellow at the CSIS think tank, then took a position as Democratic Staff Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2003, he was an advocate of the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. In this position, he worked closely with Biden, who tapped him to be the foreign policy advisor of his failed 2008 presidential campaign. With the Obama-Biden victory in 2008, he served as Deputy Assistant to Obama, then moved to be National Security Advisor to Biden. In this capacity, he was part of a group that anointed themselves the “Humanitarian Hawks,” advocates of the imperial doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” This group included Susan Rice and Samantha Power, both of whom were influential figures under Obama, and then in the “Collective Biden” grouping. He also worked closely with Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor to Obama and close to Biden, and with John Brennan, whom Obama appointed CIA Director in 2013, a position he abused as one of the leaders in the fraudulent Russiagate campaign against Donald Trump.

Among the policies Blinken supported under Obama were the NATO military intervention in Libya in 2011; his participation in drafting the plan to support “moderate” jihadists in the civil war in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad; and support for Biden in his backing for the “regime-change” coup in Ukraine in 2014. He was given responsibility to formulate the response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which has been to demand the return of Crimea to the Kiev regime.

The Corporate Connection

Upon leaving the Obama administration with the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, Blinken cofounded WestExec Advisers in April 2017, following the path of previous government security and intelligence officials into becoming lucrative fixers with Beltway consulting firms. His cofounder was Michele Flournoy, a “defense expert” who had been Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under Obama.

Other Obama appointees who joined WestExec and later worked in the Biden administration included Lisa Monaco, now a Deputy Attorney General; Robert O. Work, a Deputy Secretary of Defense under Obama, who in 2013 was appointed CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a neocon think tank (Victoria Nuland, the notorious witch of Maidan, who became Biden’s Under-Secretary of State in 2021, was CEO of CNAS during 2018-19. She is married to Robert Kagan, a prominent neocon who was a cofounder, with Paul Wolfowitz, of the “Sole Superpower” think tank, Project for the New American Century); Avril Haines, currently serving as the Director of National Intelligence, who was Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy CIA Director under Obama; and Jen Psaki, who was an ineffective press secretary for Biden before she went to work as an analyst/commentator for the MSNBC network.

The clients Blinken and his team signed up at WestExec read like a Who’s Who of the MICIMATT. They include Blackstone, Bank of America, Lazard, Royal Bank of Canada, Facebook, Palantir, Boeing, AT&T, Google’s Jigsaw, and two Israeli defense-related firms—Shield AI, which specializes in drone surveillance, and Windward, whose CEO is Lord Browne of Madingley, a “titan” of the City of London and former CEO of British Petroleum.

WestExec adopted the model of the consulting firms founded by two of Blinken’s mentors, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger. The Albright Group was founded in 2001, as was Berger’s Stonebridge International. Their merger in 2009 created a consultancy powerhouse, Stonebridge International.

The Spawn of Zbiggy

The individuals mentioned above represent a significant part of the U.S. roster allied with Blinken in running the “Collective Biden.” What they have in common is a commitment to the geopolitical worldview shaped at the beginning of the last century by the Fabian Society networks which promoted Halford Mackinder, whose geopolitical doctrine served as a rationale for the continuation of the British Empire through the first half of the Twentieth Century. By the 1960s, the “Heartland Theory” of Mackinder was adapted to provide a theory to serve the emerging American empire, which is in reality an Anglo-American Empire. The focus today is the same as Mackinder’s—to control the land mass, abundant raw materials, and large population of Eurasia.

The leading proponent of an American school of geopolitics was the Polish-born emigre, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a mentor or dominant intellectual influence for many in the Blinken gang. Brzezinski joined with David Rockefeller in 1973 to found the Trilateral Commission, which became notoriously well-known through its role in making Jimmy Carter President. Carter appointed Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor, a position which he used to launch operations to break up the Soviet Union. It was Brzezinski who updated the British Empire’s 19th-Century Great Game against Russia, setting a trap using Islamic jihadists and tribesmen to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, to create a Vietnam-style quagmire to pay back the Soviets for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. His “Arc of Crisis” theory, of arming, training, and deploying Islamic fundamentalists into border states of the USSR, was drawn explicitly from his encounter with the ideas of British geopolitician Bernard Lewis.

