Though American foreign policy has always vacillated, its actual practice has managed at least the appearance of consistency. But in a period when American society as a whole is undergoing a psychodrama regarding race, class, history, climate and "whiteness," it is not surprising that diplomats have been affected.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield are telling examples of intellectual trends among both American elites and the institution of American diplomacy. For both, there are extraordinary crises that must be addressed immediately by the global community. But the contrasts between Blinken's level presentation of globally oriented technocratic "expertise" and Thomas-Greenfield's full-bore anti-Americanism could not be more profound. In neither case do American interests come first. Can they be reconciled or explained?

Blinken's pedigree as a certified internationalist need not be recapitulated. His return to the State Department was heralded as the return of American probity and leadership. What are his priorities and methods? His remarks to the Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate are indicative. "What the United States can do at home can make a significant contribution toward keeping the Earth's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius," he stated, without elaboration. "But of course, no country can overcome this existential threat alone."

Elsewhere, Blinken has depicted human-induced climate change as a veritable Frankenstein's monster causing "[m]ore frequent and more intense storms; longer dry spells; bigger floods; more extreme heat and more extreme cold; faster sea-level rise; more people displaced; more pollution; more asthma," as well as "higher health costs; less predictable seasons for farmers. And all of that will hit low-income, black and brown communities the hardest." Almost as bad, "Russia is exploiting this change to try to exert control over new spaces. It is modernizing its bases in the Arctic and building new ones, including one just 300 miles from Alaska. China is increasing its presence in the Arctic, too."

To address these unfolding horrors, America will put "climate crisis at the center of our foreign policy and national security, as President Biden instructed us to do in his first week in office. That means taking into account how every bilateral and multilateral engagement – every policy decision – will impact our goal of putting the world on a safer, more sustainable path."

The United States will then "mobilize resources, institutional know-how, technical expertise from across our government, the private sector, NGOs, and research universities" and "emphasize assisting the countries being hit hardest by climate change," notably by "leveraging instruments like the financing provided by the Export-Import Bank to incentivize renewable energy exports; the proposed expansion of tax credits for clean energy generation and storage in the President's American Jobs Plan; and the Administration's ongoing efforts to level the global playing field for American-made products and services."

Blinken expresses a modernist faith that problems can be overcome with technology and the sharing of money. The subtext, however, is a moral panic in which humanity and modernity are themselves scourges to be tamed, if not reversed, and which hints that conventional politics and persuasion are inadequate. Technocrats wielding power is the only possible avenue to avert disaster.

Thomas-Greenfield's animadversions are more easily parsed. In remarks she made at an event honoring anti-Semite Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, she lauded Sharpton's "activism" and touted American global engagement, warning that if "we go it alone, and retreat from the world, then we let existing inequalities fester."

Like Blinken's, Thomas-Greenfield's primary orientation is global:

"We rejoined the World Health Organization because we believe we can make the WHO smarter, nimbler, and more just by rolling up our sleeves and getting involved. We proudly rejoined the Paris Agreement because the only way to reverse the effects of the climate crisis is to join forces. And we know that if we don't act, poorer communities and communities of color, especially in the Global South, will suffer the most. And we immediately re-engaged with the Human Rights Council, and have announced our intention to seek election to that body, so that we can advance our most cherished democratic values around the globe."

Like Blinken's, Thomas-Greenfield's faith in elite-run institutions is absolute, but her promotion of ill-defined "democratic values" rather than American security and interests (much less American values) is telling. More so is her indictment that "when we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale, we have to approach them with humility." She then offered personal testimony, in the religious sense, regarding how bad American racism has been: her great-great-grandmother was a slave and she herself grew up in the segregated South during the 1950s.

But that evil is foundational and seemingly ineradicable.

"I have seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles," she declared. She then pronounced that "Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today's world, that is every society."

"White supremacy" is effectively proposed as the predominant American and global form of racism, which she has experienced not only in the United States but around the world. And while acknowledging that Rohingya and others "have been oppressed, abused and killed in staggering numbers" in Burma, and that in China the government "has committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups," it was the Black Lives Matters movement and its spread from Minneapolis around the world that offered the greatest hope, she said.

Thomas-Greenfield's bizarre statement was widely excoriated for denigrating American failings rather than celebrating its successes. Stating that America was born in sin and that all share that sin, was intended as an act of contrition that would legitimize leadership. In the real world, it palpably undercut American leadership. But there is little doubt that her animus is real. It unintentionally depicts not humility but an open-ended condition of self-righteous victimhood, from which will flow (in a vaguely Maoist fashion) endless revolutionary power to condemn and accumulate.

