When determining who is the worst secretary of state in American history, the only hard part is choosing between Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. Albright stated in May 1996 that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying for U.S. foreign policy objectives. That was arguably the darkest moment in the history of American diplomacy prior to the Hillary Clinton era. It was up there with her assertion that we are always justified in using force because the U.S. is “the indispensable nation,” and with the question that she posed to then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Albright’s successor Hillary Clinton, who came to Foggy Bottom a decade later, was a liberal interventionist on steroids. Her disdain for standard international norms and mechanisms in diplomatic practice was on par with Albright’s. It was evident in the giggle she released on hearing news of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s murder: “We came, we saw, he died!” In 2011, with devastating consequences, she tipped the balance within the Obama administration in favor of the Libyan intervention. She routinely saw military power as the first resort, notably in Syria, and in 2012 her recklessness resulted in the Benghazi debacle.

For people like Albright and Clinton, “America” has been an instrument to impose anarcho-tyranny at home and internationalist imperialism abroad. They share nothing in common with the real and historic America, which they view as the host organism for exercising their bloated egos and ideological obsessions.

In that sense, Secretary of State Antony Blinken fits the mold well. Blinken is less deranged than his two female predecessors, making him all the more dangerous. More than any other figure in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, he seamlessly blends the assumptions of cultural leftism and neoconservative hegemonism. Blinken is a deeply committed ideologue whose striving for open-ended U.S. global dominance is inseparable from his determination to impose “our values”—LGBTQ+ ideology, the dogma of man-made climate change, diversity, and so on—on a world that is largely resistant to what it sees as America’s descent into madness.

From 2009 to 2013, as deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to then-vice president Joseph Biden, Blinken advocated an all-out U.S. intervention in Syria. With unabashed mendacity, he defended Biden’s 2003 vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a “vote for tough diplomacy.” He favored the Libyan intervention and the Saudi war in Yemen. Out of office during the Trump years, he readily succumbed to the usual temptations of the swamp: Blinken co-headed WestExec Advisors with Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s undersecretary of defense, whose key clients were in the defense industry.

While preparing for the pending Biden campaign in 2019, Blinken co-wrote with Robert Kagan an article reasserting the standard neoconservative dogma of global interventionism: the world does not govern itself, and if “the United States abdicates its leading role in shaping international rules and institutions . . . [s]ome other power or powers will step in and move the world in ways that advance their interests and values, not ours.” That is an arrogant and patently false view of the international scene because the U.S. has been the greatest generator of instability and conflict since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Lest we forget, Kagan was the coauthor—with William Kristol—of the seminal neoconservative manifesto “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” published in 1996 by Foreign Affairs.  Kagan is also the husband of Victoria Nuland, a Russophobic hawk who—as assistant secretary of state for European and Asian affairs under Obama—was directly involved in stage-managing the Maidan coup against the government of Ukraine in 2014. Seven years later, Blinken chose Nuland as his undersecretary for political affairs, the second most important position at the State Department. It’s a tightly-knit community inside the Beltway.

Working in tandem, Blinken and Nuland strove relentlessly to goad Vladimir Putin into war in Ukraine. In December 2021, they rejected his final demand for a binding set of security guarantees from the West—a pledge that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO and that offensive missile systems would be removed from Russia’s borders. At the same time, contrary to logic and foreign policy realism, Blinken has gone out of his way to alienate China.

A rapid deterioration of relations between Washington and Beijing started in March 2021, barely six weeks after Blinken assumed his current post. Addressing the media in Alaska just before a meeting with Yang Jiechi, the leading architect of China’s foreign policy, Blinken announced the U.S. would “discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, [and] economic coercion of our allies.” This unprecedented display of arrogant disregard for diplomatic norms prompted an angry response from Yang, who warned that the U.S. does not “have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.”

America’s ideological eccentricities are not confined to its failed China policy. The State Department has provided financial assistance to some 10,000 “LGBTQI human rights defenders” through its Global Equality Fund. Blinken has even created a new senior position at the State Department: a “special envoy to advance the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex persons.”

Speaking at the State Department’s first-ever briefing for LGBTQI reporters in June 2022—an event which is in itself indicative of an advanced form of insanity—Blinken said that he brings up LGBTQI rights with his Saudi counterpart “invariably, in every conversation.” He added, “We have real engagement” on this issuewith Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud.

Blinken’s “real engagement” has contributed to the remarkable fact that Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations, with China acting as the intermediary. The agreement was a major victory for Beijing. China is well on the way to replacing the U.S. as the preeminent power in the volatile Middle East. Beijing is also fortifying its position as Russia’s key and essential ally, and is likely to dominate that relationship. During Blinken’s three years in office, China has become better poised than at any moment in its long history to influence and even control global events and processes, which it considers vital to its security and essential to the execution of its grand strategy.

Blinken’s arrogant style has alienated another formerly staunch Middle Eastern ally, Turkey. At the end of March, amid the Turkish election campaign, the American ambassador in Ankara, Jeff Flake, went to the headquarters of the opposition Republican People’s Party, where he had a meeting with its leader and presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. This was a crude gesture of preference obviously made on Blinken’s orders. It prompted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to formally cut all ties with Flake. A month later, Turkish interior minister Süleyman Soylu said that “the whole world hates America,” and that its efforts to impose its culture and values on the planet are doomed to fail because its hegemony no longer exists. Such rhetoric coming from a senior minister in the government of Turkey would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

Of lesser import but illustrative of his mindset is Blinken’s unabashed climate alarmism. Speaking of the challenges facing the American people, he declared in an April 2021 speech that “We’ll put the climate crisis at the center of our foreign policy and national security.” Last November, he reasserted that claim. “Climate change poses an existential threat to people and our planet,” he said. Such statements and Blinken’s devotion to various climate-related “protocols” confirm his propensity to embrace and propagate elite orthodoxies with almost religious fervor.

In addition to Blinken’s distorted world outlook and disastrous performance, his moral standards and truthfulness are open to doubt. In April, Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, told Congress that Blinken, in his capacity as one of the Biden campaign’s senior advisors, was a driving force behind a letter signed by several intelligence colleagues in 2020, which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. That was a disinformation operation par excellence, as there had never been any evidence of Russian involvement in the laptop affair—but its systematic suppression by the media was real.

Furthermore, at the end of April, GOP Senator Ron Johnson accused Blinken of telling “boldface” lies when he testified under oath to Congress that he never emailed Hunter Biden. Johnson’s comments came after the revelation that the president’s son and Blinken exchanged emails in 2015 while the latter worked for then-President Barack Obama and Hunter was on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The emails show that Hunter wanted to meet with Blinken to get his “advice” on certain issues.

Antony Blinken combines the worst traits of an inherently corrupt Washington insider with the blinkers of an ideologue who seeks permanent cultural revolution at home and the imposition of its fruits abroad. He is likely to be remembered as the person who has done more than anyone to help China strengthen its global position vis-à-vis the United States by pushing the harassed Russian bear into the claws of a grateful dragon.

It would be in the American interest for Blinken to go, even though no successor would likely do much better under this administration. At least he or she could hardly do worse.