America Is Losing

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 05, 2024

 

In one of his earliest speeches as president, Joe Biden put the world on notice: “America is back.”

 

Sure, it would not be easy to repair the damage Biden said Donald Trump had done to U.S. prestige, and most of that repair work would be, in Biden’s estimation, diplomatic. But America faced other, thornier challenges, too. “American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism,” he said, “including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy,” as well as “threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries.”

 

Nearly four years later, Biden has presided over the deterioration of the American position across all these fronts and a few new ones. And America’s strategic deficits are expanding radically amid Biden’s senescent retreat from the world stage.

 

For all the battlefield success Israel is experiencing in its defensive war against Hamas, the hidden hand behind that war, Iran, is on the march. As a Foundation for the Defense of Democracies analysis explained, the war imposed on Israel after the 10/7 massacre has tied its hands and cost it diplomatically. Those costs are not limited to Europe; the U.S. under Biden has displayed a willingness to withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations and withhold arms transfers — a condition that has compelled Israel to think about a future in which the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. In addition, the war has put the process of normalization between Israel and the Sunni states on hold — halting the progression of the Abraham Accords, which held out the promise that America could safely disengage from a region that would have been defined by a stable balance of power between the Israeli–Sunni bloc and Iran and its proxies.

 

Meanwhile, Tehran is still racing toward the development of a fissionable device. “Where we are now is not in a good place,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken conceded in July. Iran “is now probably one or two weeks away” from a nuclear breakout, he said. Blinken blamed that condition on the scuttling of the Iran nuclear accords, but the JCPOA was set to sunset in October of next year anyway, at which point the centrifuges it was only required to mothball would have begun spinning again. The best-case scenario following an Iranian breakout is an even more destabilized Middle East in which Iran’s adversaries race to acquire their own nuclear capabilities. The uncertain prospect of a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in advance of a breakout is even more terrible to contemplate.

 

Another Iranian cat’s paw, the Houthi terrorist group in Yemen, has managed to demonstrate the hollowness of America’s guarantees of free and open maritime shipping. Despite the Biden administration’s (reluctant and belated) retaliatory strikes on Houthi targets, the terror group is not deterred. It continues its campaign of attacks on merchant and Naval vessels in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — a menace that, increasingly, only America’s enemies will brave. The U.S. is simply standing by as its influence in the region is checked. “There are definite strategies that were put forward,” said Rear Admiral Marc Miguez of the Houthis following his deployment to the Red Sea. “But our National Command Authority decided that those — I would call more aggressive postures and more aggressive strikes, was not something we wanted to challenge.” In other words, the U.S. is all but ceding the strait that leads to the crucial Suez Canal to terrorists for fear of Iran’s response.

 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that America is no longer the preeminent power in that part of the world. Indeed, it has become clear to international-shipping interests that, if they want to see their investments generate a return, they need to shadow ships with ties to China or Russia. That’s where the power in the Red Sea now lies.

 

Russia is also on the offense in Ukraine, where Biden’s paralyzing fear of antagonizing Moscow to the point that it engages in direct escalatory provocations against NATO assets now risks the entire Ukrainian enterprise. In a bid to change the static dynamic of the battlefield in Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces mounted a daring and pretty successful invasion of Russian territory late last month. But that offensive has stalled and the Biden administration simply refuses to authorize the use of U.S. ordnance against Russian targets inside Russia. Moreover, Ukraine’s gambit did not compel Moscow to shift its reserves to that new front. Instead, Russian forces are pressing their advantage in Ukraine’s east, capturing new territory and bearing down on the city of Pokrovsk. At the same time, Russia has in recent weeks executed some of the deadliest missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian population centers since the war began.

 

For all his talk in favor of the Ukrainian cause, Biden has not provided for either Ukraine’s air defenses or its offensive capabilities, and his diplomatic efforts to compel Europe to fill the gaps have come up short. Understandably, Europe, too, is contemplating the contours of a world in which America is on the retreat — a condition that creates incentives for a further decoupling of relations which, while enticing to populists wary of foreign entanglements, would put America at a disadvantage in a zero-sum world in which our loss is an adversary’s potential gain.

 

America’s allies in the Pacific are similarly apprehensive over the prospect that American fecklessness will evolve into American defeatism. “Unlike eight years ago, we are much more prepared, as are other European and Asian allies,” said former Japanese diplomat Kunihiko Miyake in July when confronted with the prospect of U.S. retrenchment following a Trump victory in November. Still, America’s Pacific Rim partners are nervous, as they should be. The U.S. position in the Pacific is deteriorating.

 

In the South China Sea, Beijing’s coast-guard vessels have embarked on what we must conclude is a campaign of reckless harassment against Philippine merchant ships, sometimes culminating in Chinese efforts to ram those boats. “Philippine-China strategic relations boil down to a cold war if mishandled,” said one Filipino security analyst recently. Given America’s treaty-bound obligation to defend the Philippines if it is attacked, that’s a troubling prospect.

 

It’s not just the Philippines that is being targeted by Chinese aggression. Vietnamese and Singaporean ships have experienced similar harassment in their territorial waters on which Beijing stakes an unrecognized claim. The increasing tempo of Chinese attacks on commercial shipping in some of the most trafficked waterways on Earth has compelled the U.S. Navy to reassure its allies that it stands by its commitments. “We certainly have prepared a range of options and USINDOPACOM stands ready, if so called, after consultations in accordance with the treaty to execute those shoulder to shoulder with our ally,” said U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief admiral Samuel Paparo in a joint press conference with Philippines chief general Romero Brawner Jr. last week. And that crisis could come sooner rather than later.

 

The Chinese harassment campaign, which includes not just ramming boats but stealing airdropped supplies meant to sustain stranded Filipinos, could compel Manila to step up those relief operations. A crisis involving an aerial confrontation or a humanitarian cataclysm could provide the spark that sets this tinderbox alight. “When Filipino forces in the disputed waters ‘are at the verge of dying,’ because food supplies were being blocked by Chinese forces, ‘then that’s the time that we are going to seek the help of the United States,’” Brawner told reporters at his press conference with Paparo. And none of this accounts for China’s territorial designs on Taiwan, on which Beijing could act as soon as 2027 according to U.S. estimates.

 

No president inherits a wholly stable world at peace with the post-Cold War Pax Americana. The world Joe Biden inherited was dangerous, but his actions and inactions have rendered it even more so. With hot wars in the Middle East and Europe, and a third looming ever larger in the Pacific, Biden will bequeath to his successor an American hegemony in decline almost everywhere that the U.S. has grand strategic interests. The only question is how much worse the U.S. situation will get between today and Inauguration Day while the president stands by, asleep at the wheel.