Hans Kundnani in The Ideas Letter:
The idea of a “Blob” goes back to Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy adviser–or “amanuensis,” as Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine called him. The term first comes up in a profile of Rhodes in The New York Times Magazine in May 2016, in which he was said to use the term to refer to the American foreign-policy establishment. In The World As It Is, Rhodes’s memoir of his time working for Obama, he explained that what he had in mind was the “groupthink that always seemed to lead inexorably to more military intervention in the Middle East, to ‘bomb something’.”
Although Rhodes set himself up in opposition to the Blob, he was actually more a part of it than he seemed to realize. Not only did he make the case for air strikes in Syria in 2013 – which, as Rhodes himself recalls in The World As It Is, led Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough to refer to him and Vice-President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan as “Cheney and Rumsfeld” – but he also shared the broader Washington consensus around the idea of liberal hegemony. Nevertheless, his term stuck and has now come to be used more generally to refer to a foreign-policy establishment that shares a set of assumptions and reflexes.
If we take the term “Blob” to refer to the problem of foreign-policy groupthink in this way, we can also apply it to other national capitals, where foreign policy is made inside a similarly closed world of officials, think tankers and journalists who also share a set of assumptions and reflexes – though they are often somewhat different assumptions and reflexes than the ones that define the Blob in Washington. Some Blobs are blobbier than others – and it seems to me that the Berlin Blob may be the blobbiest of them all.
More here.