The adults are back in charge! The State Department and its secretary Antony Blinken are tweeting out Spotify playlists! Spokesman Ned Price is sending hashtags and emojis in support of Ukraine!
Meanwhile, nonessential American personnel have been ordered to evacuate their posts in Kiev. But surely they’ll find a good hashtag to use on their way to the helicopters and airports. In all seriousness, this is a dangerously unserious administration that appears to be attempting to TikTok their way out of a crisis. Here’s hoping Vladimir Putin is checking his Snapchat for updates from Jen Psaki and the Jonas Brothers.
What the Biden administration is trying to do is to recreate the wonder of the Obama years and their way-too-online Millennial social media strategy. Both Ned Price and Jen Psaki (John Kerry’s former spokes-kid at the State Department) tweeted in 2014 as Putin was preparing to invade Crimea that Russia should live by the “promise of hashtag.” Shockingly, it didn’t work then either.
At least Obama, the Pepsi slogan spokesman, was able to sell this kind of cringe strategy as serious policy. Joe Biden is not Barack Obama, no matter how many memes they throw out of him donning the aviator shades or forcefully shoving ice cream down his gullet to the oohs and ahhs of an adoring media. Biden, never known for his foreign policy acumen, has found himself once again attempting to negotiate his way out of an international crisis after careening out of an Afghanistan that has fallen back into massive poverty and under extremist Taliban control, hashtag #DontGoThereSister.
Sure, Biden still has a loyal army of former Pentagon officials who can push his agenda on the cable networks. But this second round of hashtag diplomacy arrives on a very different internet than the one Obama’s junior #HateWatch team occupied in 2014. Twitter and Facebook users are much more cynical now.
What that means is that Tony Blinken cannot Spotify his way out of this mess and Jen Psaki is going to need a lot more than Instagram stories and kickboxing classes.
A week after a Democrat-led charge in Congress blocked sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, members of the Biden administration took to Twitter to promote the hashtag #StandWithUkraine with a hand waiving emoji. It’s a move that, for the most part, sums up this administration’s strategy as a whole. Create a crisis (Putin most likely would have never moved on Ukraine without first witnessing the Biden administration’s sloppy retreat from Afghanistan), trot out Ron Klain to tweet like he’s on speed, deploy a hashtag and hope for the best.
But no hashtag can cover up Biden’s record public disapproval in his first year. Last week, the administration pushed Tom Hanks to record a video about the restoration of America. It’s the same tired policy that the country soured on back in 2016. Though at least Obama retained a high personal approval rating despite the expressions of gloom from Jen Psaki and others the morning after Trump’s victory. If the Biden administration continues the way it’s going, we may very well have another hashtag to deal with: #dejavu.
