What would Henry Kissinger do?

That is what Secretary of State Antony Blinken should have asked before making his fourth fruitless trip to the Mideast to deal with the Israeli War in Gaza.

Talk about a waste of time. He would have been better off disappearing with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Joe Biden would not have known anyway.

Kissinger is, of course, the legendary former U.S. secretary of state who died in November at age 100 while Blinken was on his third visit to Israel looking for peace in all the wrong places.

Now Blinken has concluded his fourth trip where he conducted “productive” meetings with regional leaders that went nowhere toward ending the brutal fighting in Gaza, freeing the Hamas held hostages, including ten Americans, or relieving the suffering of the Palestine people in Gaza.

In addition, if Blinken’s role was to work toward warding off a regional war, he struck out there too.

Not only is Israel fighting the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but Israel is faced with increased combat with the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

And the Houthis will continue to bombard commercial vessels off the Red Sea coast with drones and missiles despite the attack launched against them by U.S. and U.K naval forces.

Hardly had Blinken arrived in the region than the Houthis in Yemen launched their largest missile and drone attack to date on commercial shipping, prompting the allied response.

A day earlier Blinken said there would be “consequences” for the Houthis if they continued their attacks on the commercial ships.

The Houthis, like everybody else, ignored him and attacked anyway.

It was the 26th Houthi attack on commercial shipping in the Red Sea since Nov. 19 before the U.S. retaliatory attack on the Houthi launching sites in Yemen.

Meanwhile terrorist groups continue to attack U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq over 100 times without any serious retaliation from the Biden administration.

What do they have in common?

All are Iranian proxies, financed, armed and trained by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the militant mullahs around him.

But rather than hold Khamenei and the Iranian mullahs to account, Blinken (Mr. Weak) and Biden (Mr. Weaker) give Iran a pass.

They not only ignore Iran, but hardly even mention Iran’s culpability in supporting the Hamas Oct 7 massacre of Israelis that led to the current destabilization of the region.

Kissinger, who fifty years ago negotiated the peace agreement among Israel, Egypt and Syria to end the Yom Kippur War, would have scoffed at Biden and Blinken’s amateur hour of Mideast diplomacy.

Kissinger’s idea of diplomacy was marked by a shrewd carrot and stick approach in meetings with decision-making principles, like Mao Zedong in Beijing and not meeting with people just to meet people.

Given a competent president, Kissinger would have gone to Tehran and met with Khamenei, persuading him to cease and desist, or otherwise face the consequences.

Instead, Mr. Weak and Mr. Weaker are content to look for peace where it can’t be found.

Instead of going to the source of the problem—Iran—and addressing it—Biden and Blinken are content to nibble around the edges.

Blinken’s latest itinerary reads like a man running away from a problem rather than toward it.

After meetings with Greek officials in Crete and then Turkish officials in Istanbul, Blinken on Sunday held talks in Amman, Jordan with King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi. Then he flew to Doha for a meeting with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.

Blinken will meet with anybody except the Iranians.

In Saudi Arabia he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Al ‘Ula, an Arabic oasis city, and later with PLA President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and the appropriately named Gaza Kaag, the UN’s senior Gaza humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator.

They were all “productive” meetings.

And things got worse.

It’s Iran, stupid.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

Houthi fighters and tribesmen stage a rally against the U.S. and the U.K. strikes on Houthi-run military sites near Sanaa, Yemen, on Sunday. (AP Photo)