Faltering US is losing its grip on world order
Publishing an article in the high-minded Foreign Affairs magazine is usually the cause of some smugness on the part of the authors. Jake Sullivan, America’s national security adviser, almost certainly imagined that he had made a powerful case for the Biden administration’s international competence when he wrote in the latest issue: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
Hurrah! A few days later Hamas mounted its helter-skelter attack on Israel and the Middle East teetered, and teeters still, on the brink of a bloody, spreading war. The online version of Foreign Affairs was promptly edited but I’m hanging on to the original printed issue in case of further hubris.
There’s just over a year to run before a President Trump might reappear and the Biden team wants to nail down its achievements well in advance. In foreign policy these are not quite as solid as they at first seemed. For one thing, the administration often fails to spot trouble as it comes hurtling down the highway. And when it is awake at the wheel it fails to persuade others in the car to fasten their safety belts. Ahead of the February 2022 attack it spotted the Russian build-up around Ukraine’s borders but was somehow unable to persuade Kyiv to prepare for action. It miscalculated the speed at which the Taliban would seize Kabul.
It was not just Israeli but also US intelligence that did not pick up the Hamas preparations for its attack on Israel on October 7. Part of the problem is that America has become overstretched as a superpower. That’s understandable; the world has become more complex, the US role more open to challenge. But there is a kind of vanity too about the Biden team’s rabbit-out-of-a-hat diplomatic projects. Getting Saudi Arabia to reach agreement with Israel was an ambitious goal but it did not take into account the almost certain counter-action from a region which fetishes its support for the Palestinian cause (while remaining reluctant to take in new refugees).
The Hamas leadership has grown rich while ordinary Gazans scrape a living and it does so by stoking the guilt of wealthy Arab donors. The October cross-border attack was a bear trap for US diplomacy. And the logic of unfreezing dollars 6 billion of Iranian assets to free a handful of prisoners is still baffling allies of the US. To Hamas’s paymasters, the US president must have looked a mug.
Joe Biden likes to call America the indispensable nation, a borrowing from the late secretary of state Madeleine Albright. The phrase implies that only the Biden administration can project power and weave together alliances to make that happen. Not Donald Trump. And it’s true that two aircraft carrier groups were quickly in the eastern Mediterranean to discourage Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah from getting involved in the scrap. Just as it was true that the US created a massive 20-month airlift of arms to Ukraine to fight the Russians. Indispensable nations take risks, military and strategic, to establish their authority. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” says Biden.
But it is leadership that is all too often befogged: the world is not so much gripped by words from the White House as it is encouraged to go its own way. The mission to Israel in mid-October was supposed to signal presidential leadership. Instead, a Gazan hospital was hit by a rocket - almost certainly a misfire by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad - and a follow-on summit with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority was promptly cancelled. Suddenly America looked very dispensable.
Now it is China, not Washington, that brokers a cautious diplomatic entente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And it is Iran that claims to rule through its proxies in four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana’a in Yemen. All could potentially threaten US forces in the Middle East.
There have been foreign policy achievements - chiefly, disentangling some of the Trump-era confusions - but even these have a habit of backfiring. Yes, he renewed the New Start agreement with Russia limiting long-range nuclear weapons. But the declared goal was to “establish a stable, predictable relationship” with Vladimir Putin. How did that turn out?
The big tests are still ahead for Biden and it is difficult to see how he can improve on his patchy record in the final months of his administration. He might be able to turn round some of the sceptics in Congress and abroad on continuing to arm Ukraine but it is getting more tricky. For one thing, Israel is competing for arms deliveries. The defence industries of the West are struggling to meet demand. Ukraine and Russia may be heading for a precarious stalemate. Israeli forces are caught between two increasingly contradictory strategic goals - freeing the hostages and eliminating the Hamas leadership. Although the Israeli army is far stronger than Hamas it might be backed into a corner if Hezbollah is fully mobilised. And what if the West Bank erupts?
The fear is that Biden’s brain may go into meltdown if a third major international crisis appears on the horizon - China, sensing confusion in the US, will perhaps sneak an assault on Taiwan. The scope for American misjudgment is huge. Biden, proud of his foreign policy expertise, mocked Trump’s fumbled attempts to defuse tension on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere. He came in promising to get out of bad wars and the Middle East and end the marginalisation of US power. Instead, his bases in Syria and Iraq are under attack and he enters an election year stumbling from crisis to crisis.
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