An American in Paris: Blinken's Petro Politics Promise...

Has Texas joined OPEC? How to tame the tech billionaires...

If you think you learned something from this post or any other, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. There will never be a paywall.

The young Mr. Antony Blinken

In my misspent youth I’d collect college theses of prominent politicos as well as their genealogical record.

Taken together these knickknacks — the flotsam and jetsam of political life — became a kind of key to viewing the past, or at the very least, grist for informed speculation.

To be sure the past is a foreign country but what better way to view it than through the eyes of a young diplomat? I’m not so much interested in what Antony Blinken thought but how he arrived at his conclusions.

I have always hunted for these unguarded moments when someone really reveals themself. In vino, veritas? No! In scriptio, veritas!

My father would always quote Cardinal Richelieu — "Never send a letter, never destroy a letter” — but writers always leave a paper trail. To write is to make a mark and those marks add up to something over time.

When you study the early history you learn a lot about these types and you get a real sense for who is the real deal and who is faking it. I like these unguarded moments and truthfully it’s a lot of fun to add something to the public record of the older generation who assumed that time had forgotten their youthful missteps or sophomoric indulgences.

Every so often, though, you meet a wunderkind who really is one of a kind. My forays in the imperial city have occasioned forced me to drive by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s home and I always make sure to waive to the protestors who I assume are all federal agents. One has to have a certain panache when one does these things.

To put it mildly, I’m a fan of Blinken, who I suspect will go down as one of our greatest Secretaries of State. Perusing the younger Blinken’s writings is a sort of time capsule. He’s been doing this awhile, maybe even from the womb.

Think about the gravitas — or daring — it took for a young Antony Blinken to interview Henry Kissinger.

Some years ago I got a copy of Antony Blinken’s college thesis, which I devoured in a sitting. The 1984 Harvard thesis was titled “The Formulation of East-West Policy in West: A Case Study of the Trans-Siberian Natural Gas Pipeline.”

My understanding is that the thesis begat a 1987 book, Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis, which is both suspiciously hard to find and altogether interesting.

I wrote about it, in part, here, and I read this rather interesting piece about Blinken’s Harvard writings in Politico.

Blinken, educated by the French and tutored by his Holocaust-surviving, Robert Maxwell-advising stepfather, is the master.

In recent years I’ve made my own reassessment of Robert Maxwell, who I have come to think of as something approximating a genius. Who really killed Robert Maxwell? Don't be lazy in your thinking. I suspect it was the British Tory world working with the Israelis that had grown tired of him who had done him in but as with so many things one is never quite sure.

Maxwell tried to buy the New York Daily News and by the end of 1991, he was dead. The publication was then taken over by Mort Zuckerman, who famously quipped when he was accused of being a part of the Israel lobby, “I would just say this: The allegations of this disproportionate influence of the Jewish community remind me of the 92-year-old man sued in a paternity suit. He said he was so proud, he pleaded guilty.”

Well, OK then. Do you think Zuckerman is really a billionaire?

Smart players know that my cofounder at Clearview.AI is Richard Schwartz, who once worked for Zuckerman after Maxwell was dispatched.

You have to understand that Blinken’s stepfather served as Maxwell’s attorney and confidant. He was among the last to talk to Maxwell while he was still alive.

Let’s talk a bit about where we are now:

• The Europeans have been fueled up with natural gas.

• The Italians talk of sanctioning Russian oil. Have you noticed how patriotic the Italian mob seems these days? I have!

• The Turks are cutting a deal with ExxonMobil, the price for which is their moving against the Russians.

• Even the Kazakhs, who view la vie en rose these days, contemplate a post-Russian future by aligning with America. Maybe we’ll help them with those methane leaks?

• Texas and California are seemingly all a lot more irrelevant than they were, especially their oil producing regions which have all but officially joined OPEC.

You could see how this would work politically.

If China alone is a customer of Russian resources China withdraws from Africa—and swallows Siberia.

China could also be in a maximal place of leverage with respect to the Russian Federation. China clearly recognizes this threat which is why they are expanding into the Micronesia world — and encouraging the breaking up of nations — and you’re hearing a lot of the Chinese fronts talking about deep sea mining, which of course will never be allowed but which could be a useful negotiating chit.

The restive provinces don’t yet want to have the conversation.

Ultimately India would also lay claim to Russian resources but China, being China, will box them out. Who knows? Given India’s willingness to assassinate people on American and Canadian soil we might even take China’s side on that.

The genius of Blinken is all around us:

• forcing the Russians and the Chinese into an unhappy marriage.

• the yoking of the Europeans to the American dollar.

• the taming of the tech bros, with attendant geopolitical consequences. They had a cute anti-Biden dinner earlier this month but there is no alternative.

No, you aren’t thinking very clearly if you don’t think Musk canceling on Modi, Xi inviting in Elon, and Mike Benz’s suspension aren’t all connected.

Will Musk move even harder into the Chinese orbit? It feels like it doesn't it?

Sometime ago Peter Thiel, a German-Maltese-New Zealander-American, asked for a meeting with Secretary Blinken, an American in Paris.

He was rebuffed, obviously. The master does not meet an amateur.