Given his advocacy of the good old American exceptionalism in the face of great power rivalry, he sounds more like a throwback to the last century or two. If that’s really the US response to the “new era”, I fear for both America and the world.

“The United States is leading in this pivotal period from a position of strength,” he declared.

“We’ve proven time and again that when America comes together, we can do anything. Because no nation on Earth has a greater capacity to mobilise others in common cause.

“Because our ongoing endeavour to form a more perfect union allows us to fix our flaws and renew our democracy from within. And because our vision for the future – a world that is open, free, prosperous, and secure – that vision is not America’s alone, but the enduring aspiration of people in every nation on every continent.”

What a wonderful vision! So why is he worried? Because many countries and people are not going along with that vision of his. I wonder why!

“We know we will have to earn the trust of a number of countries and citizens for whom the old order failed to deliver on many of its promises,” he said.

“Many countries are hedging their bets … Countries and citizens are losing faith in the international economic order, their confidence rattled by systemic flaws.”

Given their experience of the past century, countries outside the West, those in the Global South or what used to be called the Third World, are perfectly rational to hedge their bets and not go along with the US.

What Blinken says next should reinforce other countries’ sense of self-preservation. If the US feigns sympathy and an hitherto unknown ability to listen, it’s only because it might need you in some way against Russia and China.

“The People’s Republic of China poses the most significant long-term challenge because it not only aspires to reshape the international order, it increasingly has the economic, the diplomatic, the military, the technological power to do just that,” said Blinken, and not for the first time.

“And Beijing and Moscow are working together to make the world safe for autocracy through their ‘no limits partnership’.”

Understandably, China and much of the Global South do not necessarily see things that way. But how do they see the world? Well, exactly as Blinken says next, though he claims they are wrong. Well, I think they are more right than wrong.

“Our competitors claim that the existing order is a Western imposition, when in fact the norms and values that anchor it are universal in aspiration – and enshrined in international law that they’ve signed onto,” he said. “They claim that what governments do within their borders is their business alone, and that human rights are subjective values that vary from one society to another. They believe that big countries are entitled to spheres of influence – that power and proximity give them the prerogative to dictate their choices to others.”

Well, yes, the rules and order are pretty much dictated by the West, but especially the US, and yes, the US doesn’t recognise the spheres of influence of others – hence Nato’s eastern expansion, which some argue was the cause of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and its increasing militarisation of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. But make no mistake; the US insists on its own spheres of influence, across the Atlantic, over North and South America, and its long-standing dominance in the Indo-Pacific. So, quite right, the US doesn’t practise spheres of influence; the whole world is its oyster.

And so Blinken said: “The contrast between these two visions [the democrats and the autocrats] could not be clearer. And the stakes of the competition we face could not be higher – for the world, and for the American people.”

Is that why his government is busy making friends with Vietnam, a one-party communist state just like you know who, among other friendly states that are, for lack of a better word, autocratic?

Fighting or contending a two-front cold war against Russia and China is a monumental strategic blunder that many “wise men” of US foreign policy have long warned against; unfortunately, most of them are now dead. What you do have are some very unwise people in charge in Washington who have gone out of their way to push Russia, China, Iran, and even more Global South countries together, for example, through Brics. The US did it all out of sheer hubris, and yet, Blinken speaks of “humility”. Oh, the irony hurts.

Blinken didn’t call Russia and China evil, but he might as well have. If Russia and China and whoever they partner with are bad or evil, and the US and whoever they ally with are good and virtuous, who needs diplomacy? You just have to arm to the teeth to deter (in a cold war) and to defeat (in a hot war).

If that’s coming from America’s top diplomat, I wonder what those Pentagon generals are planning.