There is an old story told about the Lausanne Conference. An exasperated Lord Curzon turned to his Turkish counterpart and said, ‘Ismet, you remind me of nothing so much as a music box. You play the same old tune day after day until we are heartily sick of it – sovereignty, sovereignty sovereignty’.
One feels the same today about the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. In nearly every speech he gives, he repeats the demand for a ‘rules-based international order’. It’s got to the point that columnists and others begging him to knock it off have themselves become too repetitive to read on the subject.
What he says is important and does not grate on one’s nerves; it’s the way he says it: with an earnest yet plaintive tone that signifies banality, insincerity, disdain, and fatigue. As a consequence he appears small, like a ventriloquist’s dummy or a backup number-two man who, upon moving up to the first rank, says what he thinks he’s supposed to say without having the trained politician’s capacity to make others believe he means it.
That reaction is probably a bit unfair because Mr Blinken may well be sincere and, if told to knock it off, he might say, ‘the hell I will; I believe firmly in what I’m saying and I’m going to keep on saying it’. His clunky public persona might also be a deliberate attempt to divert attention from what may be a more fruitful modus operandi in private. Still, he needs to shift his tone to one that’s less accusatory because his job is not to represent his own views or those of his government so much as it is to persuade others to want to share, or at least to tolerate, them.