His theory, such as it is, was summarized in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. One can see from some quotes from this work, the extent to which it has shaped the intention to use Ukraine to weaken and potentially break-up Russia, which was applied by the Clinton, Obama, and Biden foreign policy teams. Developing the idea of the U.S. as the “Sole Superpower” introduced by Paul Wolfowitz (who was a Cold War liberal who worked with Democratic Senator Henry Jackson), Brzezinski wrote:

The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole, and indeed, the first truly global power….

[I]t is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.

This is the language, clear and simple, of the unipolar order, which, in Blinken-speak, must be enforced by the U.S. and its NATO allies, by military force, if necessary, to maintain a “Rules-Based Order.” No rival is allowed.

The timing of the publication of Zbiggy’s book is significant, in 1997, on the eve of the expansion of NATO, with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary incorporated the next year. Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as a key nation to be brought into NATO:

Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian Empire. Russia, without Ukraine, can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state…. If Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources, as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

As for the British imperial oligarchs who promoted Mackinder, Brzezinski insisted that Russia must not become a Eurasian power. As for the challenge confronting the United States, Brzezinski wrote, “In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of power in the hands of a single state.... Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.”

So, what should be the U.S. strategic goal? “Expecting America’s unprecedented power to diminish over time, the priority must be to manage the rise of the other regional powers in ways that do not threaten America’s global primacy.” How do you do that? You pit them in wars against each other. You use irregular warfare; you use terrorism. And here you see the Brzezinski strategy unfolding, even as he was out of office, but dominating what became the policy of the George W. Bush administration and every administration since then.

Brzezinski was the mentor of Madeleine Albright, who was a graduate student under him, and was hired by him to be the NSC’s congressional liaison. She described him as “my professor, my mentor, my boss, and my friend.”

Albright played much the same role with Blinken as had Brzezinski with her. At a memorial service for Albright on March 23, 2022, Blinken described her as “a brilliant diplomat, a visionary leader, a courageous trailblazer, a dedicated mentor, and a great and good person who loved the United States deeply and devoted her life to serving it. She was also a wonderful friend to many, including me. I’ll miss her very much.” Perhaps his ruthless support of sanctions as an instrument of “statecraft” is a way of paying homage to the great “success” of Albright in tightening the sanctions regime against Iraq that killed 500,000 children, which she defended to her dying day.

For their role as key operatives running the disaster labelled the “Collective Biden” administration, Blinken and his cohorts must be held accountable.

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[fn_1] On the term “Collective Biden,” Russian analyst Gilbert Doctorow defined it in a column, “The insane recklessness of Collective Biden.”

He concluded the column with this footnote: “Collective Biden is the term which Russian talk show hosts have applied to the U.S. leadership given that the Presidency assumed a collective form when the physical Joe Biden slipped into deep senility this past couple of years.” [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] Brett Murphy, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Agencies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them,” ProPublica, September 24, 2024. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] Former CIA analyst and anti-war activist Ray McGovern has updated the concept of the MIC, to reflect its reach into other areas. He calls it the MICIMATT—the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex, which includes the Silicon Valley tech sector. This is the modern form of what was identified in the 1920s as “synarchy” and identified as the movement which created fascism, or private corporate control of governments. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] On the CIA involvement with the Russellite Congress of Cultural Freedom, and its role in an early phase of hybrid warfare, see the author’s article, “You Are the Target of Hybrid Warfare.” [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Albright presented a defense of sanctions which is echoed by Blinken and his liberal hawk allies: Asked on CBS’s 60 Minutes if the loss of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions was worth the price, Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” [back to text for fn_5]