Neither diplomat evinces a sense that America is special in any positive way. This may be another reaction against Trump's malaprop advocacy of "America First," but the problem is deeper. In one conception, the United States is merely the richest and strongest state in the world – a condition that automatically brings onerous responsibilities, primarily towards others. In the other, it is uniquely evil, which undercuts its ability to lead by word and perhaps by deed. Mapping the premise of "white supremacy" on the world has consequences.

But in a sense, both approaches help explain otherwise bizarre policies, such as the Obama-Biden effort to revive, empower and nuclearize Iran as an act of expiation and even self-erasure. Certainly, the current crisis at the southern US border, where close to 200,000 migrants have suddenly flooded in thanks to the Biden administration's surrender of enforcement, may also be explained this way. As always, self-loathing for real and imagined guilt and self-love for righteous efforts to correct real and imagined wrongs are one and the same.

The American imposition of local categories onto others and disregard of individual histories is underpinned by the unique American Protestant legacy of Puritanism and Wilsonian internationalism. This unforgiving and always crusading moralism expresses itself through devotion to modernist contrivances such as global governance and human rights, which, along with environmentalism, have been elevated to the status of secular religion and are presented as normative, salvific and liberatory. Blinken and Greenfield are thus two sides of the same coin.

But an American leadership that is dedicated to the intricate processes of global governance, which proposes to simultaneously resolve planetary geochemistry and adjudicate incidents involving local law enforcement even as it maps its own putative sins on to the world – and which expresses self-hatred that must then be corrected in others – is a fickle ally.

As Saudi Arabia and Israel have quickly learned, their situations can be swept up in America's nervous breakdown. Saudis have become the sole party in Yemen despite nightly volleys of Iranian ballistic missiles launched by Houthis. Israelis – battling their own quiet war against Iranian imperialism – have, in the eyes of many American intellectuals, been redefined as "white" "settler colonialists," somehow like 19th-century Swedish farmers in Minnesota. Framing the world in uniquely American terms, many of which don't even apply to America in the first place is an exercise in vanity and a fight against reality.

What is the future for this Janus-faced approach? The case of John Kerry, former senator and secretary of state and now special climate representative, is instructive in defining the bottom line. No one in recent history had embodied both trends as much as Kerry, with his globetrotting, high-minded internationalism and dark moralizing about the ills of American history and endless responsibilities to others.

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His latest trip to China was another of many meant to "woo" his hosts away from fossil fuels. "Yes, we have big disagreements with China on some key issues, absolutely. But climate has to stand alone," Kerry was quoted as saying. But, as the BBC put it, the bottom line is that "China wants the US to give more cash to developing countries to obtain clean technology and adapt to climate change." Sin might be insurmountable, but giving alms never goes out of style.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

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With regard to the possible application of Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley, certain long-term aspects are clear. It would be a partial culmination of both longstanding Zionist aspirations to control the ancient heartland of the Jewish people and the strategic necessity of creating defensible borders for Israel.

The early Zionists made do with areas that could be purchased and settled and were diffident about pushing to control areas such as Shechem, Hebron, and the central highlands, despite their ancient Jewish significance. But while practical-minded and often non-religious, they acknowledged the importance of those regions for the Jewish people and the long-term Zionist project.

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This sentiment applies to the question of defensible borders. The Allon Plan, which emerged immediately after the 1967 war, envisioned Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. The communities built around Jerusalem were designed with the goal of creating a permanent Jewish majority within a defensible configuration of the city. The creation of Ariel and other settlement blocs was intended to create strategic depth and defend existing population centers.

The sovereignty issue has long vexed Israeli leaders, who have to contend with the settlement movement and the Right as well as with the Palestinians and the international community. The wisdom of successive Labor and Likud governments allowing or sponsoring Jewish neighborhoods in areas both close to Jewish communities and right in the midst of Arab populations can be questioned from the standpoint of domestic and international politics; minorities created strategic realities with which governments then had to contend. As a voting and demographic bloc, the settlement movement exerts significant pressure, and it is doing so on behalf of the application of sovereignty.

These long-term pressures aside, the short-term reality is that the Trump administration has shown itself to be uniquely favorable to Israel. No American administration has ever been willing to support Israel diplomatically with the same determination and affection. The United States under Trump has consistently fallen in with pro-Israel positions, from moving the US embassy to Jerusalem to defunding UNRWA to the "Peace to Prosperity" plan to adopting the Israeli position that Palestinian intransigence has not only been the key obstacle to peace but one that should no longer be rewarded.

Through signals from US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the United States has made plain that in its view, sovereignty is an Israeli domestic decision. This position contrasts sharply with statements from Western European governments to whom the move is anathema. Joining in condemnation are US Democrats, including members of the former Obama administration like former National Security Advisor Susan Rice. These warnings also forecast the likely policies of a possible Biden administration, which would essentially be a third Obama administration augmented by the far-left and Muslim wings of the newly progressive Democratic Party.

These objections suggest a hitherto overlooked aspect of Israeli decision-making. The application of sovereignty would not simply represent an Israeli desire to change the status quo before the US elections in November. To some degree, it would also constitute a response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his treatment at the hands of the Obama administration. Obama may thus turn out to be an unintended godfather of the application of Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank.

The Obama administration's treatment of Israel is well documented, from repeated condemnations of "settlement building" no matter how minor or theoretical, to constant derision of Israeli leaders as liars and "chickenshits," to the covert last-ditch effort to orchestrate the United Nations into condemning all Israeli activities across the Green Line as "settlements" in Resolution 2334, and above all, to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran.

Israeli concerns and concessions were dismissed and derided by Obama at every turn. Supporters of Israel, including members of the US Congress, were illegally spied upon, and the Washington echo chamber was arrayed against them. The US Jewish community was deliberately split by organizations constructed by allies of the administration precisely for the purpose of neutering American Jewish unity on Israel. Even the much-vaunted massive military-aid packages to Israel were in part efforts to subvert Israeli military industries and exports.

These were only some of the activities of the Obama administration, which included illegally spying on journalists and conspiring with the Clinton campaign to launch an investigation of the Trump administration on fraudulent premises, with the object of depriving it of legitimacy and the ability to conduct foreign and domestic policy unimpeded.

But a unique antipathy toward Israel as the impediment to a massive realignment of US relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, above all Iran, made it a target for the Obama administration. For Obama, at a policy and apparently personal level, peace could be achieved throughout the Middle East only if the Arab-Israeli conflict were resolved, which meant ending the "occupation" and the "settlements." These parameters were made explicit in Obama's May 2011 speech: peace would be based explicitly on the 1967 "borders." A status quo that was beneficial to Israel and tolerable to the Palestinians was the Obama administration's target, but pressure on the settlement issue served only to push the Palestinians away from negotiations and toward internationalizing the conflict.

It can be argued that the relentlessness of Obama's scorn for Israel was traumatic for Netanyahu and his officials. Trauma is a relative term, but the Obama administration's antipathy was glaringly obvious even to casual observers. How much more obvious was it to Israeli officials? This may well have raised the sovereignty issue to a higher priority in the minds of decision-makers wishing to consolidate strategic advantages and make future concessions demanded by the United States less possible.

Netanyahu's reactions to Obama's efforts against him and against Israel can be inferred by taking his many statements and supplementing them with information on his specific policy decisions. This was a clash between two oversized egos, each suffused with a sense of historic mission that placed them in direct opposition in critical respects. There was no love lost between them.

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Like so many of the Obama administration's efforts, its policies backfired. Believing they were smarter than everyone else, certain that they were forever on the "right side of history" and convinced that their opponents were not merely wrong but stupid and immoral, Obama and the members of his former administration have had to watch his policies collapse or be undone by Trump.

The wisdom of Trump's policies, and certainly the style with which they have been created and executed, deserves ample criticism, including in the Middle East. But the fact of the matter is that nothing remains of Obama's efforts to bolster the Muslim Brotherhood, reach out to Iran, mollify Turkey, stay out of Syria or depend on international institutions. Sovereignty may be another unintended Obama legacy, along with the wreckage of Libya.

Ever since Obama left office, Netanyahu has been hemmed in by ongoing corruption accusations, the inability to form a government despite three elections, the coronavirus pandemic and contradictory signals from the Trump administration, which for its own reasons was slow to reveal its peace plan. With US elections looming, Netanyahu may have played the sovereignty card clumsily and at almost the last possible minute, but in an irony of history, the Obama administration may have helped speed a slow-moving train towards its station.

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